Nicolas Cage plays Paul Matthews as a man built entirely out of minor grievances — passed over for tenure, forgotten by former students, mildly resentful of a more successful colleague — which makes him the perfect blank surface for a fame he did nothing to earn and can't figure out how to use. Kristoffer Borgli's script treats the premise less as a fantasy hook and more as a pretext for a very specific kind of comedy about people who mistake attention for validation, and Cage plays every stage of that confusion with a restraint that's almost unrecognizable next to his usual register.
The film's cruelest trick is turning the premise against its protagonist exactly when he starts to enjoy it: the dreams sour, Paul becomes something people fear rather than admire, and the movie tips into a pointed piece of satire about cancellation, brand deals, and how quickly the internet's mood can flip on somebody who never asked for the spotlight. Michael Cera shows up as a marketing consultant angling to turn Paul's dream-fame into an ad campaign, and the scenes between them are some of the funniest and most uncomfortable in the film.
A viral-fame parable that gets funnier the more uncomfortable it becomes.
Borgli, making his English-language debut, has a gift for staging the surreal without winking at the camera about it — the dream sequences read as unsettling rather than whimsical, which is what keeps the back half's turn toward horror-adjacent territory from feeling like a tonal accident. It's a strange, uneasy little movie that trusts a mid-budget premise to carry real ideas about ambition and humiliation instead of just being a gimmick with a trailer-ready hook.
Dream Scenario was written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, a Norwegian filmmaker making his English-language feature debut after the Norwegian black comedy Sick of Myself. It was produced by A24 with Ari Aster among the producers, marking Nicolas Cage's first collaboration with either. The film runs 102 minutes and stars Cage alongside Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, and Tim Meadows. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023 before opening in American theaters that November.
The film received strong reviews on release, with particular praise directed at Cage's performance as a rare instance of him working in a quiet, internalized register rather than his more famously unhinged mode. It didn't break out commercially the way some of A24's bigger hits have, but it built a following through streaming and has become one of the more frequently cited examples of the studio's original satirical work in the years after Everything Everywhere All at Once. Borgli's follow-up projects have been watched closely since, largely on the strength of this film's careful, deadpan handling of a premise that could have gone broad and silly in less careful hands.
Dream Scenario earned Cage a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, a rare bit of awards attention for a performance built on restraint rather than his usual live-wire energy. It also became by far the best-reviewed of the other films Cage released that same year — The Old Way, Renfield, Sympathy for the Devil, and The Retirement Plan all landed well behind it with critics, which only sharpened the sense that Borgli's film had found something the others hadn't. That contrast has become part of the film's reputation: proof that Cage's strange, prolific output of the 2020s could still produce something this exact and controlled when the material matched him.
