What if you could inhabit another reality where you were a different version of yourself? Perhaps you had a different career, mindset, appearance, or attitude. Maybe you lived in a different city, had a different relationship or had a brand-new wardrobe that reflected this other version of you. Movies and television shows that explore parallel realities, alternate universes, past lives, time travel, or even encountering alternate versions of “you,” use such themes to explore the infinite possibilities of the self and the universe, and the impact of our choices and their ability to shape our reality. Here are seven mind-bending movies and television shows about parallel realities, including the award-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, that are sure to captivate and move you.
Coherence takes place on the special night of a comet during a gathering of eight friends at a dinner party. Unbeknownst to them, this comet is the malevolent influence that will make them aware that other parallel universes exist and lead to a fight for survival among the different versions of the main characters that they come into contact with. Talk about having a fight club with your own doppelgangers. This movie has a disturbing plot twist ending that will leave you thinking about it for days. Given that it was a low-budget film, it is amazing to see how such simple settings were used to depict unbearable tension, intrigue, and mystery throughout the film. Much of the movie’s thrill relies on dialogue and subtle shifts that captivate the audience.
In the famous sci-fi action thriller The Matrix, Neo discovers that humanity has been subjugated by intelligent machines and that he has been living in a simulated reality with his body trapped in a pod as an energy source for the new regime. He must find a way to fight back against the Agents and Sentinels and get back to his authentic reality. The movie delivers a poignant message about self-awakening because in order for Neo to fight back he must “take the red pill” and wake up to the nature of his own reality or choose to live blissfully unaware in an illusion – he must take back control over his own agency and life.
Starring Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once is an Oscar-winning deeply moving film about a mother-daughter relationship that is tested in supernatural ways. Protagonist Evelyn Quan Wang is seemingly living out her “worst” timeline in an arena of possibilities in the multiverse. Not only is she being audited by the IRS (another meaningful message of the movie is that the IRS is a diabolical, evil force in every possible reality, in my opinion), she has a strained relationship with her daughter and her husband is about to serve her divorce papers. But when she is inhabited by a force from the “Alphaverse,” she learns that another Evelyn in a different parallel reality created verse-jumping technology that allowed other versions of herself to access and inhabit the special skills, memories, and the bodies of the different “Evelyns” across the multiverse. The “Alpha” version of her daughter, Joy, however, threatens to destroy this multiverse as she has created a black hole after learning how to jump through universes with an exquisite skill and mastery that has turned her into a destructive force.
Throughout the movie, Evelyn jumps through different realities where she is more successful than she is in her current reality – whether she is a kung fu master or a film star – and is tempted by what could be and could have been. Ultimately, however, her husband Waymond delivers one of most powerful lines in the film, saying, “I would have really just liked doing laundry and taxes with you,” in the reality where she is a famous movie star who never married. Using her husband’s lesson of being kind even in a supposedly meaningless universe, Evelyn uses her empathy and love for her family to try to save her daughter and fights to restore balance across all universes.
In The Butterfly Effect, the impact of even our tiniest decisions and their ability to affect the trajectory of our lives is brilliantly explored. Evan Treborn has the power to time travel connected to his mysterious blackouts and amnesia from trauma, but he soon finds out that changing the past always has unintended consequences, causing him to live through numerous realities where he recognizes both the benefits and consequences of making different decisions. Getting to the “right” reality with the best outcomes takes much effort and strategy, but as the movie shows, sometimes getting to the “dream timeline” after exploring all your possibilities is worth it.
Based on the international NYTimes bestseller by Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is an limited series Apple TV adaptation about a quantum physicist who gets taken into the multiverse by another “alternate reality” version of himself. Former quantum mechanics physicist Jason Dessen is drugged and kidnapped, wakes up in a science lab and stumbles out of a metal box, only to enter an alternate universe in Chicago where he never married the woman of his dreams and instead decided to pursue his career as a physicist. As Jason begins to experiment with the box that allows him to sift through different realities and timelines, he learns that the universe is filled with infinite possibilities and that our choices dictate our reality – but some possibilities are far too dark and disturbing to explore.
In television series The Flash starring the lovable Grant Gustin, Barry Allen is a crime scene investigator who develops superhuman speed due to the S.T.A.R. Labs particle accelerator explosion. However, as other “speedsters” and the “Reverse Flash” from parallel universes in the multiverse come into his reality to try to stop him from saving the world, Barry is forced to create alternate timelines and recruit the gifts and talents of other “versions” of himself and people in the multiverse to maintain balance. He also sifts among past, present, and future throughout the television series, and learns that in trying to stop traumatic events from occurring in the past, he changes his own destiny and who he was meant to become.
Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, explores different realities through the mindscape of dream creation and infiltration. In Inception, infiltrating other people’s minds becomes a form of corporate espionage as characters Cobb (played by DiCaprio) and Arthur use “dream-sharing” technology to extract information from their targets, entering people’s dreams and uncovering their secrets. Throughout the movie, there are beautifully masterful “world-building” scenes in the film to depict the process of dream infiltration and the different realities that can be shaped and molded, and even built and lived in, in line with the idea of “we create our own reality.” Yet some worlds should never have been built, as we discover that DiCaprio’s character Cobb is also dealing with a past trauma regarding the way his wife’s mind becomes tainted and fractured by living in her dream world rather than in reality. The secrets of his past are locked in his own subconscious and they “leak out” throughout the film, allowing viewers to only piece together the horrifying truth at the end. This movie is both a psychological thriller and a cinematic masterpiece about alternate dimensions, penetrating deeply into the depths of the human psyche and the mysteries of the universe.
