Pre-'Inception': The Best Surreal, Alternate Reality, Mindbending Films (*As Dubbed, By Us...)

As some have noted already, it's been 519 days since Christopher Nolan's "Inception" was announced and the wait is finally over (and let us tell you, it's worth it).

A dense, layer cake mindbender that burrows deep into the recesses of your subconscious (and heart), the MC-Escher-like implausible levels to the film will leave you disconcerted and walking around in a haze for days.

The picture which finally sees release today is heady, surreal and firmly enters the canon of the finest thought-provoking head-trips in cinema (read our review here). In recognition of this incredibly ambitious and admirable film (the internal logic alone of the script is just super impressive to say the least), we decided to collect what we called (for lack of a better title), The Best Surreal, Alternate Reality Mindbending Films (yes, a whatever catch-all title to cover the films we wanted).

"Last Year at Marienbad" (1961)
Is it a dream? An imagined reality? A mis-remembered memory? A psychological denial? Or something else entirely? These are the questions that are asked and never really answered in Alain Resnais’ still mysterious “Last Year At Marienbad” which continues to dazzle and confound audiences more than four decades after its release. The story concerns a man, X, and a woman A, who encounter each other at a chateau, X is convinced he met A the year previously at Marienbad, but the woman thinks he’s mistaken. And over 90 minutes, Resnais will weave a web of repeated conversations and the same few events approached from slightly different perspectives. But what about the shooting range scene? What do the repeated games of Nim mean? Resnais opens the doors to Marienbad and as the viewer, your best bet is to give in rather than trying to make sense of it all. But if it sounds chilly, surprisingly, its not. There is something deeply sensual and erotic about the proceedings, while also being austere and modern (the cinematography and set design is simply breathtaking) but on top of it all is an evocative exploration of the meeting place between memory and imagination.

"Mulholland Dr." (2001)
1999’s “The Straight Story” was an unusually straightforward film for David Lynch, to the extent that it was actually released under the Disney banner. Was Hollywood’s strangest filmmaker finally settling down? Hell no. “Mullholland Drive,” initially conceived as a TV pilot, before being rejected and turned into a feature, was perhaps Lynch’s oddest work since “Twin Peaks” (although “Lost Highway” comes close, certainly) and few films have captured the feel, tone and rhythm of a fever dream as well as this. This is because the film is essentially a masturbatory, guilt-fuelled fever dream, as Naomi Watts’ Diane constructs an alternate reality after ordering the death of her lover. Terrifying, darkly funny and still managing to be one of the great L.A. movies, it’s one of our all time favorite alternate realities. And no mention of the film is complete without mention of Watts’ astonishing performance(s); almost unbearably raw, she’s never been as good since, but then we’ve seen few performances as good at all. Lynch returned to similar territory a few years later with “Inland Empire,” but despite another great performance, this time from Laura Dern, it covers similar ground, but is twice as long and half as good.

"Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974)
A dreamy, surrealist madcap tale that is equally absurd, profound and creepy, Jacques Rivette's little seen three and a half hour elliptical ghost story, "Celine and Julie Go Boating" is a head-swirling enigmatic masterpiece that must be seen (if you had to ask the Criterion Collection for a list of the top 10 films they don't own, but desperately wished they did, our bet is 'Boating' would be top five). Centering on two friends (the lovelies Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto, the latter of which would die an untimely death of cancer at age 42) who set out on an innocuous boating trip that takes them on a breadcrumb teasing adventure that is seemingly played out in a protracted and bizarre echoing feedback loop. While situations repeat, metamorphose and butterfly outwards, what eventually surfaces is a silly, yet disturbing spectral tale of a little girl trapped in a mansion of ghosts that must be freed from the other side. What separates 'Boating' from its hypnagogic cinema compatriots that generally are dark and oh-so-serious is its playfulness and joie de vivre. Rivette balances tones, reverse narratives and essentially pulls off one of the most wonderful magic tricks ever performed on the screen.

"The Wizard of Oz" (1939)
The Oscar-nominated 1939 adaptation of L. Frank Baum's children's novel might be the quintessential, sine qua non dream film. Its lavish sets, rich technicolor photography, bizarre characters and wonderful music all combine to produce an almost hallucinatory effect in the viewer — in Dorothy’s Oz we get a comprehensive imagining of a world that exists outside and beyond the reaches of humdrum everyday life. Yes, Dorothy’s friends can be interpreted as simply the embodiments of real-life psychological issues like anxiety, fear and forgetfulness, and the plot may be distinctly undreamlike in its logical clarity (it is only when each character/facet of Dorothy finds a solution for his problem that she can gain the strength to defeat evil) but if ever the film strays too near the prosaic and explicable, a troop of singing munchkins or an evil witch and her flying monkey army arrives to distract us and bring us back to surreality. The film was a cinematic revolution, treading some pretty dark territory without losing its light, using musical numbers to actually further the plot, and pioneering a contrast between monochromatic Kansas and technicolor Oz that might seem hokey to us now, but only because as a device it has been so endlessly reused. And yet for all its contemporary edginess and groundbreaking elements,the film’s real message about dreams is ultimately rather cozy and conservative: as wonderful and magical a place as Oz/dreamland is, Dorothy still in the end chooses Kansas/reality; because no matter where you escape to, kids, there’s no place like home.

