Big thoughts, bigger screens – Inception is back in IMAX

Luca Fontana

24.2.2026

Translation: Elicia Payne

What is real? This is the question Inception poses – and refuses to answer. So perhaps that’s precisely where the truth lies – it isn’t facts but emotions that determine our lives. Now the film’s returning to the big IMAX screen and I’m excited to reflect on it again.

I remember how we all held our breath as the spinning top spun. And spun. And spun. How the screen suddenly went black – like a punch in the chest. Then silence. The pictured stopped and so did the sound. Hans Zimmer, who’d previously carried us through the dream levels with orchestral force, pulled the rug out from under our feet at exactly the right moment.

Was Cobb still dreaming?

Inception refused to give us the answer and instead gave us something much greater: freedom. Because we’re supposed to decide for ourselves whether the life that Cobb ends up living is real. Whether it counts.

Whether it’s enough.

Now the movie’s making a return. To the place where it once robbed us of our sanity: the IMAX screen. It’ll be shown in the original language and without subtitles.

On **Sunday 15 March **, we’ll be showing Inception in all Pathé IMAX cinemas in Switzerland in cooperation with The Ones We Love and Pathé Switzerland. We’re keeping our promise: last July, you voted for Inception to be our next IMAX spectacle. So that’s precisely the film you’ll get.

Follow the links below for tickets in Spreitenbach, Ebikon (Mall of Switzerland), Bern (Westside) and Balexert:

**Sunday 15 March **: 10.45 a.m., DE: Spreitenbach | Ebikon | Bern
**Sunday 15 March **: 2 p.m., EN: Spreitenbach | Ebikon | Bern | Balexert

DE = German dubbing.
EN = English, without subtitles.

So, now that you’ve rushed off and secured your tickets, I invite you to return to your dreams. Perhaps deeper than ever before. Sit back. Play Hans Zimmer’s Time in the background – and let yourself go.

Warning: spoilers.

The seed of doubt

Everything starts with a thought.

A small, almost inconspicuous impulse. A desire. A wish. And suddenly, something grows inside us that won’t go away. That changes us and infiltrates everything we do: an inception.

At least that’s what director Christopher Nolan tells us. Although this is perhaps the biggest deception he’s ever planted on us – that his movie isn’t actually about dreams and their complex structures, but about ideas. About beliefs that become ingrained in us. About obsessions that we can no longer get rid of and how they threaten to drag us into the abyss.

Let’s remind ourselves of the plot. Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a master thief. Except, he doesn’t break into houses, but into dreams. For one last big coup, however, he’s not supposed to steal a secret from his target’s subconscious. He’s supposed to plant something there: an idea. For this to work, he has to penetrate the deepest depths of his target’s dream worlds. And that’s dangerous – which is why no one’s ever dared to do it before.

Yet the deeper Cobb goes, the clearer it becomes – this isn’t about wealth or safes. Not even power. It’s about control. Because how much of what we believe really belongs to us? And how much of it was planted in us? Not even by fictitious dream thieves like in the movie. Rather, by everything we consider to be our own ideas and beliefs, because they were sown in us early enough through upbringing, fear, media, love or loss.

Yet in the film, Cobb suggests that a «real» inception isn’t implanting an idea. It’s the sowing of doubt. An inner conflict that relentlessly grows and slowly takes control. At some point it’s so big that it influences all our decisions without us realising it. Yes, that’s what makes an inception so powerful. But also dangerous.

And deceitful.

At first glance, Inception is a gigantic thought experiment about dreams that cleverly tries to disguise itself as a heist movie – as a man’s last attempt at pretending to be in control. In truth, however, it’s about what we carry around with us when we’re awake: the ideas, obsessions, doubts and feelings that drive us. Or stop us. That protect us.

Or consume us.

Guilt and shame

In Cobb’s case, this is an ever-spinning whirlpool of guilt and shame that threatens to pull him into a never-ending hole. Not only figuratively, but also literally. Just think of his totem – a never-stopping spinning top – and the many dream levels in Robert Fischer’s subconscious.

