PaprikaMovies like Paprika
- Key Features:
- Dream invasion, Psychological thriller, Virtual reality, Technology gone wrong, Alternate reality, Identity, Psychoanalysis, Japanese animation, Mind control, Surrealism, Hallucinations, Paranoia, Visual spectacle
- Tone:
- stylized, suspense-driven, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Anime fans, Sci-fi enthusiasts, Psychological thriller viewers, Art house cinema lovers
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Confusion → Terror
Paprika

When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient's dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it and recover it before damage is done: Paprika.
Paprika
Neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. In his quest, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.

After having narrowly escaped an attempt on his life at the hands of a psychopath, detective inspector Takakura quits active service in the police force and takes up a position as a university lecturer in criminal psychology. But his desire to get to the bottom of criminals’ motives remains, and he does not hesitate long when former colleague Nogami asks him to reopen an old case.

A detective starts spiraling out of control when a wave of gruesome murders with seemingly similar bizarre circumstances is sweeping Tokyo.

In the year 2029, the barriers of our world have been broken down by the net and by cybernetics, but this brings new vulnerability to humans in the form of brain-hacking. When a highly-wanted hacker known as 'The Puppetmaster' begins involving them in politics, Section 9, a group of cybernetically enhanced cops, are called in to investigate and stop the Puppetmaster.

Prot is a patient at a mental hospital who claims to be from a far away planet. His psychiatrist tries to help him, only to begin to doubt his own explanations.

When a number of suicide victims slash themselves in their sleep, detective Keiko Kirishima is called to investigate.

An unnamed doctor has always had everything he's ever wanted, but that has only made him develop more extreme and depraved needs. He kidnaps a young couple in the prime of their life together and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival.

A shy high schooler in Kyoto meets a man claiming to be his future self, who tells him he’s hacked into the past to save their first love.

Psychotherapist Ruben Brandt becomes the most wanted criminal in the world when he and four of his patients steal paintings from the world's most renowned museums and art collections.

A psychotic executive triggers a journalist's dark side, and they begin to form a strange bond through the internet.

Following some trauma in her past that has since been repressed, a young woman is trying to recover her memories with the help of a psychiatrist. During her hypnosis sessions, she repeats the name "Tomie" but is unable to recall where she knows it from. Meanwhile, a police detective is investigating a string of brutal murders, where he also runs across the name "Tomie." How are the two connected?

A man suffering from insomnia is tricked into buying a drug, Lucia, that makes his desires come true in his dreams, blurring the line between fantasy and reality.

A memory-wiped and defective cyborg sex slave is tossed onto the streets and taken in by a homeless woman while his corporate creators hunt him down.

In order to diagnose the psychic traumas suffered by his patients, Dr. Paul Novotny gets young Alex Gardner to enter their dreams.

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

A.D. 2400, DEVA's central council detects an incident of unauthorized access into their mainframe. Someone on Earth was trying to hack into the system. The only information DEVA was able to retrieve was that hacker referred to themselves as "Frontier Setter." To investigate the mysterious hacker's motives, the high officials of DEVA dispatch system Security Third Officer Angela Balzac to the Earth's surface. Equipped with a prosthetic "material body," Angela attempts to make contact with a local agent Dingo, but what awaited her instead was a swarm of Sandworms now infesting the Earth's surface. Angela intercepts the gruesome pests with her exoskeleton powered suit Arhan.

A trilogy of separate stories. In "Labyrinth labyrinthos", a girl and her cat enter a strange world. In "Running Man", a racer takes on the ultimate opponent. In "Construction Cancellation Order", a man must shut down worker robots.

A homeless man meets a medical school student who pays him to volunteer for a surgical procedure known as trepanation, drilling a hole in his skull, which ends up giving him the ability to communicate with the dark side of people’s subconscious minds.

A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.

The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it's up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ.

After being brutally murdered in a subway station, a teen boy awakens to find himself resurrected by a strange computer named Gantz, and forced to fight a large force of invading aliens in Osaka.

Rising pop star Mima quits singing to pursue a career as an actress. After she takes up a role on a popular detective show, her handlers and collaborators begin turning up murdered. Harboring feelings of guilt and haunted by visions of her former self, Mima's reality and fantasy meld into a frenzied paranoia.

