Dream Scenario review: Nicolas Cage is on peak form in this surreal, nightmare-filled dark comedy (Comedy + Horror)
Dream Scenario review: Nicolas Cage is on peak form in this surreal, nightmare-filled dark comedy (Comedy + Horror)
Cage's career has had many twists and turns. But his latest role, playing a professor who starts popping up in people's dreams, is one of his best yet, writes Caryn James.
In this delirious dark comedy, Nicolas Cage and director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) take us down a rabbit hole, with the eccentric, unclassifiable star ideally paired to a filmmaker with a wonderfully mordant imagination. Cage plays Paul, a nondescript professor who, for no reason, starts popping up in other people's dreams – first his family's, then his students' and strangers' all over the world.
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Paul basks in the viral fame that comes from being a benign, passive presence in the background of everyone's dreams until he starts turning up in violent nightmares, leaving people as terrified of him in life as if he really were Freddy Krueger. That is revealed in the film's trailer, but Borgli also drops a huge clue when the film opens with ominous, horror-movie sound effects and images flashing on screen of an apparently ordinary scene by the family's pool that turns out to be anything but. He deftly signals that something in this film's world is abnormal.
It's good to see Cage going back to his comedy/horror roots! Vampires Kiss is still one of the best films he's ever made!
I'd missed the fact that it was a comedy horror until now as I was going to see it anyway, so had been avoiding spoilers.