A Glean movie guide
Sci-Fi That Breaks the Brain
Prepare to question everything.
A curated selection of reality-bending films with complex plots and unforgettable twists.
Handpicked for this guide
The movie list
- 01
Inception
A masterclass in multi-layered storytelling that blurs the line between dreams and reality.
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, non-linear narrative that explores how language shapes our 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.
- 03
Primer
This famously dense time-travel puzzle demands your full attention and likely a second viewing.
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 low-budget marvel that uses a simple dinner party setting to unravel the fabric of reality.
Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.
- 05
Predestination
An incredibly tight, circular time-travel paradox that keeps you guessing until the final frame.
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.
- 06
Dark City
A visually stunning noir that questions the nature of identity in a city that changes every night.
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.
- 07
The Prestige
A bitter rivalry between two magicians unfolds into a complex mystery with a legendary twist.
A mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy -- full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.
- 08
Ex Machina
A tense, psychological game of cat-and-mouse that explores the terrifying potential of 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.
- 09
Source Code
A high-stakes mystery that uses a repeating time loop to keep the tension at a constant peak.
When decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens wakes up in the body of an unknown man, he discovers he's part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train.
- 10
Tenet
An ambitious, high-concept action film that requires tracking time moving in two directions at once.
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.