The story follows Akane, a girl with no self-confidence. On the day before her birthday, she meets a mysterious alchemist, Hippocrates, and his student, Pipo, who both tell her they're on a mission to save the world. Together, they set out from the basement for "Wonderland," and Akane finds herself labelled Wonderland's savior.

Young artist Kyoko wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters when Japan's oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series.

When a ghost-infecting virus known as Fire-Starter begins spreading through the system resulting in the assassination of the Japanese Prime Minister, Major Motoko Kusanagi and her elite team of special operatives are called in to track down its source.

A detective investigates a series of murders. A possible serial killer might be on a rampage, since they all are in the same vicinity and by the same method, but as the evidence points toward the detective as the prime suspect, a ghost in red follows him, and he begins to question his identity. His realization of what seems to have really happened results in something much more sinister and larger in scope, and it leaves his psyche scarred.

A psychiatrist tries to put her life back together after a violent attack by seeking to repair the life of a new patient, but he has his own terrifying history.

One year after the events of the anime, Rintarou begins to feel the repercussions of extensive time travel, and eventually completely fades from reality. Kurisu, being the only companion to remember him, now must find a way to bring him back.

Consumed by jealousy, a woman takes an extreme step and undergoes surgery for a new face. Although her lover of 2 years misses her, he falls in love with the new face, not knowing it's the same woman.

Koji Shiraishi interviews the survivors of an indiscriminate attack at a sightseeing resort and starts investigating the strange events that have been happening to them.

A week before Christmas, Kyon wakes up in a world where the SOS Brigade doesn't exist. Mikuru and Yuki don't recognize him, and Haruhi and Itsuki seem to have vanished.

On the mysterious planet of Ash, Riya awakens to find her crew slaughtered. When a man named Brion arrives to rescue her, an ordeal of psychological and physical terror ensues while Riya and Brion must decide if they can trust one another to survive.

A soldier searching for his missing wife breaks into a high-tech facility, believing she's been caught in a human trafficking ring. But beyond its walls, he finds a surreal, futuristic fantasy park where reality and illusion blur. As he navigates this seductive and dangerous world, a shocking truth pulls him deeper into a deadly game where nothing is as it seems.

After escaping from an insane asylum, a medical student assumes the identity of a mysterious dead man, who appears to be his doppelganger, and gets lured to a sinister island ruled by a mad scientist and his malformed men.

Mitsuko, a young student, encounters a series of horrifying incidents set in alternate realities where people wind up dead in the most horrendous fashion.

Set in a future world. Japan has created a great medical technology that controls ethics, health, and social interaction to create a perfect world. Three young girls attempt to stand up to this by committing suicide, but it doesn't work. Years later, Tuan, one of the girls who attempted suicide must prevent a crisis that threatens this "perfect" world.

Mimma starts working in Madame Colette’s brothel to help her boyfriend financially. There she is rechristened “Paprika,” and falls in love with her first client, naval officer Franco. Despite this attraction, she begins her climb through the sex trade, residing in Italy’s most illustrious brothels.

Narumi is on bad terms with her husband, Shinji, when, one day, Shinji goes missing. He comes back a couple of days later, but he seems like a totally different person, and he is now gentle and tender. He goes for a walk every day. Meanwhile, journalist Sakurai covers the story of a family that was brutally murdered, when an unexplained phenomenon takes place. Shinji Kase tells his wife that he came to Earth to invade.

Ichiko works as a private nurse for a family she almost became a part of. While Ichiko cares for the grandmother, she is also a confidant to Motoko, the eldest sister. But one day, Motoko’s younger sister disappears. And the media soon reveal the kidnapper to be Ichiko’s own nephew.

In the near future, Major is the first of her kind: a human saved from a terrible crash, then cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world's most dangerous criminals.

Since her childhood, Jessica has been haunted by recurrent nightmares whose meaning escapes her. This peculiarity has led her to study the psychophysiology of dreams and to follow a therapy with Sean, her mentor and boyfriend, to try and understand the origin of her nightmares. Following the death of her maternal grandmother she hardly knew, Jessica reluctantly returns to the family home. Jessica then begins to wander in a nightmarish world inhabited by twisted versions of her family members. She gradually improves her skills as a lucid dreamer and investigates to solve the mystery that gnaws her and haunts the family home...

