Maybe not a masterpiece, but a monsterpiece for sure

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2011)

You will recognize at once the various matrices that have produced this film. The first matrix is of course that of all sorts of king fu and other action films that deal with real and virtual worlds intertwined into a more or less loose fabric. This one is simple to identify and follow, if follow we want to or can.
The second matrix is naturally "Matrix", the film or rather trilogy of films. In Matrix though the three levels of reality are the underground warriors who fight against the conquest of the world by machines, the real world and the world of machines. A fourth level exist which is the result of the matrix itself: the real world of the surface is little by little conquered by a mental world "controlled" or "invaded" by a certain Mr. Smith. This mental world is the creation of some engineer behind who invented the mathematical matrix that enables his mind to take over the real world.
None of this here. In fact we have a real team of people who are exploiting a certain capability of some human beings, themselves among others, their ability to dream and to be able to live (virtually of course) in that dreamed world. That dreaming can be controlled by some machine and is like hypnosis. The complication comes from the fact that anyone in any world can dream a deeper world that then superimposes itself onto the original world. We thus can come to five, six or seven levels of depth. This is done so fast that, and since we are constantly jumping from one level to the next, the film becomes chaotic.
The human mind is afraid and abhors chaos. So in front of this situation we are confronted to we try to sort out the various levels and to remember which one is the first true dream, hence which one is the real world, and hence which ones are the other and deeper worlds. Don't believe in miracles. You would have to be autistic to be able to really follow every shift from one world to the next and identify them in their depth and successiveness. And that's the charm of the film. A certain balance and equilibrium is then re-established at the end when finally – but I won't say – though we have absolutely no real element to make sure that last scene is the real world.
At another level of meaning this film, as opposed to "Matrix", has no reference or metaphor connected to any Christian myth, or as for that any mythology at all. The film then has no ethical meaning, no spiritual signification, no mental and moral depth. We are thus and henceforth floating and roaming into a vast universe of many strata with no milestone, guideline or compass to find a way out. This world is absolutely psychotic and after a period of living in that universe the characters would find it a relief to finally die. But is it that simple? If you died in the first level of dreaming that would wake you up in the real world. But if you died in any deeper world you will never be able to wake up in the real world, hence you would die really. The fact that suffering at any level accumulates in the real person whose personae or avatars are suffering at any dreamed level makes the experience really painful for the real persons. The psychosis would easily then induce this person to just accept to die, to commit suicide.
The last characteristics of this film is that the main character has the capability to bring into any of his dreamed world the recollection of his wife who is really dead, or so he says, and she can play a direct role against him including enticing him to commit suicide in order to stay with her. Here the psychosis can reach a certain level of schizophrenia.
This film then is a pure strong disorienting drug that aims at getting you out of any kind of stable vision of reality. That's what the title means and that's what the objective of the real people in the real world is: to implant ideas in the brains of other people to control them and to make them do what they want them to do, in other words to manipulate them. IN-ception is nothing but a manipulation of words like RE-ception, PER-ception, DE-ception, and many others: CON-ception, EX-ception, .... In a way it is a denunciation of the virtual universe or universes of electronic games now game-designers have been able to introduce us into their virtual reality just as if we were really in that universe made real in the process. All that is false and fake but quite a few people find it comfortable to live in such a psychotic reality, and for some of them to die there.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID