WATCHED - Dream Senario

Into Nicholas Cage's late career Renaissance comes Dream Senario. A small independent movie, written and directed by Norwegian film maker Kristoffer Borgli. Its worth an honorable mention at least. For Dream Senario has one too many structural flaws for Cage's fine central performance to fully overcome.

Cage plays a University professor Paul Matthews, who lectures in evolutionary biology. He is mild mannered, quite unimpressive, ignorable and dull. He knows his career has somewhat plateaued. And he's paranoid his contemporaries are being much more successful than him, mostly by plagiarising his ideas, so he believes.

Then one day he discovers that both his daughter and his students, are starting to dream of him. In the dreams they are always in some dangerous or horrific incident, into which Paul just placidly walks observing. Suddenly everyone is experiencing him in very similar dream visitations, as this bland benign presence. 

Everyone wants to meet him, interview him, use him to promote products. He just wants to utillise his new found fame to get a book on his work published. The hapless professor finds himself floundering in a disingenuous media cesspool, who only want to financially exploit his momentary celebrity for their own benefit. That is until the dreams people are having with Paul in them, take a distinctly more disturbing turn.

The central premise of the film is undoubtedly interesting. But the movie itself fails to commit tonally in how it wants to handle it. Is it a black satire on contemporary celebrity culture, or a disturbing psychological portrait on what unsought for fame does to you, or a dark morality tale with truly horrific consequences? It lightly touches on all these possible ways to approach its central themes, but doesn't dig deep enough into any of them to really get enough comedy, horror or psychological gold out of them. It's not entirely a disappointing movie, because Cage's, not waving but drowning, character, is more than able to hold it together.  But this is more than a step or two away from being a truly great film, which feels all too obvious by the end.

CARROT REVIEW  - 5/8