#TIFF23 Review: Dream Scenario (Platform)

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

In his genre-bending surrealist comedy Dream Scenario, Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) teams up with acting legend Nicolas Cage to explore what happens when a man becomes famous for reasons beyond his control, and subsequently deals with getting cancelled.

Paul Matthews (Cage) is a tenured professor and nebbishy family man, who just wants to finish writing his book. But Paul’s life changes when people start to recognize him, and it soon becomes apparent that he has been randomly showing up in people’s dreams. At first it’s just a few people, and then everyone starts having this man appear to them in their sleep, pushing Paul to become internet famous. While the dreams are harmless at first, they eventually become more disturbing in nature, changing how people view him in real life.

There is a version of this movie that plays as a straight psychological thriller or horror movie, and there are elements of both, especially in its dark dream moments. But Dream Scenario is more a story of an average guy suddenly having to deal with being famous. The film touches on the modern phenomena of going viral on social media, internet groupthink, and the rush to “cancel” people by trying them in the court of public opinion (shot in Toronto, there are illusions to the saga of embattled U of T professor Jordan Peterson, who is name-dropped in the film).

On a more metaphysical level, Dream Scenario (which was co-produced by Ari Aster) introduces headier ideas about collective consciousness, social contagion, and the power of suggestibility to drive moral panics. Borgli’s screenplay is filled with tons of ideas, almost too many by the last act, and I’m not sure it does as much with all of them as it could have. The comedy can also end up feeling a bit broad at times. But I would rather a film that takes big swings than none at all, and Dream Scenario functions as a very entertaining satire about modern cancel culture, that finds a clever way in to explore it.

It’s carried by a solid Nicolas Cage performance, with the actor drawing upon the meme version of himself for inspiration; there are parallels to the Cage who exploded in fame for reasons beyond his control as out of context rage clips went viral on the internet. Borgli crafts a bizarro nightmare comedy around Cage’s sympathetic, tragicomic average guy character, building to a wonderful final moment.