Cage is certainly in the most interesting phase of his career so far. I find much of what he does, even when it's flawed, to be fascinating. Dream Scenario mostly falls into that category for me, but its final act lost me and wasn't able to recover. Still Cage's performance is one of the more interesting in a while.
My main complaint is with the meta-text of Dream Scenario. The film wants to comment of viral fame, its rises and falls, and its darker elements. It sets up its high concept premise for this purpose and the script itself refers to this thesis numerous times explicitly. And for 2/3s of the film, Dream Scenario is saying some interesting things. But is missing something important that I worry is fatal to its case and the third act exposes that fatality dramatically.
The premise of the film, which isn't a spoiler as it's in the trailer, is that Cage's character is appearing in people's dreams, even people who do not know him. It starts slow, with him just being present but having no agency, escalates into his avatar being more active, including a suggestively violent sexual scenario, and eventually to the point where he becomes the centre of people's violent nightmares. He goes from being a trend, to a phenom, to an outcast, being "cancelled" for what people dream he does. The film comments on this and the complications that arise from it, very explicitly labelling it "cancel culture" and even centring it with real world culture war references.
And it would all be good except... well, it doesn't work that way.
You see when we dream, the people we dream about, while perhaps representative of real world people we know, are creations of our subconscious that have no connection to the people they represent for us. Those people can't influence what our dreamed versions of them do. As the film points out in the beginning Cage's character has no agency. So much of the critique is tied to this idea. But in the real world, in real scenarios of "going viral" or social media fame, the people involved DO have agency. They are making real choices, they are having an impact that they themselves are either choosing or being wilfully blind to the effects of their actions. So unlike everything that happens in Dream Scenario real world internet fame is based on the choices people make, taking the steam out of any argument the film is making.
I kept waiting for the film to address this but it never does. Near the end the film tries to tie this even further to its argument by having another, completely unrelated and suddenly appearing character (I hate deus ex machina moments), invent a way into people's dreams. I thought the film would tie this to Cage somehow, implying that he was actively choosing the actions people saw him commit in his dreams, but it never does. The film shies away from having any explanation for the phenomenon but it's arguments fall apart without one. I kept waiting for the film to find a way to tie his waking hour behavior to the dreams people manifested about him but it chooses not to. Also this final act starts to lean more and more into the silly side of things while the film up to this point had been walking a good balance between the normal and the absurd.
In actually the tale here seems to try to absolve people of their responsibility in how people respond to their actions. It's the "I'm sorry you were offended" argument. By implying that Cage's character should not be held accountable the argument seems to be that those who profit from their actions on line or in other public spaces, are in no way capable of influencing how people see them. It implies that all speech is somehow consequenceless. It's a ridiculous but popular argument made by those who want to have their cake and eat it too.
The film ends in a touching moment where he actually does enter someone's dream intentionally (now that the technology has been created - certainly not because he had that power before) and tries to give them what they want. We are to feel tragedy for him cause he lost everything over nothing. If only that's how the real world works.
Dream Scenario
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Dylan Baker, Lily Bird, Jessica Clement
Writer/Director: Kristoffer Borgli
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