It feels like Nicolas Cage is kind of everywhere these days. We’ve had the meta-Cage of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and the vampiric Cage of Renfield, not to mention the unexpected CGI Super-Cage of The Flash. And now, we’re about to see Cage in his more dialled-back, intimate indie-drama form, as the first trailer has just dropped for A24’s new comedy-drama Dream Scenario, in which the Cage-naissance spreads into the world’s subconscious. Watch it below:
Cage plays the mild-mannered and really quite dorky college professor Paul Matthews, the kind of guy who never makes much of a splash, no matter where he goes. Until, out of nowhere, he starts appearing in people’s dreams. First it’s just a few, then it’s more and more, and he’s up to all sorts: sometimes he’s just in the background, other times he’s creeping people out, or going full Freddy Krueger and belting them in the back of the head. Soon the world’s media want to know who he is and why he’s in everyone’s heads. Paul reacts with an aw-shucks kind of shrug: “Why me? I don’t know! I’m special, I guess.”
With Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli – whose deliciously dark Sick Of Myself also mined ideas about fame in the social media age – at the helm, the rest of the cast includes Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Dylan Baker and Kate Berlant, and the film was a breakout hit at this year’s Toronto film festival.
Dream Scenario is out in the US from 10 November, but does not yet have a UK release date.