At one point in Inception, two main characters walk through a dream-room that looks like it was designed by M.C. Escher. One would expect a dialogic reference to be made to the surrealist artist, but there is none. This is on purpose. To draw a direct reference to Escher would be to compromise the linear, sensible nature of the film. In Inception, when something surrealistic happens, it only seems surrealistic. It is always grounded in an ontological exploration. In this film, writer/director Christopher Nolan examines various layers of reality and psychology like one might examine floors in a building. The result is a work that attempts to understand not only the id and the superego but their interaction with one another, as well as their places on a longer chain. The film bewilders even as it expands thought, supported at its core with grounded directing.

The main character of Inception, a man by the name of Cobb, is an invader of dreams. He slips drugs to his subjects, hooks them up to a machine that pumps a chemical through their veins, hooks himself and his partners up to the same machine, and enters their dreams to steal information. In rare cases he takes them into a dream within a dream, waking them from the second dream level back to the first to threaten them in various ways, as they have no way of knowing that they are still not in reality. Now a man named Saito has hired Cobb to pull off the most difficult job of his career: invade the mind of a business competitor, Robert Fischer, and instead of stealing information, implant a single thought to cause him to dissolve his company. This, Cobb realizes, will require that he go three-levels deep into the man’s dreams, a depth to which, because of its instability, travel has been deemed impossible.

Nolan presents the subconscious and reality as being almost identical. They are uncontrollable forces, populated with entities that function autonomously and at times hostilely. These planes of reality can both be influenced by the individual, though, and they even use the individual to communicate to each other. The subconscious produces feelings that result in real-world action. Reality produces people and objects that are converted into dream language. However, the subconscious and reality are also relative to the state of the subject between them. In dreams, when one passes from what was the conscious, the subconscious literally becomes a temporary conscious. Cobb and his men have learned to work and act in this new conscious just as they would in real life. It is important to understand, though, that dreams themselves are not the subconscious. They are only the communications of the subconscious, the bridge to the subconscious, just as life is not reality but, rather, is the experience of reality. The individual, the simple conscious, lies in the middle, doing what he can to affect each of these avenues of communication in an attempt to achieve the best possible reality for himself.

Yet, Nolan presents the subconscious/conscious/reality (id/ego/superego) triad as more than a three-pointed existence with two pathways running to the middle. He presents life as a potentially endless chain, in which each level of existence has a higher reality above it and a more primal subconscious below. When we dream, we are in a new conscious, previously known as the subconscious. Our former conscious then turns into an entire reality of its own. The reality we once knew moves beyond reach, and a deeper subconscious comes up below us. There are hints that a true, final subconscious exists at the end of the line, but it is almost infinitely distant, as is true reality.

In the plot of Cobb’s attempt to plant the inception of a thought, this understanding of being and reality becomes clear. As a dream-entity, his goal is to force the subject to undergo an experience that is so deep within his mind that he doesn’t consciously realize it has happened. Instead, a seed is planted that is allowed to blossom into a full mindset, causing him to act according to Cobb and Saito’s wishes. When Cobb enters the man’s dreams, he literally becomes dream material, setting up operations on one plane to descend to the next, where he can plant a thought so small, so seemingly inherent in the man’s character, that it will never be suspected as artificial. When this is done, not only would one plane of reality affect the next; it would cause a chain reaction, gaining intensity at each level. A man can brush aside a thought, but he cannot ignore a core part of his being, even if it is a part of him he never noticed was there.

Nolan’s first great film was Memento, and while he has proven himself fluent in the grammar of cinema ever since, Inception takes him to the level of master. This is not so much because the film is complex and cerebral but because he is able to communicate this complexity clearly and confidently. At only one or two points is there a question of how many levels of consciousness the characters have descended below the plane we understand as the real world. The director communicates the practicalities and logistics of dreaming and waking not through exposition but through characters that are essential to the film also for non-expository purposes. By its description, Inception probably sounds made solely for film enthusiasts, but it can be enjoyed and understood, for the most part, by anyone.

More superficially, Nolan also crafts Inception into a thriller more intense than most movies that aim only to thrill. Part of this is in spite of its cerebral nature. Most of this, however, is because of it. Since this movie deals with various levels of consciousness, Nolan is able to infuse into it a concept worse than death for those who fail to stay alive: limbo. Because the dream thieves are under such heavy sedation for this particular job, they will not wake if killed in the dream. They instead will drop immediately to the bottom subconscious, where they will remain until the sedation wears off. In real-life terms, this is a matter of hours. In the experience of the subconscious, however, this is a near infinite amount of time. This forces us to hope for the success of even the characters we otherwise would have little reason to care about, as such a fate would surely be worse than death.

Action-wise, the film is still able to deliver intensity. This is as much due to Nolan’s directing as it is to the actors’ believability and the sound editing. At one point, the main characters, in two separate cars, come under attack by a special security force. The realism of the crashes, the desperation of the characters, and the dynamic range of the sound effects, all combined with Nolan’s ability to uphold the verisimilitude of the threat over an extended period of time, creates an experience with such immediacy that we feel what the individuals involved would be feeling. There is more than one scene like this. The director is not afraid to provide simpler thrills while progressing through the larger story.

There have been movies about men and women entering others’ dreams, but none of them have the power or the fluidity of Inception. Few films have such talent behind them that they can be simultaneously mind-bending, entertaining, and reasonably easy to understand, and that is what makes this one great. You can ponder it, re-watch for details you didn’t catch, or view it casually for fun, and you will be satisfied. If you do all of these things at once, though, you will experience something that only the rarest movies accomplish. Even for the director who has made Memento and The Dark Knight, this is a work to be proud of.