"Bliss" intrigues at first but hard to buy into and remain engaged

Bliss (2021)

In his 2011 narrative feature debut “Another Earth,” writer-director Mike Cahill (2014’s “I Origins”) tackled an ambitious sci-fi conceit involving parallel worlds. However, he scaled it back to earth and focused more on the human condition with a quiet yet involving melancholy. Cahill goes bigger and starrier with his latest mind-bender about philosophical ramifications, but “Bliss” is a conceptually challenging misfire that doesn't know when to quit. Even with Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek bringing the star power, the film is a strange-but-not-strange-enough, annoyingly overcomplicated amalgam of “eXistenZ,” “The Matrix,” “Vanilla Sky,” and “Limitless” that makes you want to just rewatch any of those movies instead. 

Owen Wilson plays Greg Wittle, a recently divorced and unfulfilled office drone working at a company cutely named Technical Difficulties. Instead of using his time wisely at work, Greg imagines a better life, popping medication and drawing a woman he saw in a dream. Procrastinating to meet his boss (Steve Zissis), Greg learns the meeting is to fire him. A physical altercation results in the accidental death of his boss and hiding the body behind the office window curtains. Rushing across the street to a local bar, Greg is summoned over by a gypsy-like woman named Isabel (Salma Hayek), who explains to him that nothing is real. She can also manipulate everything in this fake world with her apparent telekinetic powers, and Greg can do the same if he just trusts her and ingests the yellow crystals from an amulet necklace. Isabel insists that Greg should just go off the grid with her to her quasi-homeless-but-with-electricity sanctuary near a viaduct. Greg figuratively takes the blue pill and transfers him to a blissfully ignorant reality, but what is reality and what is just a simulation? 

The first 30 minutes of “Bliss” are certainly the most auspicious. Writer-director Cahill seems to be satirizing corporate office life, naming Greg’s workplace “Technical Difficulties” and having all of the employees frantically answer the phones as if they are robots. Then there’s the seriocomic dead-body disposal. Even once Greg first meets Isabel, the setup of the story proper is still intriguing, as one is right there along learning with Greg. To have fun and get drunk on their superpower, Greg and Isabel go to a roller rink and use their magic to take down those harassing others. When the bleak, almost-apocalyptic achromatic visual palette of the world we thought was real soon becomes more vibrant and sun-dappled, it's easy to tune out.

“It starts to feel like you’re making this up as you go along,” Greg states to Isabel, and it feels as if he’s reading the viewer’s mind. It’s difficult to buy into or care about any of this synthetic folly, particularly when the rules of the world seem to keep changing. If the characters don’t know what to believe, how can we? Through all of this, Greg and Isabel are meant to be soul mates, at least because Isabel tells Greg they are. Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek try bringing layers to these people, and Hayek actually gets to show her loopy comedic side more than Wilson does, but they don’t really have enough chemistry to even make their romance work. We won’t even get into how Isabel is really a scientist who has developed a “brain box” to experiment with manufactured worlds and living a perfect life with Greg in the Mediterranean villa. Or, how in the allegedly fake world Greg has two grown children, one of whom—daughter Emily (Nesta Cooper)—wants her father to attend her graduation.

No film needs to give up every answer immediately or be like a problem in need of being solved, but writer-director Mike Cahill gets so bogged down in his own allegory that Greg and Isabel feel like holograms of characters. Greg comes across as a patsy, and Isabel is like a mad scientist who keeps explaining what is or isn't real and just insists that Greg believe her. If a film keeps unloading exposition but withholds what is really going on, the proceedings need to have engaging characters, crackling dialogue, or something while we wait for the other shoe to drop. “Bliss” is fine for some pretty scenery and moments of the sublime—and maybe a Bill Nye cameo—but it’s too ambitious for its own good that disorientation quickly transforms into waning interest. 

Grade: C

Amazon Studios is releasing “Bliss” (103 min.) on Prime Video February 5, 2021.