Leonardo DiCaprio helms the film as Cobb, a man whose talent for infiltrating dreams and stealing ideas has left him desperate and emotionally broken. As with many heist films, Cobb decides to take on one final job—the most elaborate dream infiltration ever attempted. Whereas most use dreams to extract information, Cobb is tasked with planting an idea deep within the subconscious, a task known as “inception.” Cobb’s team consists of a chemist, an architect, a forger, a client, and a right-hand-man. All are unique, and their special skills come into play in different ways as the group delves deeper into their target’s mind.

The majority of the film is the mission itself, which consists of an elaborate multi-layered dream within a dream within a dream. Different time scales at each level ensure that the action can continue on one level while remaining at a virtual standstill in another. On paper, it sounds confusing, but Nolan adequately establishes the concept and uses it to great effectiveness. At first, you’ll be questioning what’s real and what isn’t—is there a chance that this is all a dream? Have we even glanced reality? It’s a mind-bending game of psychological warfare that’s compounded by the appearance of Mal, the film’s main antagonist played expertly by Marion Cotillard.

Mal walks a delicate line between evil villain and loving wife. As a psychological projection of Cobb’s dead spouse, Mal appears as a resisting force to all that Cobb does. Her story-arc is a tragic one, and as more and more details of her life begin to unfold, we begin to see why she is such a burden on Cobb’s mind. Ariadne (played by Ellen Page) is the only one of the group who seems to truly understand Cobb’s dilemma. She may be young, but her intelligence serves her well. As an audience, we share her insight to both Cobb as a character as well as the human mind as a setting. In many ways, this is as much Ariadne’s chronicle of discovery as it is Cobb’s tale of redemption.

From start to end, Inception is a mind-blowing thesis in the nature of dreams and reality. This is without question my favorite movie of the year, and I truly believe that history will judge it to be one of the greatest sci-fi films ever created. Inception is a ground breaking piece of intelligent cinema, and it will be on the tips of everyone’s tongues come Oscar season. If your jaw isn’t on the floor by the time the final scene rolls, then you must have fallen asleep.