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

Ha! I’ll bet you thought I was going to start off with the poster-child of the fake-world-in-a-real-world subgenre that is The Matrix, but you shouldn’t be led to believe that The Matrix was actually original in its story. In fact, it appears to be an amalgamation of The Terminator and a very little-known 1999 film called The Thirteenth Floor. While the former took on an action-packed kung fu-esque appeal which stormed audiences en masse, the latter was a far more subtle film that approached the concept in the style of a detective noir.

The Thirteenth Floor revolves around a man named Douglas who’s part of a team building a simulated reality. To access this program, one simply slides into a compartment and is hypnotized by lasers… I think… and bam! You’re in New York in the roaring twenties! Things take a strange turn, however, when one of the fabricated people in the program accidentally hitches a ride to the real world after discovering that his own is false, and he starts killing people in a rage. A younger and far less intense Vincent D’Onofrio still manages to skillfully pull off the mix of confusion and frustration that this character feels.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there! You see, after talking with the escaped program, Douglas applies the man’s situation to his OWN world and comes to realize that he is also a fabricated person in a simulation, and that his is simply the first fake world to create a fake world WITHIN a fake world, and no one knows how to get off this crazy merry-go-round. The film strikes an excellent balance between the crushing emotional weight of these realizations and still maintaining an allure of mystery, all the way to when that surprise antagonist shows up claiming to be a god.