Paprika, by Satoshi Kon (2006)

movie review

by Éric Lemoine

Adapted from a Japanese novel, Paprika is a gorgeous visual tale where dreams meet reality like never told before.

The premise of Paprika may seem quite simple: a team of researchers in psychology invent a means to record dreams of their patients and interact with them to do some therapeutic interventions. Soon, they discover some of the prototypes are stolen, and are used by an unknown “terrorist” to invade the whole dream world which starts to dangerously bleed-through to the “real” world…

But very soon this impression of simplicity fades away as the colorful disturbing dream parade appears and leaves us panting before this visual feast on our plates —unlike the child-at-heart obese genius inventor of the device who gobbles everything with appetite: the whole dream world, like an inflated repressed repository of our collective egos becomes an uncontrolled mayhem more and more undistinguishable from reality.

At the end of the movie, nothing is as clear-cut as it was. Even Paprika, the eponymous heroine of the movie (who was used as her dream world alter-ego by the stern-looking female head of the team, Doctor Atsuko Chiba, to illegally help patients outside of the facility) starts to take on a life of her own, which makes us wonder at some point who is the other’s imagination figment.

Far from being just a beautiful kaleidoscopic jigsaw puzzle without any substance, Paprika has also some interesting reflections to shed on the subject of the nature of reality.

Although clues are given here and there, Paprika doesn’t attempt to explain everything. In fact, there may be as many interpretations as there are viewers. One I found worth noticing is that dreams need “reality” for the experience, as much as the reverse is true.