Movies that ask what's real and what's fake

Cafe Society
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Recently, I’ve started getting into movies that, in some way or another, involve a character (and often the audience) being uncertain about what is real and what is not. Specifically…

The Matrix is a fake, computer-generated world which most of the human race thinks is real. The ones that realize it’s not have escaped it for “the real world.” But, as the movie brings up, “the matrix can be more real” than the so-called “real-world” and The Matrix Reloaded might be suggesting that the “real world” is actually just part of the matrix, or it’s a second matrix. I hope Revolutions will explain once and for all: What is real?

Memento is about a man who essentially has no memory, so he has to trust notes in his own hand-writing and accept them as facts. But sometimes he lies to himself, without knowing he’s done it, and other times the memories he does have (from before the accident) are questionable. So he can never be sure what is real.

In Minority Report, there are these kids that can tell what’s going to happen, in cases of murder. Not what is intended to happen, but what is going to happen. So if you see the predictions, then prevent them, were they wrong? Are the events in the prediction real or not?

In Vanilla Sky David sees one person change into another, knows something is wrong, and discovers he’s actually dead, and has been experiencing a carefully programmed “lucid dream” (not unlike the matrix, actually). I don’t like this one very much, because Mr. Tech Support basically gives it away, so there’s not much mystery left. The worst part was him telling exactly when the lucid dream started. But the theme is still there.

The Truman Show is about living your whole life with people who were just acting, and then discovering that your entire world was just a big TV show set, in other words, discovering that it wasn’t real.

So what other movies have a similar “What is real?” theme?

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“Twelve Monkeys” is another example - and a good movie, too. Actually, all movies directed by Terry Gilliam deal with that theme in some way.

If you didn’t like “Vanilla Sky” watch the spanish original “Abre los ojos” - it’s a far superior movie.

Come to think of it - spanish movies often reflect on the reality of reality, it’s part of spanish thinking since the middle ages: The very first “modern” novel, “Don Quijote” is one of the early examples - and also many plays by the famous writers Lope de Vega and Calderon (today, Shakespeare would be in a lot of copyright troubles concerning their plays).

Especially Calderon had a lot to say about the experience of the “desengaño” - the “end of deception”, the look behind the curtain of what we only think is true.

But that is not what you wanted to know :-).

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dark city

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Blade Runner

Deckard may or may not be an android

The Discrete Charm of the Bourgoisie

People sit down to dinner and discover they are actors in a play

A Double Life

Ronald Coleman plays Othello, but it begins to mix with his personal life

The Stunt Man

Cameron keeps discovering things he thinks is real are actually part of the movie Eli Cross is shooting – and that Cross might be planning to kill him.

Belle de Jour

Is she really a prostitute, or is that just a daydream?

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How about Donnie Darko and Avalon

I thought they were both excellent… Avalon’s reviews usually seem to say something like, "This shouldn’t really be compared to The Matrix, but…

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Swimming Pool, now in cinemas.

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A number of Nic Roeg films seem to hover on the border between “this is someone’s dream” and “this is reality”, for example Track 29.

I’ve not seen the old German movies The Cabinet of Dr Caligari or The Testament of Dr Mabuse, but they both involve plots set at least partly in insane asylums where it’s uncertain who is mad and who is sane, what is real and what is imagined, who is the doctor and who is the patient.

Also, The Wizard of Oz has one of the most famous characters who are not what they seem, and the whole thing could be a dream of Dorothy’s.

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And when I saw the OP, I thought immediately of Orson Welles’s F For Fake, which is a somewhat fictional documentary about cheating, deceit and fraud, in which Welles plays with the audience with great skill.

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Adaptation (The Orchid Thief)

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I’m probably in the minority, but I thought Vanilla Sky was comparable to Abre los Ojos.

I’d also mention Julia and Julia:

Kathleen Turner[/spoiler] seems to be living in two realities – one in which her husband and child were killed in a wreck, and one in which they’re still alive and she’s still with them. Could have been more effective, but was kind of incoherent.

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Great; I really screwed up the spoiler coding there.

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Total Recall! (a classic)

It’s possible that the whole adventure was a ?dream? planted by the Recall company.
Oh yeah I nearly forgot: Get your ass to Mars… get your ass to mars… get your ass to mars~

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Usual Suspects

Since Verbal is Keiser Soze (or the man that controls the myth) and we know that he made up at least parts of the story (Kobayashi’s name, Redfoot, being in a babershop quartet in Sokie IL etc.) , we don’t know if anything he said is the truth. All we know is that the men found dead on the dock are dead and he was there (hungarian witness).

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The Thirteenth Floor
eXistenZ
The Game

What we think is reality is really part of a game.

Mulholland Drive
Can’t believe no one has mentioned this one yet.

Jacob’s Ladder

The whole movie is a dream the main character has while is is (dying) on the operating table

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Damn, tanstaafl beat me to Jacob’s Ladder. He also messed up his spoiler tags, whoops. That’s a big one.

Anyway. The other one I was going to mention is Closet Land, with Madeline Stowe and Alan Rickman (possibly Rickman’s best role, anywhere). Without spoiling the film much, Stowe plays a writer who is abducted and brought to an interrogation room. Rickman is her interrogator. He so effectively builds a different reality around her during his “questioning” that by the end of the film, even the audience is unsure what is real and what is his invention.

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Yeah Avalonian, I feel really bad about that one too. Nothing like giving away the entire movie, huh? I reported it to the mods and asked for a fix not 10 seconds after I posted but I guess they haven’t seen it yet.

(Walks off muttering "Preview is your friend… Preview is your friend…)

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Spoiler tags fixed, sorry about the delay.

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The Others

The family and servants think they are haunted by ghosts. In reality, they are the ghosts haunting a living family.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned The Sixth Sense or Fight Club. It’s fun to watch those two movies a second time and catch all the odd things that result from their respective plot twists.

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Wow. This is a great list. Thank you so much, and keep 'em coming! I actually have seen Adaptation, I just forgot it in the OP. The thing I really like about it is that it blurs the line between the reality that we live in and the fictional world in which the movie takes place, because in the movie there is an obvious similarity between the movie Charlie is writing and the movie that is his life. Every time I try to figure out the implications of all this, I just get stuck, but it reminds me very much of “Print Gallery” by Escher. I’ll go find an Adaptation thread now…

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not even out on DVD yet… Identity

Ten travelers brought together at an isolated motel by circumstances begin to be picked off one by one. Each of these people is an identity of within the mind of a mass murderer with multiple-personality disorder. They’re being “killed off” as part of a psychiatrist’s effort to integrate the personalities and save the killer from execution.

There is some speculation that the plot of the screenplay in Adaptation, “The Three”, may have been an inside joke by Kaufman on his friend John Cusack, who starred in Identity.