Nicolas Cage has had quite a year in 2023! He’s starred in five films this year: The Old way, Renfield, Sympathy for the Devil, The Retirement Plan (which my cousin Adam McKay worked on), and lastly Dream Scenario. He also had a completely CGI cameo in The Flash which was not a good movie and contained maybe one of the worst scenes ever put to film in it. Anyway, enough hate for The Flash. It should surprise nobody that I’ve seen all of these movies this year as I’m a pretty big fan of Nicolas Cage and I was incredibly excited for Dream Scenario.
It’s listed on Rotten Tomatoes as a comedy/horror movie but I don’t think that is very accurate. It’s definitely more of a dark comedy/fantasy movie to me. Cage is joined by Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula and Dylan Baker.
As always, I don’t like to give much details about movies beforehand and I managed to dodge all the trailers and marketing for this one so I will only tell you what I knew going in. Cage plays a professor who inexplicably starts appearing in the dreams of millions of people. That’s it, that’s all I knew going in and I think that is all I really want to give away in this review as far as plot details go. What impact does this have on Cage’s character, his family, and society at large? Well all those are things this movie explores in an incredibly funny way.
Cage shines in what is possibly my favourite performance he gives this year (with his turn as Dracula in Renfield as my second favourite), but is Dream Scenario worth the trip to the movies?
My Thoughts
Before I get into the weeds and talk about Nicolas Cage, I want to talk a bit more about the studio behind this movie, A24. For many of you, I’m sure just from that note you have a decent idea of what this movie is like. For those less familiar with A24 though, let me try and explain a bit about them.
A24 is an independent studio that produces and distributes a variety of smaller budget movies. Originally founded in 2012, the studio has given us some of the best movies in the last decade including Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hereditary, Uncut Gems, Ex Machina, The Lobster, The Florida Project, and A Ghost Story to name a few of my personal favourites. Of the 137 movies they’ve released, 113 of them are “fresh” according to Rotten Tomatoes (which means 60% or more of critics gave a film positive review) and 54 of their movies currently hold at least 90% on the tomatometer which is a remarkable consistency for a studio. A24 films have received 49 Academy Awards nominations with 16 Oscar wins.
What sets A24 apart from other studios is their willingness to produce unique and original projects and give chances to filmmakers. Some filmmakers that have worked with A24 include Ari Aster, Darren Aronofsky, the Daniels, the Safdie Brothers, and Robert Eggers.
To get to the point, A24 has created a reputation and generated a strong fanbase for making unique and stylistic movies that stand out from the rest of the mainstream movies we get today. It’s safe to say that when I see the A24 logo before a movie or a trailer, I’m going to be interested and you should be too. A24 takes chances and makes all kinds of different movies and are taking the kind of chances that deserve our support as lovers of movies.
Needless to say when I read that A24 and Nicolas Cage were coming together I was excited and Dream Scenario became one of my most anticipated movies of the year. So I’m happy to report that this one is worth the watch!
There was a lot to like about this one, including the visual style of the movie. The dream sequences in particular do a good job of capturing the unique and sometimes odd feelings of a dream without relying on some easy visual indicator to show you that this is a dream sequence.
Beyond that though, this movie delivers steady laughs, including one in particular that might be the hardest I’ve laughed in a theatre this year. This movie’s themes touch on a lot of modern day things, like the fickle nature of public opinions, ads, consumerism, and more and it uses comedy to do this in an interesting way.
If I can knock the movie for anything, it’s just that I didn’t connect with the overall themes in a strong way. I laughed at the sort of satirical nature of some aspects of the movie, but none of these things hit me in the moment or even after as all that profound. I’m not trying to suggest that a movie has to do this, but I feel like for a movie that seemed to have a lot to say about human nature and the way things are today, I came out of the movie not really thinking about those ideas very much.
What I am thinking about afterwards though (and not just because I’m such a fan) is Nicolas Cage’s performance in this movie. He plays a family man who is deeply insecure and invested heavily in how he is perceived by the world and the people around him. He’s not a smooth talker and much of the comedy in the movie comes from him saying and doing some cringey stuff.
I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with Cage at this point in his career, but many people around my age may not remember how good this guy can be. For most of the last decade, Cage has done seemingly every movie put in front of him. There have been reports from other outlets of financial troubles that he was dealing with and seemingly the choice to do all these projects was a way to secure his financial future. Since 2018 though, starting with the movie Mandy (an must watch film in my opinion), Cage has been doing some better movies and has consistently been the best parts of them too. In Mandy he plays a quiet but brutal man on a revenge mission, in Pig he gives such a reserved performance as a man living but not coping with loss and genuinely deserved the Oscar for Best Actor for that movie.
This is another case of a more subdued Nicolas Cage performance, but he’s so effortlessly awkward in this movie in what he says and what he does that I don’t know if it would work the same way with anyone else in this role. To say that he disappears into a character is possibly the highest praise I could give him. As someone who has seen more movies with Nicolas Cage in them than any other actor, for me to be able to say that when I watched this movie I saw Paul Matthews and not Nicolas Cage is a testament to just how good he is. It’s easy to forget given his more recent body of work that Cage won an Oscar in 1995 for Best Actor, but Dream Scenario is just another reminder that Cage has it.
Verdict
This is worth it just to see Nicolas Cage, but if that isn’t enough to lure you out to the theatre then go for all of the laughs and the timely commentary on the state of people and the world today.
This one comes just shy from getting another thumb up, I just wish the themes of the movie hit me a bit more strongly. With that said though, I’m excited to watch this one again and see what more can be discovered! I can definitely recommend that you check out Dream Scenario!
Adriana Wiszniewska