After gaining international fame with the recent Sick Of Myself (2022), presented at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Norwegian director and editor Kristoffer Borgli now launches his first English-language film. Dream Scenario is a work that transcends genres, or rather, devours them. Thriller, horror, dark comedy, grotesque satire, at times even a romantic, but certainly dramatic and certainly a film of great depth and numerous interpretive layers, so much that it is difficult to frame it. One could say it’s a surreal snapshot of mass thinking and of the consequent jamming of societal gears it brings about.
Nicolas Cage’s performance is literally breathtaking, and together with the film’s editing – signed by the director himself and absolutely impeccable – it is one of the most intriguing aspects of the film.
The American actor here takes on the role of Paul Matthews, an evolutionary biology professor obsessed with zebras, who – with an apparently stable marriage, two daughters, a rather incipient baldness, and awkward manners – embodies that typical average man who can easily go unnoticed in everyday life. At least in the vigilant one.
Until he enters the unconscious one.
For inexplicable reasons, a sort of dream epidemic takes hold and infects the collective unconscious – somewhat confirming Jungian theories about its very existence.
More and more people begin to dream of this man. The film seems to be inspired by an event dating back to 2006, according to which the same mysterious man would have appeared in the dreams of thousands of people.
Dream Scenario takes this matter to the extreme, making it global and turning it into an unprecedented media case that puts the man in the spotlight: a double-edged sword indeed.
The dreams are not only characterized by the disturbing presence of the protagonist, but also by certain traits that initially seem to correspond to Dante’s logic of “contrapasso” by analogy, (in the hell recounted by the medieval Tuscan genius there was a link between the eternal punishment of the damned and their faults in life).
If in life, Paul is a passive man who never reacts – evidenced by the fact that not only does he fail to write his book, but he also allows a colleague to steal his idea, which could eventually become a publishing success in the academic niche – he will be a passive spectator in the dream scenarios in which he involuntarily “enters”. In those, he will never be able to respond to call for help, but will only observe.
As the narrative progresses, the story takes on darker tones and Nicholas Cage becomes a sort of nemesis of Nightmare on Elm Street, with a difference compared to Wes Craven’s 1984 film.
If in the latter, the no longer alive Freddy Krueger would materialize in the form of a nightmare that could actually act on the body of his unfortunate host, with Paul Matthews the situation is more subtle. The protagonist is real, but the dreams in which he appears cannot act on the physicality of his hosts, only on their emotions. Meaning, these dreams can “only” hurt the hosts emotionally. In fact, in the second part of the film, the man himself becomes the agent of the terror of others’ unconscious, no longer a passive spectator.
This constitutes the fundamental turning point of the movie, which becomes a paradoxical representation of mass psychology, with Paul becoming the scapegoat. Representing an extreme form of nonsense and obtuse social ostracism, Dream Scenario says a lot about today’s society. In a way, one could easily draw critical observation of cancel culture.
It is a film that could be discussed for hours and demonstrates the undeniable talent of Kristoffer Borgli, who shows flawless direction skills. The editing perfectly recreates that bizarre and increasingly distressing atmosphere that is, in fact, the very essence of the film.
There is only one small flaw, or rather, naivety. That of deciding to prolong the clever idea of the ending and the – so to say – “dream marketing” or “advertising dreams,” making the final discourse drawn out and thrust in the audience’s face when a mere hint would have been sufficient and more ingenious.
They say that it’s a good habit to leave a party when there are still people, or to leave a place when you still want to stay.
Well, it is also good to leave a cinema when you still want to watch the movie.
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