"Groundhog Day" (1993)
Forget elaborate dream worlds or enigmatic realities, the real terror in Harold Ramis’ modern day classic is the pure hell of having to re-live the same, ordinary, unremarkable day over and over and over again. Bill Murray, in one of his finest roles, plays curmudgeonly TV weatherman Phil Connors, a big city sourpuss who is eager to file his report on the weather predicting groundhog Punxsutawney Phil and leave the small town and its quirky residents as soon as possible. Unfortunately, he and his crew are snowed in and when he wakes up the next morning he gets a very peculiar sense of deja vu as all the events he just lived are repeated. And again. And again. And again. Yes, Phil will eventually learn what he needs to do to break the curse of living the same day over and over and there is a heartwarming and somewhat saccharine message in all this, but Murray’s performance and some great, inspired set pieces and supporting work (ie. Brian Doyle-Murray and Stephen Tobolowsky) help keep things from going too far. In “Groundhog Day” the warning is loud and clear: the most confounding reality to be conquered, might just be your everyday life.

"Brazil" (1985)
Like several of the films on this list, “Brazil” deals with worlds within worlds. Sam Lowry (a wonderfully meek and nebbish Jonathan Pryce), a low-level bureaucrat in a futuristic dystopia, is a day-dreamer. In his (beautifully designed and executed) fantasy world, he’s a knight in shining armor, rescuing a beautiful maiden, but when he meets Jill, his fantasies seem to be coming true. At its heart, Terry Gilliam’s best film is at least partly about escapism, and that’s never more clear than during the heartbreaking finale where it turns out that the happy ending we’ve been given was nothing but a fantasy of the now catatonic Lowry. But this shouldn’t play down the importance of the incredibly detailed, darkly funny future world that Gilliam created with co-writers Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard; it’s proved as influential on science fiction and fantasy as the other great sci-fi flick of the '80s, “Blade Runner,” in its way.

"The Obscure Object Of Desire" (1977)
Since Christopher Nolan recently admitted he just saw "Last Year At Marienbad," we wonder if he ever took the time to see the always surrealist works of the Spanish auteur Luis Buñuel who admittedly could have had several entries listed here (the disarming loopiness of "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" is one we strongly considered). Known for famously slicing up eyeballs with Salvador Dali ("Un Chien Andalou"), Buñuel was pretty strange on his own thank you very much and made a career based on oblique and enigmatic narratives. The title of 'Object' really says it all: desire is a fleeting, opaque and unattainable thing, and in the picture frequent Buñuel collaborator Fernando Rey desperately chases down the girl of his dreams (literally). Perhaps its own carnal cautionary tale about emotional possession and lust, said femme (gorgeous French actress Carole Bouquet) begins to morph into another altogether different object of intense ardor and soon he's tortured and torn between a woman with a Jekyll and Hyde nature (or is it two separate females? The other half is played by Spanish beauty Ángela Molina) Erotic and abstract, it wouldn't be a Luis Buñuel film if it didn't contain an absurdist out-of-nowhere ending that suddenly suffuses the film with a heretofore unseen political agenda.

"Naked Lunch" (1991)
Canadian master of the phantasmagorical David Cronenberg has made a number of mind-bend-y films ("eXistenZ" narrowly missed this list, but several others could have probably made if we had more stamina), but there's something really unsettling and dreamlike about his 1991 adaptation of the "unfilmable" 1959 William S. Burroughs novel. Cronenberg's approach — to mix the narrative of the book with autobiographical details of Burroughs' life. An itchy writer with an addiction to drugs becomes an exterminator and secret agent (former "Robocop" Peter Weller) who is hooked on "bug powder." It's this synthesis of art and life that makes the movie so damn compelling. In some of the movie's most arresting and ghoulish scenes, Weller has conversations with talking bugs that look like certain, er, orifices. But the most nightmarish detail of the film is one ripped out of Burroughs' life, when he accidentally kills his wife (played here by Judy Davis) in a grim game of William Tell.

