Mark Reviews Movies: BLISS (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 4, 2021

It doesn't take too long to figure out what's really going on in Bliss. Indeed, one of the earliest shots in the movie more or less gives away the game writer/director Mike Cahill is playing, although the image is brief and subtle enough that we're probably not supposed to immediately register it as a definitive answer for all of the strange happenings that are about to ensue.

The clue is the answer, though, and that leaves us with a bit of a conundrum. It has little to do with the fact that the movie's big twist is easy to determine, because this story does try to go much deeper than the constant questioning of what's actually happening to the main character. It's more to do with Cahill's approach, which tells a very metaphorical story about trying to escape from the pressures and pain of everyday life in a literal way. The metaphor here is where the real anguish lies, but the movie's artifice—a fantastical tale about the world only being a simulation—keeps that pain at a distance.

Without noting the image that explains the true foundation of this story, we begin with Greg (Owen Wilson), a recently divorced man working a soul-crushing office job, who is lost in an apparent fantasy that his life should be something else. Instead of working, he draws sketches of a dream home on a seaside peninsula and of a mysteriously beguiling woman smoking a cigarette.

His boss (played by Steve Zissis) calls Greg for a meeting, fires the mentally absent employee, and hits his head on a desk when Greg suddenly stands. Greg hides his dead or unconscious boss between the window and some curtains, and then, he heads across the street to a bar. There, he meets Isabel (Salma Hayek), a woman who looks exactly like the one from his drawing and who convinces him that she has telepathic powers, granted to her by ingesting yellow crystals.

It certainly seems as if she does have those powers. After knocking people over with a wave of her hand, Isabel frees Greg of his worries by making the boss fall out of the window. Greg just has to lay low, hiding out in Isabel's camp beneath an underpass, until the police investigation is finished.

Here is where Cahill has a choice to make: dive into the fantasy as reality or maintain some distance from Isabel's assertions. He chooses the former, and we're thrust into some heavy exposition from Isabel, who explains to Greg that what he thinks is the real world is only an illusion, that his real life is something much better than the one he's currently living, and that most of the people in this world are merely constructs of a computer program. Greg buys it, starts ingesting the yellow crystals, and goes on some adventures with Isabel. Meanwhile, his daughter Emily (Nesta Cooper), who's about to graduate from college, starts searching for her father, despite the reservations of her brother Arthur (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), who thinks Greg is lost in more ways than the obvious one.

There is this strange dichotomy between what we know we're seeing—as Greg and Isabel start behaving in increasingly desperate ways, while living in abject destitution—and of what Isabel and quite quickly Cahill try to convince us—as Isabel and Greg's abilities to manipulate the world and the people within it become impossible to ignore. There are some flashes of reality, in the sense that what we're seeing might not be what's really happening. Isabel and Greg make a scene at a roller rink by using their telepathic powers to knock down skaters, and although they seem to get away at first, Greg watches himself being taken away in a police car, where he suddenly is. If we're willing to lift the veil of Cahill's fantastical scenario, the couple's behavior, reliance on those crystals, and severe mood swings definitely look all too sadly recognizable as something else.

Cahill, though, would rather lift a completely different veil on this situation, which leads to the story's most literal interpretation of Isabel's assertions. There is another world beyond and outside of the one where Greg begins his journey—a utopia that's treated as fact, with history and science to explain what started it, how it functions, and why a simulated world of misery might be the key to its continued success. This place looks just like Greg's drawings, and he's determined to spend as much time here as possible—even if it means giving on the personal attachments he has in the simulation.

Even if one doesn't notice the apparent giveaway at the movie's start, the game being played here becomes obvious. Without explaining too much, everything here is a metaphor for something far more grounded than the complicated rationale, politics, and background of the simulation and the utopia. By the time the answer is revealed, Bliss feels as if it has missed the bigger point for Cahill's determination to constantly and repeatedly trick us. Only one world really matters here, and it's not the one in which the movie is primarily invested.

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