List Thread: Existential Media (minimize spoilers please)

for its ending. The main character ends up being hooked up to a "dream machine."

because at the end of the movie, the main character finds out that although he defeated the demon that was living in the mirror world, he ended up being put in the mirror world himself.

It's full of questions on how we consider something real. It's basically about being trapped at a single point in time and fixing things. You're given a synopsis of why you encounter the big ship and why you go onto it, but you're not actually a character, but a supernatural force. You might even be dead, along with the rest of the crew. You fight off monsters caused by the crewmembers' sleep of reason. And it's full of little details, such as the game turning bluer and colder whenever an enemy appears, depicting that the cold is a symbol of evil. You are the heat and the light come to melt such problems away, which is why you replenish your health from warm objects, rather than things such as fire traditionally killing you.

Like some sort of pocket of subspace technobabble in Star Trek where up is down or something. The whole world of the North Wind seems real but not real enough, like a spiritual representation of a real predicament.

The 'happy' ending is simply the dream of the main character who has been tortured into insanity.

The characters are split personalities living in the mind of a serial killer.

Like Inception, the characters live in various levels of virtual reality video games and it's never quite clear where the games stop and reality begins.

The main character is actually dying and all the events are his final imaginings.