In the aftermath of a car crash, a man discovers his dreams are tied to a stranger's sleepwalking.

Freed of her responsibilities with the 501 Organization, Motoko Kusanagi must now learn how to take orders from Aramaki. Someone hacks the Logicomas, and Batou enlists the help of former army intelligence officer Ishikawa and former air artillery expert Borma. Kusanagi also seeks to enlist ace sniper Saito and undercover cop Paz into the new Public Security Section 9.

Admitted to Mt. Abaddon Hospital for a routine procedure, George Grieves discovers that his condition is much more serious and complicated than originally expected; and as his own fears begin to manifest around him, he learns that Mt. Abaddon is not a place where people come to get better... it is a place where people come to die.

An elite superhuman agent must stop a foreign military unit from seizing control of an ancient artifact that holds the key to ultimate power.

In a future world, young people are increasingly becoming addicted to an illegal (and potentially deadly) battle simulation game called Avalon. When Ash, a star player, hears of rumors that a more advanced level of the game exists somewhere, she gives up her loner ways and joins a gang of explorers. Even if she finds the gateway to the next level, will she ever be able to come back to reality?

When professional gamer Hana, who suffers from acute agoraphobia, receives new equipment that enhances her game, she begins to wonder if it is reading her mind – or controlling it.

Ross Sylibus is assigned to a police unit on a Martian colony, to find that women are being murdered by a psychotic named D'anclaude. He is assigned a very unorthodox partner named Naomi Armitage, who seems to have links to the victims. To stir things up more, every victim is found to be an illegally made third-generation android.

Nishi is a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place.

Three female idols appear on a television show to investigate an exorcism. An exorcist with psychic powers named Unsui claims that the show’s subjects, the Kaneda family, are cursed by a demon that’s too powerful for him to banish on his own, so he calls in a fellow exorcist to help. Soon, a reckless ghost hunter enters the fray as the three idols witness a series of terrifying events.

Noah's Ark, the latest innovation in VR technology, is set for a showcase to Japan's privileged children. However, their carefree fun is cut short when a company employee is found murdered, with his dying message pointing to a clue hidden within the Ark. Along with the Detective Boys and Ran Mouri, Conan Edogawa enters Noah's Ark to solve this mystery and ensure the perpetrator is caught.

In dreamlike mountain scenery, Toshiko makes a daring escape from her sexually warped Uncle Sonezaki. Fortunately, she met Samehada as she runs for her life, which is also escaping from some slayers. What follows is a wild chase that leads the audience into a comically violent world.

A criminal psychologist loses his arm in a car crash, and becomes one of three patients to have their missing limbs replaced by those belonging to an executed serial killer. One of them dies violently, and disturbing occurrences start happening to the surviving two.

Following the incident in the Southeast Asia Union in 2116, Shinya Kogami resumes his vagrant journey. In a small South Asian nation, Kogami rescues a bus of refugees under attack by armed guerrilla forces. Among the refugees is a young lady by the name of Tenzin, who begs Kogami to teach her how to retaliate against the enemy. Just what does the girl who wishes for revenge and the man who has exacted revenge see as they gaze upon the edge of a world from which there is no escape?

Capable of making bio-mechanical weapons out of human flesh, alien parasites grotesquely invade the Earth, turning their hosts into maniacal killers who seek and destroy each other to the bloody death! And yes, it s also a human love story, even though the budding romantics are infested with slimy, tumor-like globules.

Japan, 2020, a few days before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics. Although she should be studying for her final exams, Kokone, a schoolgirl who lives in a small town with her widowed father, a mysterious and talented mechanic, falls asleep often, anywhere, anytime, entering, over and over, a dream-world where a squad of fantastic motorized contraptions fights against magic, a world close to reality where she will find out the keys of her true past.

Soo-jin, who lost her memories due to a horrible incident, starts suspecting her husband. She is confused between reality and illusion, truth and lies.

Kurumi’s heart was broken by the sudden death of her boyfriend in a tragic airplane accident. By melding futuristic technology with the binary equivalent of human emotion, a brilliant scientist created an ultra-lifelike robotic surrogate to take Hal’s place – and lure Kurumi from her shroud of solitude.

