10 Movie Characters Who Discovered That Their Universe Didn’t Exist

The Incident is a bleakly repetitive film that somehow manages to remain engaging. It features two parallel stories: one involving a policeman chasing two brothers down a stairwell, and another consisting of a family breaking down on an abandoned stretch of roadway. After an unknown explosion in the distance, each of these groups becomes trapped when their location transforms into an infinite loop. In the stairwell, one brother dies, leaving the policeman and the other brother to forever descend a stairway with no bottom or top and no doors through which to leave. The family finds that the road stretches in a spatial loop: if they walk in one direction away from their car, they’ll pass a gas station that mystically restocks its food supply and then come upon their car from the other direction.

This is at first quite frustrating, but then it’s revealed that these loops remain in place for THIRTY-FIVE YEARS. That is three-and-a-half decades before the elder character in each pairing dies and the younger is allowed to escape. In the end of the film, the older characters reveal the truth which they’ve discovered: that their realities are potential bubble universes created for the sole purpose of generating emotional stability for their real-life counterparts. The hope carried by the younger character in each location keeps their counterparts hopeful for the first thirty-five years of their lives, while the suffering of the older character perpetuates the slow degradation of age felt for the next thirty-five years.

And the final gut-punch is the revelation that the older character of one of the scenarios is, in fact, the younger character of the other, meaning that one person has been doomed to spend seventy years in spatial loops in broken dimensions, while another version of them gets to enjoy a real life and inherit their emotional states. It’s… it’s a tough one, but worth the watch.