Your stomach is clenched the whole time. You feel motion sickness as the bus moves through the city. You grip onto hotel walls as gravity is lost. Your breath catches when you watch Marion Cotillard jump from the window.
The 2010 movie Inception gets to you. Then it stays with you, years after the fact.
The Christopher Nolan-directed film takes you on a journey that renders logic, perception and the division between dreams and reality — absolute mush.
You watch the characters enter deeper and deeper into the dreams of their mission’s target – the heir to an energy conglomerate. They go through layers of his subconscious in order to plant an idea: They want the conglomerate broken into pieces and they want the decision to come from this man.
You pass through multiple layers of unreality. You see Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Cobb fight to get his family back (the mission is doubly important for him). You see him play desperately with a spinning top – a token that helps him distinguish between dreaming and reality.
If the top falls after spinning, he’s back in reality. If it keeps spinning, he’s still dreaming. Sometimes, like with most dreams, it can be difficult to tell the difference.
Then the movie ends. And you groan.
Because the ending leaves you hanging. It leaves you somewhere in between fantasy and reality and you're not quite sure which dimension you've landed in.
It leaves you here: The mission is over and finally, Cobb is with his children. They're in a sunny kitchen with a wooden dining table. The kids are laughing but he's still uncertain. So he spins the top.