Perfect Blue

Darren Aronofsky screened Ingmar Bergman's Persona and John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence for Natalie Portman before filming began, these are the films that showed him how to make a psychological breakdown feel bodily. Bergman's Persona is the direct model: an identity that dissolves under pressure, two women who begin to merge. The horror in Black Swan is Bergman horror, no monsters, just the face.

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.