Quick Synopsis: Nicholas Cage suddenly appears in everybody’s dreams. Well, a character who in this film is played by him. Which isn’t anywhere near as interesting.

This shares two cast members of Mouthpiece, which is always a good sign as it gives me a chance to talk about how much I love that movie. It’s one of the most creative and brilliant movies I’ve ever seen. Dream Scenario? Not so much. It has a great concept: “What if a random man starts appearing in everybody’s dreams?”, but it doesn’t seem to know what to do with that concept. It raises some interesting questions but then has zero interest in answering them. It kind of feels like a lot of it is filler until they can think of a better scene. It also feels a bit unfocused. Is it attacking cancel culture? Memes? The capitalist desire to exploit wonder for adverts? It attempts to talk about all of them and ends up not discussing any of them.

The fact we don’t really find out why this is happening also means it’s kind of narratively unfulfilling. I have a feeling it’s something to do with the technology later shown which allows advertisers to enter dreams, but that implies an issue of consent which was never there in the start. It also would be an incredibly risky advertising strategy “Hey, we made a guy appear in people’s dreams and kill them, buy our product”. Nobody seems to make the connection between the two either, and if the capitalist aspect was taken from the narrative it wouldn’t cause that much difference. The only change would be you’d no longer have the ending of Cage appearing in his wife’s dream in a giant suit and saving her from being sacrificed, this shows that he………is willing to dream about her? I dunno. I feel it would have said more if she just happened to have that dream, showing that no matter what, her opinion of him hasn’t changed.

The lack of agency and control that Cage’s character shows also means the reaction to him is a bit weird. When he starts attacking people in their dreams EVERYBODY takes it seriously and blames him. I could understand a loud section of the internet doing so, but it feels like there’s not a single person who says “Wait, this is stupid” and defends him. I don’t object to the fact that if this happened in reality, people would blame him for it, but I find it hard to believe there wouldn’t be people just as passionately defending him. People will defend anything on the internet: the right to murder people just for being trans, sexually assaulting women if they wear skirts, microwaving tea. Cage is the only sane man in this movie (which is usually the complete opposite of what happens), with every single other character lacking any sense of realism. Remember that scene in Friends where Phoebe is annoyed at Ross because he did something rude but in the end, it turns out it only happened in her dream? That’s Dream Scenario. The big difference is that in Friends, when Phoebe realised it was a dream she forgave him and thought of herself as being silly. The idiot character in a sitcom populated by not-smart characters is STILL MORE LOGICAL than ANY other character in this movie. It does have some really sweet moments and some horrific ones. But that’s all they are; moments. There doesn’t feel to be the momentum required to carry it through. I will say this though; it does have the best fart joke I’ve seen in a while.

It’s annoying as I REALLY wanted to enjoy this, I love weird things (probably because I am a weird thing), and Nicholas Cage is entertaining as hell. It looks good and has some really good supporting performances. It’s just, how can I put this in a way that makes sense? The only way I can describe it is it’s like when you’re English and watching an American sitcom and you hear jokes about certain basketball players or shops, you sit there like “I’m sure I’d appreciate that if I got the reference”. That’s how it feels watching this, you’re left with the feeling that scenes, dialogue, and character motivations are all references to an obscure film you haven’t seen.