Movies Like Total Recall: 11 Reality-Bending Sci-Fi Films That Keep You Guessing

Start here. Ridley Scott's other great Philip K. Dick adaptation is slower and sadder than Total Recall, but obsessed with the same doubt, whether your memories are yours and whether that even makes you real. Where Verhoeven is loud, Scott is mournful, yet both films leave you unsure who is human and who was manufactured.

The natural companion to Total Recall, and the one that treats the same question as tragedy instead of thrill.

Verhoeven's film just before Total Recall, and its closest cousin, a hard-R satire smuggled inside a violent crowd pleaser. A murdered cop is rebuilt as a machine and spends the movie trying to recover the man underneath. It shares Total Recall's exact question, what is left of you when your memory and body have been taken and rebuilt by a corporation. A perfect double bill.

Steven Spielberg turns another Philip K. Dick story into a chase, with Tom Cruise as a man running from a future that insists it already knows who he is and what he will do. It has Total Recall's blend of propulsion and paranoia, plus the same distrust of any system that claims to know you better than you know yourself. The modern heir to the Dick action movie.

Alex Proyas built a whole city where a race of beings rewrites human memory every night to find out what makes a soul. A man wakes with no idea who he is and has to solve his own identity while the ground keeps shifting. It is the deep cut that shares Total Recall's exact nightmare, that the people around you may have installed everything you believe. Watch it and argue.

David Cronenberg's queasy, prophetic film about a man who can no longer tell hallucination from reality after exposure to a mysterious broadcast. It shares Total Recall's central destabilizing move, a protagonist whose grip on what is real dissolves scene by scene. A deep cut for anyone who wants the doubt pushed into pure body horror. Long live the new flesh.

The Wachowskis made the biggest reality-bending movie of them all, where an ordinary man learns his whole world is a simulation. It owes an obvious debt to the Total Recall question, is the life you are living even real, only it answers where Verhoeven refuses to. For the viewer who wants the same rush with a firm floor under it.

Richard Linklater's rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick is the closest any film has come to the drift and dread of Dick's own prose. An undercover agent loses track of which identity is the real one until they cannot be told apart. It shares Total Recall's split self and paranoia, played as slow tragedy rather than spectacle. A deep cut for Dick devotees.

Christopher Nolan's heist inside the dreaming mind ends on the same withheld answer as Total Recall, a spinning top and a cut to black that refuses to tell you whether any of it was real. It shares the exact structure, an implanted or invaded mind and a viewer left to argue the ending. If Total Recall's open door thrilled you, this is the modern version of the same trick.

Verhoeven again, another satire the multiplex took at face value, a gleaming fascist war movie that is secretly mocking everything it shows you. It does not share Total Recall's memory puzzle, but it shares its method, real ideas buried under the loudest possible surface. A deep cut for anyone who wants to see how far Verhoeven will push a joke the audience does not get.

Cronenberg's virtual reality game film keeps peeling back layers until neither the characters nor the audience can find the bottom. It shares Total Recall's nested-reality anxiety, the fear that the level you think is real is just another game. A deep cut that pairs beautifully with the doctor's visit at the heart of Total Recall. Are we still in the game?

Duncan Jones sends one man alone to a lunar mining base and slowly unravels everything he believes about who he is. It trades Total Recall's noise for quiet dread, but it lands on the same wound, an identity that turns out to be manufactured and a memory that cannot be trusted. Sam Rockwell carries the whole thing. A deep cut about a self that was assembled.

Our pick, in case you have not seen it or want to revisit it. Paul Verhoeven drops Arnold Schwarzenegger into a Philip K. Dick nightmare, a construction worker who buys a memory of Mars and can no longer tell whether he is a nobody named Quaid or a secret agent named Hauser. Rob Bottin's practical effects and Jerry Goldsmith's score drive it, and the film never tells you whether any of it is real. It is the sugar and the medicine in one spoonful.

If you are building a Verhoeven run, follow it with RoboCop and Starship Troopers. If you want the Philip K. Dick thread, go to Blade Runner and Minority Report. They all lead back here.