A young actress rehearsing for a play about human trafficking begins to relive terrifying scenes that may be dreams -- or an alternate reality.

After losing her parents, young flower selling Midori is put up by a fairground group. She is abused and forced to slavery, until the arrival of an enigmatic magician of short stature, who gives her hope for a better future.

One night, the Nohara family were enjoying a pleasant dream, when suddenly a big fish appeared in their dreams and ate them. The next morning, Hiroshi read in the newspaper that everybody in another town had the same nightmare as him, but it seemed to have ended. But Hiroshi also heard the same dream from Misae, Shinnosuke, Himawari and even Shiro. They were surprised and thought if the same thing is happening in Kasukabe too. In kindergarten, on telling others about his nightmare, Shinnosuke was surprised to know that everybody too had the same dream. Then a mysterious girl named Saki was transferred to Futaba Kindergarten and joined Shinnosuke's class. Everyone in the class, including the rather inactive Bo-chan, were all excited and happy on seeing her. But Saki had a cold attitude and didn't get along well.

A top surgeon is besotted with a beautiful woman who once rebuffed him. Unable to come to terms with life without her, he tries to convince her that they need each other. She has other ideas, but a horrific accident leaves her at his mercy.

Paris 2020, a high tech surgeon and her daughter are involved in a horrific car accident, the surgeon saves her daughter's life at the cost of manipulating her dreams and memories.

In the winter of 2117, a runaway vehicle crashes into the Public Safety Bureau Building. The driver is identified as Izumi Yasaka, a psychological counselor at the Sanctuary, a Latent Criminal Isolation Facility in Aomori Prefecture. But right before her interrogation, Inspector Mika Shimotsuki and Enforcer Nobuchika Ginoza are tasked with promptly escorting Yasaka back to Aomori. What awaits them there is a False Paradise.

After a massive party one evening, 17-year-old Tina begins experiencing nightmares in which she is haunted by an unusual creature.

Posing as lovers on vacation, Motoko and Batou work to try to stop a terrorist organization whose symbol is the Scrasath. Meanwhile, Togusa investigates a murder of a man who possessed a prosthetic leg manufactured by the Mermaid's Leg corporation.

An anime-obsessed young man fantasizes about his favorite voluptuous heroines, but his sex-addled dream quickly transforms into a nightmare which threatens to consume him.

An aspiring hair dresser becomes the infatuation of a tricophilic man who sells hair extensions to nearby hair salons. The source of the hair is the corpse of a girl whose dead body continues to grow beautiful, voluminous, black hair that comes alive, driving those who use the extensions insane or killing them.

A peculiar girl transforms into a cat to catch her crush's attention. But before she realizes it, the line between human and animal starts to blur.

A Japanese actress begins having strange visions and experiences after landing a role in a horror film about a real-life murder spree that took place over forty years ago.

Mr. Takazawa, an elderly invalid who is cared for at his home by Haruko, a young nursing student, is chosen by the Japanese Ministry of Public Welfare to test the Z-001, a computerized hospital bed with robotic features that allegedly displays more efficiency and skills than any human nurse, but Haruko mistrusts a machine unable to consider human feelings.

An innocent young man becomes enamored with a mysterious girl. He is lured into "Black Hole" - a dark, obscure video game world of avatars with deadly serious intentions in the real world.

A troubled young woman wakes up one day as a different person - someone who is stalked by creatures.

When Dr. Pieter Fales' patients start receiving ominous letters and getting murdered by an unknown black-clad assailant, he and his daughter both come under suspicion.

Oxford PhD student Ana finds herself unable to build new memories, following an experiment to generate and travel through a wormhole. The story follows her increasingly desperate efforts to understand what happened, and to find out who—or what—is behind the rising horror in her life.

As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of.

After a man with extraordinary, and frighteningly destructive, telepathic abilities is nabbed by agents from a mysterious rogue corporation, he discovers he is far from the only possessor of such strange powers. Some of the other “scanners” have their minds set on world domination, while others are trying to stop them.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

Not long after they cross paths at an art gallery, architect Ray Reardon and hypnotically sensual Lena are married with children. But as strange incidents occur, Ray begins to realize he may not really know the woman he married.