The whirlpool’s manifested itself in the form of Mal, his deceased wife, who always appears and shakes everything up when Cobb goes too deep into other people’s dreams. Not because she wants to. But because Cobbs wants to. Or at least his subconscious, which has moulded Mal as a faint memory out of guilt and shame so that Cobb won’t forget her, does. Or more likely: because Cobb isn’t ready to let her go and admit to himself what he did.

Because it was Cobb who actually carried out the inception that they thought was impossible – on Mal. When they had spent decades, perhaps even centuries, in Limbo, the deepest of all dream levels, Mal lost the ability to distinguish between reality and dream. So Cobb planted the most devastating doubt of all in her mind: that of reality itself. Or at least what she perceives as reality.

Only then would she voluntarily commit suicide with him – the only way you can awaken from Limbo, if you’re still capable of recognising it as such.

But the inception took hold of Mal like a virus. It grew and flourished from the deepest to the highest levels of dreams to actual reality. Because Mal now also thought reality was a dream – of course – she committed suicide. That was Cobb’s fault. Cobb, who acted with good will. But while Mal lost the ability to distinguish dreams from reality, Cobb also took away her ability to distinguish reality from dreams.

The tragedy in it all? Cobb no longer has this ability either.

Catharsis in a dream

This is precisely what the movie’s about: not whether Cobb is still dreaming at the end or not. You can find discussions on that in numerous critiques, although they completely miss Nolan’s point. His point being more about whether Cobb is finally ready to face up to his guilt. Not through punishment. But through acceptance.

What Cobb’s really looking for isn’t an entry in his passport, a return ticket to the States so that he can finally see his children again, or freedom in the legal sense, as he pretends to his team and indirectly to us viewers. He’s looking for liberation in the deepest sense: from the paralysing fear of having done something unforgivable. So unforgivable, in fact, that every single breath feels like a betrayal.

So, the last job, the inception of Robert Fischer, is more than just a means to an end. Cobb once planted doubts in his wife’s mind and lost everything. His team wants to try something new with Fischer. No doubts. A lie. This might sound paradoxically worse, but it’s not. The lie is that Fischer’s father did love him. That he wasn’t born just for the company and its succession and instead can, and should, lead his own life.

It’s an illusion. Yes. And yet it works. Because it’s not based on logic, but on emotions. On catharsis. The lie may be constructed, manipulative, perhaps even cynical. And yet it’s exactly what Fischer needs to break away from his father and finally move on.

Truth or lies, dream or reality – whatever it is only plays a subordinate role. What counts is what the inception triggers in Fischer: healing.

That’s the real point and what Nolan wants to tell us with Inception – that the emotional experiences we have in dreams are just as real as the emotions we experience in waking life. Inception doesn’t want to tell us what reality, ideas, doubts or lies are, but merely where they arise. That is, in the innermost part of our experience. They’re in the emotions that shape us, in the redemption we feel.

It doesn’t matter whether all this happens in a dream or while awake. Because both – as this movie tells us – are of equal value.

Dreaming is enough

Cobb eventually understands exactly that. Perhaps for the first time. And so he faces up to his guilt: he admits to himself that the Mal created by his subconscious isn’t real. That no dream, no construct and no shadow can ever replace the real Mal. And that he has to let her go in order to get out of Limbo and return to himself. Then something happens that’s stronger than any totem rule: Cobb forgives himself – and wakes up.

Possibly.

Yes, there are theories that prove that Cobb’s still dreaming. Or that he isn’t. But if he is still dreaming, then at least he’s not afraid. No longer feeling guilty. No longer feeling compelled to question everything. Cobb’s decided that the life he’s living now is real. That it counts. That it’s enough. He can now see the faces of his children. Not just blurred. Not just concealed. But clear and full of light.

Full of life.

Then he spins the spinning top. And goes.

Luca Fontana

Senior Editor

Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.ch

I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.

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