Bliss (2021 film)

Bliss is a 2021 American psychological drama film written and directed by Mike Cahill. It stars Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek. A middle-aged man, recently divorced and estranged from his family, suffers a psychotic break when he is fired from an unhappy job. Befriended by a homeless woman, he gradually falls deeper into psychosis and drug addiction as he struggles to discern reality from fantasy. 
The film aims to portray the reality of drug addiction and mental illness, as Wilson's character chooses a life of homelessness and hunger over a relationship with his family. It was released on February 5, 2021, on Amazon Prime Video, and received mostly unfavorable reviews from critics.
Plot.
Greg Wittle spends his work hours daydreaming and drawing. When he is fired, he imagines accidentally killing his boss, and concealing the body before leaving the office for the bar across the street. Greg alternates between reality and drug-induced fantasy. 
In the bar, he meets Isabel, a homeless woman who appears to know what he has done. She speaks about having created this world with unintended consequences. Isabel drags Greg away, telling him to lay low to avoid police, and to avoid all contact with his family. She sells his phone and possessions. Isabel takes Greg to a tented area. He shares his drawings with her, and she offers him crushed yellow crystal. Isabel helps Greg imagine that with the crystal, he is able to manipulate the world telekinetically.
Greg descends deeper into hallucination. He is homeless and has lost a sense of time. After an altercation at a roller rink in which he and Isabel imagine telekinetically tripping a bully, he watches police arrest the bully, only to discover himself in the back of the squad car. Greg is released and his daughter Emily searches for him.
While Isabel gets more crystals, Emily spots Greg on the street and attempts to rescue him. She gives him her phone number, and asks Greg to call her. One day Greg wakes up in Isabel's tent and finds her absent but sees his drawings posted. He finds Emily's phone number and calls her, but gets the answering machine. When he returns, Isabel is there, furious that he called Emily, asserting she is not real. Isabel decides she needs to prove what reality is to him. She plans to eject them both out of this "false" world using blue crystals.
In what proves to be a hallucination, Greg 'wakes up' attached to a giant computer along with several others including Isabel. He is told that he has been experiencing a simulation within a Brain Box created by Isabel to study alternate realities and their effects on the human brain. Isabel reveals they are a couple in this world and takes Greg home, showing him his drawings were recreations of this setting. Greg does not remember this world, and Isabel says that after a long dark period of poverty, most problems on Earth were eliminated allowing humanity to flourish. Greg still has vivid memories of the 'simulation,' but Isabel warns him the simulation pulls tricks on the user.
A gala is thrown for the Brain Box. During the celebration, Greg wanders off and encounters a ghostly Emily, who implores him to come back to her. Isabel begins to see elements from the simulation leak into her view and claims they need to go back into the simulation and take more blue crystals in order to fully exit it. Back within the 'simulation,' Isabel gets more crystals. The police are on their tail. At her tent, Isabel finds that there are only enough crystals for one of them to 'leave.' Greg suggests Isabel kill him since he believes 'real' people cannot die in the simulation, but hearing Emily, who has tracked him down, Greg insists Isabel go back alone, which she accepts. Isabel distracts the police long enough for Greg to escape to a rehab clinic, admitting that he believes that his daughter Emily is real. Sometime later, Greg reconnects with Emily.
Production.
In June 2019, it was announced Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek had joined the cast of the film, with Mike Cahill directing from a screenplay he wrote and Amazon Studios distributing the film. Cahill managed to cast the two lead actors before they had seen the script, based on a twenty minute pitch. 
Principal photography began in Los Angeles in June 2019. Filming also took place in Split and on the island of Lopud, Croatia.
Release.
The film was released on February 5, 2021 by Amazon Prime Video.
Reception.
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 27% approval rating based on 96 reviews, with an average rating of 4.90/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "When it comes to building an entertaining sci-fi drama around some cool ideas, this "Bliss" is largely ignorant." Metacritic sampled 14 critics and calculated a weighted average score of 34 out of 100, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".
Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com gave the film 2 out of 4 stars, and called it "schmaltzy and pointlessly confusing." Frank Scheck of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote: "As with both of his previous works, the filmmaker delivers an undeniably ambitious mind-bender that bites off more than it can narratively chew."
Andrew Barker of Variety wrote: "Cahill gets so bogged down in hair-splitting rules and exposition that he loses track of the bigger themes."