Watch Brazil

Sam Lowry is living a bureaucratic nightmare. Like so many other government workers, he spends all his time shuffling around in a gray office, doing the same miniscule, repetitive jobs over and over. What saves his sanity are his recurring daydreams in which he's escaped his numbingly boring life and become a hero who rescues a beautiful woman.

Sam is the hero of the Terry Gilliam directed fantasy film Brazil, originally released in 1985. Sam's unlikely rise to real heroism comes about when he discovers a glitch in one of the machines he works with every day, a glitch that has inadvertently led to the arrest and death of a man named Buttle. When Sam tries to find out about this mistake, it leads him to the real man, named Tuttle, who should have been arrested. It also leads him to a beautiful woman who, quite mysteriously, happens to look just like the woman in his daydreams.

It's in trying to learn more about this woman that Sam runs afoul of the government for whom he's been working. Things turn quite bizarre as he's pursued for treason and learns that perhaps he's just another cog in the machine.