The film opens with Greg Wittle losing his job and, within the same hour, accidentally killing his boss. This is not a thriller set-up — it is the moment Mike Cahill uses to introduce a man so unmoored from consequence that reality itself stops feeling stable. The gamble in Bliss is that this instability is the point. The disappointment is that Cahill never decides what to do with it.

Owen Wilson, cast here with more sorrow in his face than comedy requires, plays Greg as a man who has been disappointing people for years and developed an almost professional composure about it. It is a genuinely interesting performance — not Wilson doing something surprising so much as Wilson doing something stripped. There is no comic distance. When Isabel (Salma Hayek Pinault) finds him sitting in a hotel lobby and explains, with the complete certainty of a person who is either right or delusional, that their world is a simulation, Greg accepts this because he has almost no world left to defend.

Hayek Pinault commits to Isabel with a ferocity the screenplay does not match. Isabel lives in the “real” world — a gleaming, beautiful future — and visits the simulation to conduct research. The two-world contrast should be the film’s primary storytelling grammar. Instead, both worlds look roughly the same: adequately photographed, not particularly luminous, not particularly grim. The crucial craft decision was to trust the camera to carry the ontological stakes. Cahill doesn’t make it.

The screenplay, which Cahill wrote himself, is in genuine conversation with Philip K. Dick — specifically with the question of whether a man’s perception of love can survive the dismantling of the reality he perceives. Greg falls in love with Isabel’s version of the world and, possibly, with Isabel. Whether this love survives the revelation about the simulation’s true nature is the film’s only real question. But the film spends so long deferring the revelation that when it arrives, the audience has been outpacing the characters for twenty minutes and is already exhausted.

There are scenes in Bliss that work precisely because of their restraint. A sequence in which Greg tries to reconnect with his daughter Emily (Nesta Cooper, doing sharp, efficient work in limited screentime) is staged with almost no dialogue and carries the film’s actual emotional weight. Greg’s memory of his daughter — which the film suggests is either a simulation artifact or a genuine feeling surviving beyond the simulation’s capacity to explain it — gives Bliss its most human moment and its best structural argument. That argument deserved a film that trusted it.

Wilson and Hayek Pinault are well-cast against their respective public images — Wilson stripped of the comic ease that defines him, Hayek Pinault given a character who operates from absolute certainty rather than seduction. The performances suggest what a bolder version of Bliss might have been: a film as unresolved and uncomfortable as their shared scenes. There is chemistry between them, but it is a chemistry of disorientation rather than romance, and the film never quite decides what to do with that either.

Mike Cahill’s earlier film Another Earth had the same structural instinct: use a high-concept science fiction frame to tell a quietly human story about guilt and consequence. Another Earth worked because it chose. Bliss keeps both doors open and walks through neither. Simulation theory as emotional metaphor was still relatively unexplored territory in mainstream streaming cinema in 2021, and Cahill was right to see its potential. The idea that love might be real even inside a constructed world — that what we feel survives the collapse of the facts around it — is worth a film. This one almost earns it.