10 Most Immersive Movies Ever

While Jurassic Park, Inception and 2001 allow us to spend a slow couple of hours absorbing their worlds and stories, Cloverfield is immersive for a different reason entirely: it's absolutely relentless.

From the word go, you're dropped into a party with a group of people you don't know, but quickly start to feel like "one of the gang" because of all the private discussions you're privy to. Then, there's an earthquake, an explosion, and fire starts raining from the sky. Cue panic, terror, and an 80-minute trek through a war-torn New York that doesn't leave much time for you to process what's happening.

There are also the obvious benefits of shooting the movie from a first-person perspective - which plants the viewer directly in the middle of the carnage - but Cloverfield's real strength is the way in which it reveals information.

Throughout the movie, you're given just enough visual cues to get a general sense of the danger - a news broadcast here, a quick glimpse of the monster there - but not so many that you ever feel safe or secure. There's a big alien thing causing havoc, okay, but you don't really know why all of this is happening. Where did it come from? Is this a global thing? What are those terrifying dog-sized creatures, and please can I just curl up inside a blanket and go to sleep?

Too many questions can be a bad thing, but only if they're about things that need to be explained. Cloverfield puts you in the middle of a crisis and forces you to deal with it on the fly, and the fear of being a vulnerable fleshy human thrust into an impossible situation is a stressful but nonetheless gripping movie-watching experience.