"Altered States" (1980)
The iconoclastic Ken Russell, who made his name on freaky, wild dramatizations of composers, dancers and artists lives' (Franz Liszt in "Lisztomania" starring The Who's Roger Daltry as scored by Yes' Rick Wakeman is just one deliriously odd example), the filmmaker is beloved by genre fetishists for his one out of place science fiction film, "Altered States" starring William Hurt in his big screen debut. Written by the great Paddy Chayefsky, (who later took his name off the film), the film centers on an ambitious, perhaps reckless Harvard scientist (Hurt) who conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory drug and an isolation chamber causes him to genetically regress to a primate/primordial state. Featuring a classical, but still freaky (and sometimes atonal) score by John Corigliano, the film is a bizarro and slightly dated (where effects and tone are concerned) examination of human consciousness. The film is essentially about a man so obsessed with experimentation and discovering mankind's true role in the universe, and eventually a cautionary tale about peering into the madness of the looking glass.

"The Cell" (2000)
Tarsem Singh is a director primarily interested in putting images in front of you that are beautifully preposterous. Planting those scenes in dream worlds is just about the only way for him to get away with it. In his two feature films to date, he employs a basic real world scenario to leap into a visually incredible dream state. With "The Cell" he throws Jennifer Lopez (as the experimental psychotherapist Catherine Deane) into the subconscious of comatose serial killer Carl Stragher (Vincent D'Onofrio) to dig up information on how to rescue his most recent victim. The universe portrayed within is disturbing and gorgeously surreal to the point that the suspense elements taking place in reality struggle to elicit anything visceral by comparison. Beyond the visuals, the threat of becoming lost in someone else's wacked-out subconscious becomes an interesting layer to the story. At points Deane finds herself enveloped in the horror world of Stragher's mind and becomes a part of the madness herself. To defeat him, Deane eventually draws Stragher into her own dream world where she challenges him with the heaven to his hell.

"Waking Life" (2001)
For those who have never experienced a lucid dream, Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" would serve as a good, if a bit frightening, substitute. The film, rotoscope-animated to accentuate its dreamworld, may in its opening sequences appear as a psychedelic rendering of Linklater's own "Slacker," with its vignettes of unique social interactions and outwardly philosophical ruminations. But one, including the unnamed main character played by Wiley Wiggins, quickly realizes that there is something off in the reality of the film's world. Addressing dreamtime quirks such as busted clocks and non-functional lightswitches, Wiggins attempts to awaken (and is convinced that he has done so a few times), only to continue traveling through and viewing a whole host of characters' (including Linklater himself at the film's end) thoughts on life, drugs, and dreams. 'Waking Life,' with its unique visuals and melancholy tango score, ends up portraying a thought-provoking world in which dreams are more real than life itself — if such a thing even exists.

"The Fall" (2006)
The opening title sequence of "The Fall" is enough to make you feel lost in a dream alone. With the black and white slow motion, seemingly random visual elements and gently rising score, it takes a few minutes to realize you are actually getting a "Wizard of Oz" shade of backstory to the rest of the film. In Tarsem's second feature film, a bedridden stunt man, Roy (Lee Pace), weaves his life into an epic bedtime story for the curious young girl Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) who is cooped up in the same hospital. The film features dazzling locations that serve as a stage for Roy to wrangle his neuroses through his fantasy alter-ego The Black Bandit. As Roy descends into a suicidal state, his storytelling evolves into a fevered hallucination as The Black Bandit and his well-costumed posse battle for the revenge Roy desires in reality. Much like in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" we are offered hope here only in dreams as the hero is successful solely in his fantasy. Tarsem succeeds here in the same way he does with "The Cell" in that he pits a harsh reality with a dreamworld that reveals truths in protagonists unhindered by reality. We will get to see how Tarsem handles a film set in a single reality next year with "Immortals" starring Henry Cavill ("The Tudors") which we reported on earlier this year.

"The Science of Sleep" (2006)
The first full-length film written and directed by Michel Gondry, "The Science of Sleep" should be the perfect vehicle for his peculiar talents: in the story of Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) whose dream life constantly blurs into his real life, Gondry self-consciously created a framework that could support the wanderings of his own often brilliant, but somewhat ill-disciplined, magpie-like mind. Unfortunately the resulting film often devolves into mere whimsy and sometimes feels like a series of unconnected, if entertaining and strangely beautiful sketches, though both Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing his love object Stephanie, do a fine job of providing some kind of emotional coherence. Their awkward, ill-fated relationship rings oddly true even in the midst of sudden diversions into the protagonist's mind, which is apparently filled with kitschy talk shows, novel inventions, stop-motion cardboard cities and pantomime horses that can be ridden through handmade dreamscapes. Stephane’s inability to sort the real from the unreal eventually destroys his blooming relationship, rather as Gondry’s constant digressions detract from the narrative’s momentum and ultimately alienate even the most patient viewer. However if you go in forewarned there is much to enjoy: its inventiveness is sometimes awe-inspiring, and the heart the actors display lends the film a sweetness that makes it hard to dislike. It flits, it floats, it journeys and detours but “The Science of Sleep” never truly arrives and never truly satisfies. Which makes it possibly the "dreamiest" film of all.

