A Glean movie guide
Reality Is Optional: Mind-Bending Sci-Fi
Prepare to lose your grip on reality.
Challenge your perception with these intellectually demanding and surreal masterpieces.
Handpicked for this guide
The movie list
- 01
Inception
A high-stakes heist where the battlefield is the human subconscious and dreams have multiple layers.
Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.
- 02
Primer
A notoriously dense and realistic look at the chaotic, overlapping consequences of accidental time travel.
A group of fledgling inventors discover a complex method to manipulate reality. At first, they successfully game the stock market with it, but the consequences of the invention start to catch up with them.
- 03
Tenet
A massive espionage thriller built around the mind-melting concept of objects moving backward through time.
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
- 04
Arrival
A brilliant exploration of how learning an alien language can fundamentally alter your perception of time.
Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat.
- 05
Coherence
A tense dinner party descends into chaos as parallel realities begin to bleed into one another.
Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.
- 06
Everything Everywhere All at Once
A maximalist journey through the multiverse that balances absurd humor with deep existential questions.
An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save what's important to her by connecting with the lives she could have led in other universes.
- 07
2001: A Space Odyssey
A visual and philosophical landmark that traces human evolution through a mysterious cosmic lens.
Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world's most advanced super computer.
- 08
Paprika
A visually explosive anime where the line between dreams and reality dissolves into a surreal parade.
When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient's dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it and recover it before damage is done: Paprika.
- 09
Predestination
An intricate and shocking time-travel puzzle that challenges everything you know about identity.
Predestination chronicles the life of a Temporal Agent sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to prevent future killers from committing their crimes. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must stop the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time and prevent a devastating attack in which thousands of lives will be lost.
- 10
Ex Machina
A sleek, claustrophobic thriller that questions the nature of consciousness and the ethics of A.I.
Caleb, a coder at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.
- 11
Annihilation
A haunting expedition into a zone where the laws of nature are being rewritten by an alien presence.
A biologist signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition into a mysterious zone where the laws of nature don't apply.
- 12
Interstellar
An epic voyage through wormholes and time dilation that tests the limits of physics and love.
The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.