A Glean movie guide
Reality, Reimagined
Prepare to question everything.
A curated selection of high-concept sci-fi films that challenge your perception of time and truth.
Handpicked for this guide
The movie list
- 01
Inception
A masterclass in layered storytelling that takes you deep into the architecture of the subconscious.
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
Arrival
A profound, philosophical look at how language and time shape our reality.
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.
- 03
Primer
This low-budget marvel offers the most rigorous and complex depiction of time travel ever filmed.
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.
- 04
Coherence
A brilliant, claustrophobic thriller that uses a simple dinner party to explore the chaos of parallel realities.
Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.
- 05
Dark City
A visually stunning noir that questions the nature of memory and identity in a shifting, artificial world.
A man struggles with memories of his past, including a wife he cannot remember, in a nightmarish world with no sun and run by beings with telekinetic powers who seek the souls of humans.
- 06
Ex Machina
A tense, psychological game of cat-and-mouse that probes the blurred lines between human and artificial intelligence.
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.
- 07
Predestination
A tightly wound paradox puzzle that demands your full attention from start to finish.
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.
- 08
12 Monkeys
A gritty, haunting exploration of fate and madness through the lens of deterministic time travel.
In the year 2035, convict James Cole reluctantly volunteers to be sent back in time to discover the origin of a deadly virus that wiped out nearly all of the earth's population and forced the survivors into underground communities. But when Cole is mistakenly sent to 1990 instead of 1996, he's arrested and locked up in a mental hospital. There he meets psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly and the son of a famous virus expert who may hold the key to the Army of the 12 Monkeys; thought to be responsible for unleashing the killer disease.