Bliss review – don’t let this film’s title fool you

There is a trick to playing somebody who is bored with life without giving a boring performance. Think of Ed Norton's jaded loser in Fight Club, or Kevin Spacey's sad-sack dad in American Beauty. Owen Wilson is tasked with being bored in Mike Cahill's Bliss, a movie that offers little of the promise of its title. Wilson can play understated charm in his sleep. Here he is asleep. It's a turn as muted as the film's colour palette, which brings new meaning to the term “fifty shades of grey.”

Wilson is Greg, who works a lowly existence in a depressing call centre-type firm. Is there more to life? Yes – though you might struggle to comprehend what, exactly. It's Salma Hayek who arrives on the scene as a kooky tramp and announces that everything Greg knows is actually part of an elaborate simulation. Does he want out? Here's where you imagine Wilson's performance going from one to ten. Instead he wallows in the revelation, bringing us down with him.

Bliss is, coincidentally, the second film out this week that grapples with life as a computer construct. If that's meant to be a sign from a higher power, they need to try harder. Cahill, who intrigued with his far more interesting 2011 alternate dimension yarn Another Earth, can't quite find the right tone for this allegory. He shoots for melancholic fable but it's just a bore. A conceit about magic crystals is baffling, while a secondary plot featuring Wilson's estranged kids never lands. There's a seriousness that stops it all from being what it should: pulpy fun. As an intellectual exercise, it barely registers. And Hayek is on another planet.

This is the kind of low-level disaster that, as an occasional filmmaker, you might wind up wishing you could wipe from your credits. Ignorance is bliss, they say. Take that as solid advice when it comes to this movie.

Bliss is now streaming on Prime Video.