Fail Safe

Christopher Nolan has publicly acknowledged that Satoshi Kon, a Japanese animator, made Paprika four years before Inception with the same architecture: dreams folding inside dreams, a spinning object that tests whether you've returned to reality, cityscapes that collapse and rebuild according to the logic of the unconscious. Kon did it on a fraction of the budget. Paprika is on MUBI and is one of the great science fiction films of the 21st century. Tarkovsky's Stalker is the deeper ancestor: a journey into a forbidden zone where your true desires are what you're really afraid of.