Bliss Review: Salma Hayek Seduces Owen Wilson Into an Underwhelming Alternate Reality

Without making a big deal of it, Amazon's Prime Video service has quietly developed a specialty in stories about alternate universes and warped realities. The service staked out the territory with one of its earliest, high-profile shows, The Man in the High Castle, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel set in an alternate timeline in which the Allies lost World War II. Then it kept expanding from there, serving as the exclusive home for Forever, Undone,Tales from the Loop, Upload, and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, all series set in off-center versions of the reality we know. Prime's seemed less interested in alternate realities on the movie front, but that changes with Bliss, an addiction drama set in a world where nothing is quite what it seems -- even the idea of the world itself.

The world of Bliss, the latest film from writer/director Mike Cahill (Another Earth), looks normal enough at first, even dull, a beige place dominated by dull office space. But even such nondescript spots can play host to drama. In the film's opening moments, Greg (Owen Wilson) works on a drawing of a beautiful woman standing in a villa, juggles phone calls, and grows increasingly frustrated as he tries to refill a prescription that seems extremely important to him. It's so important, in fact, that he keeps punting his boss's request for a meeting, right now. The scene keeps going as the phone call turns south and Greg grows increasingly late to a meeting that sounds like it's not going to be pleasant even if he's on time.

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The scene generates an almost unbearable amount of tension even before the meeting begins with Greg learning he's been fired then ends with him accidentally killing his boss and fleeing the building. Then the film takes a turn for the truly strange: At a dive bar, Greg meets Isabel (Salma Hayek), a disheveled woman with a piercing gaze and a commanding presence who informs him they're real, most of those around them aren't, and that they can control the world with their minds. (Oh, and if he wouldn't mind, could he fetch some magic crystals from the guy passed out in the men's room?)

Those people they're manipulating like rag dolls, Isabel tells Greg, shouldn't concern them. They're just part of a computer simulation. Nothing that happens is beyond their control, even Isabel's choice to live outside in a homemade shelter filled with plants and detritus. And she might be right. Greg's journey gets stranger still when -- and the spoiler averse should probably skip ahead a bit here -- Isabel reveals, yes, they are in a simulation and their life in the real world is pretty swank. That villa he used to doodle? That's their villa, the fruits of her labor as a theoretical scientist responsible for the neural experiment that created the alternate reality in which they'd been living. And that beautiful woman? Well, that's her.

It's a cleverly realized bit of sleight of hand, one seemingly inspired by David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, in which the lines between simulated reality and the real world grow increasingly blurred, and Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, a film in which the protagonist's surroundings' reflect his mental state -- and the drugs he's putting into his body. And, as with Naked Lunch, however intricate the science fiction trapping, this is, at heart, the story of people struggling with addiction. Its two leads play it quite differently. Hayek goes big in the grungier reality of the film's early segments, then with more reserve in the more luxurious reality of the world they unplug into (at least until that starts to seem unstable, too). Wilson, by contrast, keeps his performance measured, leaning into the sadness that's usually lurking just beneath the surface of even his comedic roles.

It's a nice study in contrast from two reliable veterans. The main problem, however, is that, despite the cast's intense efforts and the twisty setting, Bliss never recovers the tension of those opening scenes. It juggles some striking moments -- especially a roller-skating sequence that takes a turn for the sadistic -- with heady ideas and finds poignance in scenes involving Greg's daughter Emily's (Nesta Cooper) search for her father (with little help from the brother who's given him up as a hopeless addict). It even makes nice use of Bill Nye as, naturally, a scientist who sounds a warning against Isabel's experiments. But it ultimately plays like a long journey to a destination signposted (quite literally) in the film's first scene. Everything else feels like wheel-spinning. Not all stories, it turns out, become more compelling when shifted to an alternate universe.

TV Guide rating: 2.5/5

Bliss premieres Friday, Feb. 5 on Amazon Prime Video.