Real

Plato’s cave is a favourite theme in film, the medium that allows a lifelike appearance of reality to flicker on the wall. Comparable to The Matrix and Inception, in Real parallel universes, dream and reality fuse into an inescapable tangle.
In this psychological horror film, neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental telepathic technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.
The reason for submerging in the unconscious is Atsumi’s attempted suicide. A children’s drawing turns out to be the key to a suppressed trauma. But in his quest for the missing piece of the puzzle, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. His everyday life is infiltrated by ‘philosophical zombies’, the city changes into a maze worthy of Escher. Psychonaut Koichi slowly bubbles towards a visually spectacular and comforting denouement. Kurosawa's latest thriller, Seventh Code, is also being screened at IFFR.