If you’re readying yourself for a Nicolas Cage film, then it’s worth considering what level of Cage you’re going to get. You might get a fairly Mild Cage (think Pig, Into The Spiderverse). You might get Medium Cage (Kick-Ass, Colour Out of Space). You could get Hot Cage (Face/Off, Wild at Heart), and you might even stumble upon some golden Extra Hot Cage (Vampire’s Kiss, The Wicker Man). Yes, some have rated Cage on their own Nicolas Cage scale. I’ve just rated a few of his films on a Nando’s sauce level scale. Groovy, hm?
Watching this particular Cage joint, the first act was setting itself up to be fairly standard Cage fare as his eccentric lecturer waxes lyrical about the virtues of zebra stripes. The basic plot revolves around Cage gaining rapid fame when he starts appearing in the dreams of his students and everyone around him. Things go sideways when these dreams start turning into nightmares and the backlash leads to his social exile. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect going into this. The trailer, set to the tune of The Cranberries’s classic – , suggests a relatively light-hearted quirky comedy. There are certainly comedic elements, but I should’ve expected other elements when I noticed that one of the studios involved was A24, and the producer was Hereditary horror maverick Ari Aster.
The main problem comes through this shift in tone after the first section, and any vague messages about cancel culture fall flat. It’s certainly fun to see a bit of Cage craziness in the nightmare sequences as he finds a number of creative ways to dispatch his victims, but there’s just not enough going on here. Secondary characters don’t make much of an impact, and the potential kookiness of a Being John Malkovich vibe is undermined by Cage, who loses energy after his social media downfall. Sure, maybe I wanted him to go full Cage and starting randomly punching women a la Wicker Man, but he stays relatively mellow as his world starts falling apart. The ending dystopian skit doesn’t make much of an impact either. What starts out as a fairly promising Cage caper dissolves into a forgettable experiment. Not quite a nightmare or a dream, then. A dreammare? Neam? Somewhere in between.