"The Matrix" (1999)
Especially now, in the days where it’s nearly impossible to walk into a theater without knowing virtually every detail of a movie, it’s hard to imagine how little most people knew about the Wachowski Brothers' “The Matrix” going in. The trailer and promotional materials showed plenty of interesting-looking action, but not a ton of plot, leaving audiences with the question ‘What is The Matrix?’ And while diluted by the pseudo-intellectual babblings of the sequels, the answer was a bold, brilliant, sci-fi world with its own unique identity. It’s also easy to forget what a mind-fuck the first act is; the sense that something’s not quite right with the world, the Cronenberg-ian body horror of the ‘bug’ planted on our hero, and finally Neo’s gooey rebirth into the real world. And once the action starts, minds were truly blown; like “Inception” (which Nolan concedes “The Matrix” is an influence on), a specific set of rules are set up within the world which turned the genre on its head. The terrible, unnecessary sequels and countless knock-offs have sullied it for many, but over ten years later, “The Matrix” remains a near-perfect sci-fi actioner (too bad about those sequels...).

"Paprika" (2006)
Satoshi Kon's work, much like that of Terry Gilliam, is often characterized by the fluid relation between reality and some sort of fantasy. In "Paprika," this relationship is explicitly addressed as the main plot revolves around the theft of the DC Mini, a device developed by psychotherapists and scientists to enter and record the dreams of patients. Perhaps one of the more similar films to "Inception" in the sense that it treats the dream world as a tangible realm with stakes as high as reality, ‘Paprika’ wastes no time in exploring the havoc that the device's theft causes. From near the beginning of the film, dreams are merged between separate minds as well as reality itself, and as the film progresses, the barrier between dream and reality continually grows to be non-existent. With Kon's superfast pacing, ‘Paprika’ presents a smattering of different images, ranging from charming to downright bizarre. This one deserves multiple viewings to decipher what's "real" and what isn't, but also to take in the overwhelming amount of imagery only possible in an anime about dreams.

"3 Women" (1977)
One of Robert Altman’s more opaque films (but one of the better movies he was making for Fox at the time, the less said about “Quintet” the better), “3 Women” is an ethereal mood piece that the director insisted, all along, was based on a dream he experienced. That atmosphere is present throughout the film, which doesn’t have a plot as much as a series of sensations. (The titular three women, who live together in a dusty apartment building, are played by Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule.) The movie’s sense of atmosphere, and it’s dreamlike “narrative” which feature a tried and true “dream movie” conceit — that of two characters swapping identities (see also: “Mulholland Drive”). And like a dream it’s open for interpretation, although maybe a little too open.

"The Game" (1997)
The only way that David Fincher’s out-of-control thriller makes any kind of sense is when applying dream logic. “The Game” starts out as a standard suspense piece, with a greasy Michael Douglas getting a “game” purchased for him for his birthday: a sort of live action role playing experience that ends up consuming his life. From the movie’s opening sequence, which shows scratchy home movies of Douglas’ father (or are they memories? See - the dream logic begins!), things are a little skewered. But by the time “the game” fully takes over Douglas’ life, we’re waist-deep in nightmare territory, with the entirety of San Fransisco turning into some giant subconscious funhouse. People complain about “The Game’s” internal logic are missing the point. Wake up already.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004)
So we’re cheating slightly here; the second, and far superior, collaboration between Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind,” is concerned more with memories than with alternate reality. But in Kaufman’s ingeniously structured masterpiece, the memories of central character Joel Barish (Jim Carrey in one of his better roles)) become a world onto themselves, one as fantastical in concept and execution as any on the list. Gondry uses every device in his considerable box of tools to nail the dream logic that sometimes occurs when looking back at your past; the out-of-body-experiences, the blurring of moments into one another, the foggy details. But it’s not just empty trickery; every moment is tied to Joel and his emotional journey. By the time he’s quietly pleading for his memories to be retained, it breaks your heart as well as his. It’s a film that gets better with every rewatch, where every performance and every aspect -- the score, the cinematography, the production design -- are at the top of the tree. But you know all that already.

Look, we realize this is just a small slice on what's out there and our criteria was loose and broad, but this is what we wanted to cover ("Primer" is one film we considered for example, but didn't quite make the cut). That said, we're probably forgetting something (or ran out of time) so sound-off in the comments section below and give us your two cents.

Oliver Lyttelton, Jessica Kiang, Kevin Jagernauth, Drew Taylor, Sean Gillane, Danielle Johnsen, Jon Davies & RP