If the recent release of Marvel’s Doctor Strange has you hankering for further films that embrace the dazzling visual and intellectual possibilities of altered realities, here are six comparably complex but lesser known films. Doctor Strange distinctly recalls elements of Inception, with the two movies even sharing an art director, but one can only ponder the significance of a top so many times and there are other works that disassemble viewer’s sense of reality in similarly profound and poetic ways. All of the films on this list contain the onion-like layers of both Inception’s dreams within dreams and the multiple dimensions in Doctor Strange.
Man With a Movie Camera
Perhaps the original reality bending movie, this film challenged the verisimilitude of cinema a little over 30 years after audiences fled the theater at the sight of a filmed train fast approaching. Man With a Movie Camera takes a relatively simple concept, a day in a Russian city, and flips it on its head. The film draws out the viewer from the world in front of the camera until we watch the filming and editing of the movie itself, get trapped in loops playing on the projector, and even see freeze frames fall to the cutting room floor. Though the movie is largely plotless and shot in black and white, it contains impeccable visuals all done with the limited technology of the 1930’s.
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Belle De Jour
Skipping forward in film history thirty three years from A Man With a Movie Camera brings us away from the study of fallible filmic reality, to one of fallible minds. Luis Buñuel’s film Belle De Jour, though not for the faint of heart, brilliantly shows how a simple situation can be made complex by the action in a character’s head. Similarly to Inception much of the movie takes place in dreams, though these are not constructed by con artists but are the fantasies of an unsatisfied wife. As Belle De Jour progresses the audience sees the character’s life become as absurd as her fantasies, until reality and the fantastical blur to the point in which they are indecipherable.
The Science of Sleep
Taking the dream concept one step further is The Science of Sleep. The Michel Gondry film shares a level of confusion with his better known movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film’s plot follows an aspiring artist as he tries to win over his new neighbor, gets a job, and struggles to differentiate between his sleeping and waking life. Gondry’s film displays dreams like we’ve never seen them, taking elements from the real world and adding magnificently strange set pieces and costumes- brought to life with a reliance on practical effects. From the start of the film it is clear how inextricably muddled the dream and real worlds are, and Gondry takes this concept to places that are both comedic and pathetic. The Science of Sleep uses dreams to undercut the character’s struggles and his successes, as the audience is never sure which elements are real and which are part of his overactive subconscious.
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eXistenZ
This 1999 movie takes a science fiction approach to creating a layer cake of plots, with a video game that literally has a life of its own. eXistenZ follows two gamers playing the titular video game that plugs directly into their spinal cords. As the game hacks their nervous system, the players become unable to tell where the games begin and end and are unable to shift from the high emotional intensity of the game back to something resembling normality. Suffice to say by the end of the film neither the characters nor the audience can decipher the roles of the video game in the player’s life and the role of the players in the world of the game- resulting in a hauntingly cyclic final sequence and a poignant commentary on the power of immersive fictions.
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Primer
Primer continues in the science fiction vein with time travel replacing video games as the reality twisting element. This 2004 film, which has already inspired a cult following, is known for its knot of timelines so complex flow charts have been drawn in explanation. The plot takes shape around a group of afternoon inventors as they create and employ a time travel device. The movie never veers towards the campiness that can come with this territory, but explores the subtle ways in which people make decisions and the effects of their choices. As each instance of time travel creates a new plot string, the audience is introduced to a reality where one situation can have multiple outcomes and multiple actions can lead to a singular result. Primer is not a flashy film, but it creates a narrative web just as arresting as Doctor Strange’s Mirror Dimension visuals.
Stories We Tell
As the only documentary on this list, Stories We Tell forsakes fantastical devices such as dream worlds and time travel and instead focuses on the inherent complexity of creating a sensible narrative. The film carefully deconstructs and recreates tales from the filmmaker’s youth as she tries to decode the story of her own existence. Director Sarah Polley draws out incredible depth with the use of found footage, staged scenes, narration, and interviews. As the film progresses it becomes painfully and poetically clear how memory is fractured and the ease with which fiction and truth continually supplant each other. Stories We Tell is an elegant reminder that as engaging as multi-layered fictions can be, real life is already a trip.
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