Traumatized since childhood by her brother's accidental death, Danika Merrick hallucinates a bank robbery and quits her job. Despite support from her three children and loving husband, Danika continues to experience unnerving visions. She seeks help from therapist Evelyn Harris but pervasive reports of violent incidents involving children make Danika fear for her own family, and she grows increasingly paranoid, worrying she may be going insane.

In the immense city of Tokyo, the darkness of the afterlife lures some of its inhabitants who are desperately trying to escape the sadness and isolation of the modern world.

A young girl, from a civilization that resides in deep underground tunnels, finds herself trapped in an inverted world and teams up with a resident to escape and return home.

When his mother's untimely death quickly follows his father's, a doctor begins to believe a killer may be targeting him and his amnesiac wife.

Laura is a successful plastic surgeon who feels her life is somewhat empty. She meets a young nurse and falls in love and experiences sexuality to a extent not known to her. However, this spiral of desire and seduction is a dangerous game where no one is who they appear to be.

A mysterious suicide and a series of unmanned robot run-aways sparks off a Police investigation into the suspicious software on-board thousands of industrial robots around Tokyo.

A simple funeral turns a man's world Topsy turvy. He wakes up in a posh hotel room, totally clueless about how he got there. Slowly, he recalls what happened a day before.

Dae-ho, an investigative journalist, seeks to track down the whereabouts of his son who was abducted three years ago. With the help of a detective and a psychiatrist friend, he will retrace his memory of the incident through the use of lucid dreaming techniques.

Top model Lilico, having recently undergone multiple cosmetic surgeries, begins to experience troubling side effects. As she desperately tries to retain her perfect image, Lilico descends into a world of nightmares and makes those around her miserable.

A top-secret weapon escapes from military custody ready to destroy its pre-programmed target. The nosy freelance reporter who shows up to cover the story lands herself at the center of something even more dangerous than the international scandal she signed up for.

A female Psychologist who has stopped practicing medicine, decides to take the case of Veronica de la Serna, a young woman whose previous therapist has mysteriously disappeared.

A young and talented architect comes to his senses after a horrific accident only to find himself in the odd dystopian world. A world that is filled with the memories of all current coma patients. Just like a human memory this world is fragmental, chaotic and unstable. This is COMA: icecaps, rivers and cities can all exist in a space of a single room and laws of physics are no longer laws as they can be bent.

The neglected common-law wife of a Japanese librarian is repeatedly harassed by a young man with a heart condition who seduces her with the prospect of a better life.

2112; the summer before Akane Tsunemori was assigned to Division One of the Public Safety Bureau's Criminal Investigation Department. Teppei Sugo, an accomplished pilot of the Defense Army's 15th Integrated Task Force, joins the military operation in Okinawa. Three months later, an unmanned combat drone opens fire on the Ministry of Defense in Tokyo. Enforcer Tomomi Masaoka of CID Division One is dispatched to Sugo's military base to investigate the truth behind this case.

A violent gang enlists the help of a hypnotherapist in an attempt to locate a painting which somehow vanished in the middle of a heist.

Though no one can see him, Hollow Face lurks in the corners, desperately desiring love but only knowing how to spread fear and hate. He creeps into the life of John Farrow after Farrow’s beloved 13-year-old daughter Mia is assaulted in their home. The line between the real and the imaginary blurs as fissures start to open within the family unit. It seems that no security measure can keep Hollow Face out.

Three back-to-back anime films by three different directors make up this sci-fi trilogy three years in the making. In the chilling "Magnetic Rose," engineers on a spacecraft board an abandoned space station and encounter disturbing paranormal forces. A young lab worker accidentally swallows a chemical weapon and becomes a walking killing machine in "Stink Bomb." In "Cannon Fodder," a young boy and his father fight for survival in a city functioning on paranoia.

Suzume, 17, lost her mother as a little girl. On her way to school, she meets a mysterious young man. But her curiosity unleashes a calamity that endangers the entire population of Japan, and so Suzume embarks on a journey to set things right.

A young programmer whose job is to watch over the reality-warping Cube defies orders to rescue an innocent mother trapped in one of its rooms.
