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Inception — Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine.

Navigation of dreams — yours or the dreams of others — is the premise behind Christopher Nolan’s new thriller. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, an independent contractor who surfs the dreams of others with his sidekick Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) largely for the purpose of industrial espionage, unlocking commercially sensitive information for a fee.

Cobb is scoped out by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) who wants him to do a slightly different job — planting the seed of a thought in the head of an heir to a large business empire (Cillian Murphy) that will make him dissolve his father’s business interests. It’s a tougher job, according to Cobb, but he takes it on, classing it as “one last job”. For this he assembles a team of dream invaders, who basically conference-call themselves into the subject’s dream.

For their mission to be successful, the dreamer has to believe his dream state, and that’s where it gets tricky. The team constructs a dream world for the subject, aided by a dream architect (Ellen Page) who designs the buildings, roads and interiors. The physics of the dream world must be equally as believable in order for the subject to go along for the ride. That’s especially important as dreamers, much like film makers, populate their dreams with a whole bunch of extras, which can act as antibodies if they spot intruders like Cobb and his team.

It gets more complex than that, involving dreams within dreams and the expanding of time therein — five minutes of real time may equal much longer in a dream. There’s a sub-plot about Cobb and his dead wife (Marion Cotillard), whom he visits in his own dreams.

The special effects are top-notch: in the dream worlds cities fold onto themselves or crumble into the sea; trains appear in the middle of city roads and the team employs optical illusions to defeat the antibodies.

The performances too are excellent, with DiCaprio often talking in a low steady voice and channelling his inner Jack Nicholson and Page as the bewildered but fascinated architecture student who jumps at the chance to create entire worlds within someone’s mind.

It’s not short on action either, with more than one dream looking like an action sequence from a James Bond film. The action scenes give you plenty to gape at as the repercussions of one dream can impact on another, making you join the dots as to why someone’s all of a sudden floating in zero gravity conditions. It’s the sort of mind-bending tale that a sci-fi author like Phillip K. Dick would be proud of.

Because like Blade Runner (or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Inception is sure to have some viewers wandering out of the cinema in a daze as they try to work out which scenes were real and which were just Cobb’s dream. It might also be one of the only times that a film maker can truly justify using the old premise of “and then I woke up”. Just don’t count on that being the twist at the end.

Trailer: Inception