Nicolas Cage plays a biology professor who becomes a global phenomenon for the strangest possible reason in Dream Scenario, a 2023 comedy-horror from director Kristoffer Borgli.
What is Dream Scenario about?
Paul Matthews is, by any ordinary measure, an unremarkable family man: a mid-career academic, easy to overlook, comfortable with being forgettable. That changes overnight when millions of total strangers start seeing him, uninvited and unexplained, in their dreams. At first it plays like a joke that has picked him at random, then like a strange kind of fame he never asked for and doesn't quite know how to use. The tone shifts hard once his nightly appearances stop being harmless and start curdling into something closer to a nightmare, and Paul finds the attention he once might have wanted turning on him instead. The film tracks what happens to an ordinary man once the world decides he means something, watching celebrity, anxiety, and collective imagination collide inside one very average life. It's less interested in explaining the phenomenon than in following Paul as he tries, and repeatedly fails, to control a story that everyone else now feels entitled to tell about him.
About the cast
Nicolas Cage stars alongside Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Dylan Gelula, Lily Bird, Jessica Clement, Tim Meadows, and Kate Berlant, with Kristoffer Borgli directing.
Context & significance
Released in 2023 out of the United States, Dream Scenario sits at the intersection of comedy and horror, using an absurd premise about mass viral fame to look at how quickly public perception can turn on an ordinary person, a theme that has only grown more resonant in an age of instant, uncontrollable online attention.
Watching Dream Scenario on Ktime
K-Time streams Dream Scenario with both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving viewers the choice of watching Paul's strange story in Farsi or with the original English performances subtitled. The film's page is free to read for anyone; watching requires only a K-Time account login, on a platform built specifically around Persian-language streaming for the Iranian diaspora.