Bliss (2021)
Directed by Mike Cahill
A mind-bending love story following Greg who, after recently being divorced and then fired, meets the mysterious Isabel, a woman living on the streets and convinced that the polluted, broken world around them is just a computer simulation. Doubtful at first, Greg eventually discovers there may be some truth to Isabel’s wild conspiracy.
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5 films that influenced Bliss
What critics say influenced Bliss
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bliss is kind of a significantly less fighty and shooty The Matrix tossed in a blender with a high-concept WTF boggler like Serenity (2019).
A documentary that explores the belief and slim possibility that we’re living in a “simulation” world, not unlike that imagined in “The Matrix,” and “Bliss,” another film that toys with that idea in fictional-fantasy form, come out at the same time?
Although The Matrix is an obvious inspiration here, Bliss does eventually find its own groove, though Cahill initially struggles to make a story which features a certain amount of necessary detachment and disorientation coherent.
Ultimately, Bliss ’ messages about learning to appreciate what’s right in front of you, as well as facing ugly things about yourself that you’d rather just wish away, are made pretty clear, and it’s a way more intimate story about simulation theory than anything seen in, say, The Matrix .
Isabel is part-superhero out of spandex, part-manic pixie dream girl, part-Morpheus from The Matrix .
The unlikeliest pairing in recent memory, Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek are caught rummaging through a strange alternate reality in “Bliss,” which is basically “The Matrix” but with dumber tech and a Bill Nye cameo.
Writer-director Mike Cahill (“Another Earth,” “I Origins”) takes earnest stabs at big ideas and themes, including the concept of “bliss,” but never clearly or cogently enough to draw us in on an emotional or intellectual level.
Writer/director Mike Cahill knows a thing or two about trippy cinema concepts, and turn to his “Another Earth” (2012) and “I Origins” (2014) as prime examples.
That much is apparent from his previous theatrical films, Another Earth and I Origins , both of which dealt with intellectually trippy sci-fi themes.
His previous features, 2014’s I Origins and 2011’s Another Earth , explored concepts of science and philosophy, with Cahill weaving larger ideas about the universe through his earthbound stories about loss, regret and hope.
Bliss , the latest from Mike Cahill ( Another Earth , I Origins), proposes all that darkness is actually just a grim simulation beamed from an idealized reality.
Director Mike Cahill, who also wrote the original screenplay, has some serious sci-fi cred with a couple of previous films, Another Earth (2011) and I Origins (2014), both of which were acclaimed for how they explored weighty, existential questions grounded in human drama.
“Bliss” is essentially “The Matrix” meets “Vanilla Sky,” just without any of the dazzling action.
In the metaphysical journey that is “Bliss,” there comes a time when one almost expects Agent Smith from “The Matrix” to pop in looking for Mr. Anderson, or perhaps McCabe from “Vanilla Sky” to find our hero on a rooftop and tell him, “Mortality as home entertainment — this cannot be the future, can it?”
The device that rooted the viewer in that stasis-dreaming-man-as-a-battery trilogy helmed by the Wachowskis and those Terry Gilliam films (and “Vanilla Sky” as well) was the reliable point of view from their unreliable protagonists: We saw only what they saw.
Sharing more of an affinity with 2017’s The Florida Project than it does more recent ‘magic-drug’ movies like Synchronic or Project Power, Bliss plays like a bitter-sweet indie romance instead of the provocative and insightful sci-fi it might have been.
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However, when Greg keeps seeing his daughter, Emily (Nesta Cooper; The Edge of Seventeen ) Isabel is fearful he will get sucked into the simulation so she finds some blue crystals and suddenly they are both in different space and time where Isabel and Greg are Doctors and Isabel is studying the brain and how we can perceive situations differently based on our experience.