10 Movies That Mock You For Paying Attention

Released in 2006, Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is... Well, it's a pretty big tonal departure from the Before Sunset director's last film, 2003's School of Rock.

A trippy and intense thriller, A Scanner Darkly is adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Philip K Dick. The father of psychedelic sci-fi, Dick was famous for his complex plots and hard-to-follow sci-fi satires. The author, who suffered with drug addiction himself, wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which went on to become the original cyberpunk movie Blade Runner in 1982.

A Scanner Darkly deals in similar territory to Blade Runner, following an undercover agent who infiltrates a group of drug users and finds after indulging in the same psychoactive substances as them that he has more in common with these supposed criminals than his fellow cops. Soon the line between reality and imagination begin to blur, and it's understandable that viewers would scour the film for clues to its true meaning.

In doing so, the audience is likely to notice the small, fast-moving text on one surveillance screen within the film.

What's that you're able to reading on the screen's surface?

That's right... It's the screenplay for Blade Runner, in a twisty meta-joke that folds the film's reality/ fiction jumble in on itself like an omelette.