Film Review: Inception (Director: Christopher Nolan)

What is real and what is not? How do we perceive reality and what is reality anyway? Can we ever really know it and if so, how? If one wants to summarizes what drives Christopher Nolans film, these questions may provide a starting point. Nolan is a master of playing with levels of reality, of unsettling certainties, shattering beliefs, dissolving what we call facts. Deconstruting time and memory in Memento, disassociating fact from perception in The Prestige, even reinventing the Batman franchise as a study in roleplay, perception and interpreting reality, recreating it in the process: Nolan, like no other director of his generation, uses film, the ultimate medium of illusion and make-belief to question as well as challenge our relationship with reality.

Inception is just a logical next step in this adventure. It is the story of a man whose job it is to invade other people's dreams, even create them, in order to extract their secrets or, hardest of all, to plant ideas in their subconscious. A story that is ideal to test the limits of reality and to wonder where it starts and ends. The dream, that mighty illusionist, that pretender of reality and truth - is there a better subject for somebody like Nolan.

It is not the first time, sleep plays a role in Nolan's cosmos. In Insomnia ist was sleeplessness that alters the protagonist's experience of the world and blurs reality so much that in the end it is hardly recognisable as such. This time, we follow the protagonist and his crew into one dream level after the other in order to plant the idea that may free him from his own demons. The way Nolan stages this is much more straightforward and less surprising than in previous films. The viewer always knows where he is, or thinks he does. Even the conclusion is not too surprising but the certainty is treacherous as so often in Nolan's films. Because the film does not end when the credits are rolling, it continues in the viewer's head where suddenly what seemed straightforward and clear dissolves into vagueness. How many layers of dream and reality are there? Is there a level of 'reality' and if so which is it? And who is dreaming anyway?

So what seemed simpler and more logical than Memento and The Prestige turns out to provide even less certainty than those who at least offer a satisfying conclusion in the very end. Nolan is a master in creating false certainties and then removing the ground from under the viewer's feet.

The visual cosmos of the film plays its part. The world of the different reality levels looks like ours but with a twist. Gravity can disappear, a city unfold on itself, ordinary houses appear in strange surroundings. The combination of what is real, what is remembered, what exists and what is purely imagined, what does not and cannot exist, this peculiar logic of the dream - Nolan finds the perfect images for this, for this unstable, fantastic and frightening state dreams can be.

So if this review is a little less structured, more meandering and possible less logical than others, the reason may not lie in the incompetence of the reviewer alone but maybe also in the shaky ground and ever changing environment the film creates. And isn't this, this play with illusions and imagination, this creation of worlds entirely their own, what cinema was created for?