Inception

The Architecture of a Ghost

I can still remember the walk out of the theater in 2010: legs leaden, lobby somehow heavier than when I went in. Inception has that effect. It throws off your balance before it tests your brain. latestnetflix.com's view is that Christopher Nolan’s mind-heist movie is not only about stealing secrets; it’s about the elaborate realities people build so they don’t have to drown in grief.

The film is famous for its stacked layers of exposition and action, but what keeps the whole machine from turning into a bloodless equation is the hurt sitting dead center inside it.

Nolan first had the idea back in university, when he was broke, living off free college breakfasts, and stumbling into lucid dreams where he realized he could briefly steer the world around him. You can feel that student fascination with control in every scene. But the older filmmaker who finally made Inception is just as interested in what control does to a person once it curdles.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb treats dreams like a worksite, using a military experimental drug to break into other people’s subconscious minds. He’s an architect of illusions, sure, but he’s also a junkie for the one place where his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), is still reachable. The movie keeps circling the same ugly truth: if you can command every detail, you can also trap yourself inside it.