Sightlines · a viewing thread

Doubles, Dreams, and Dissolving Selves

Watch these when you want the floor to give way — dream machines, hypnotists, doppelgängers, and haunted houses where perception and identity quietly come undone.

A film-education spread of unreality cinema: some (Paprika, Mulholland Drive) are accessible marvels, others (Possession, Kotoko, Cure) are slow, demanding and genuinely disturbing — program by how much you can take that night.

• Paprika (2006)
• Mulholland Drive (2001)
• Cure (1997)
• Possession (1981)
• Kotoko (2011)
• Mind Game (2004)
• House (1977)
• Millennium Actress (2002) — The Satoshi Kon you shelved right next to Paprika and forgot — a vanished actress whose memories bleed into the films she made until life and cinema become one dissolving reel.
• Angel's Egg (1985) — If Possession's dread and Kotoko's hush stayed with you, this is the wordless Oshii deep-cut where a girl guards an egg through a drowned twilit city that never resolves into sense.
• Enter the Void (2010) — The one that literally makes the floor give way — a drifting out-of-body soul over neon Tokyo, the psychedelic freefall to finally pull down when Mulholland Drive left you wanting to go further under.
• Eraserhead (1977) — Lynch before Mulholland Drive — the industrial-nightmare debut whose dream logic and slow dread you already trust here, the under-seen origin of everything that unnerved you.
• Belladonna of Sadness (1973) — The hallucinatory watercolor fever-dream that rhymes with Mind Game and Paprika's animated unreality — under-seen, erotic and harrowing, a self coming undone in shifting paint.
• Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) — If the dolls of House and the porous selves of Cure caught you, Oshii's doll-haunted sequel loops perception on itself until you can't tell cyborg from puppet from dream.