Brainstorm

Brainstorm (1983) is an American sci-fi thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Douglas Trumbull — the visual effects pioneer behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Two scientists, Michael (Christopher Walken) and Lillian (Louise Fletcher), build a headset that records raw human experience — sight, pain, fear, joy — and plays it back directly into another person's mind. When Lillian suffers a heart attack in the lab and manages to record her own dying moments, that tape becomes the most dangerous object on earth. The military wants a weapon. The corporation wants leverage. Michael wants to know what she captured in those final seconds.

Production was overshadowed by the death of Natalie Wood, who played Michael's wife, in November 1981 before filming wrapped. MGM tried to shut the project down; Trumbull fought to finish it. The result is one of the more philosophically ambitious American genre films of the decade. Stream Brainstorm (1983) online on iFILM.