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The Adjustment Bureau is very literal in its imagination. Doors swoosh open as the sharply dressed employees of the adjustment bureau make their way across New York, their portals between locations opening onto new and unexpected vistas, hanging there in the doorframe like trompe l’oeil. It’s a realist flick in the dominant Hollywood romantic-action style, caked with a little sci-fi frosting. But even this is recognisable and plausible to us: the bureau use live maps to track their subjects, on them people flash in orbs as if they were tracked by Google Maps on an iPad. The bureau all dress in 50s clothingthis is perhaps a nod to Dick’s era, or perhaps because it’s shorthand for “style” right now (to double the effect, John Slattery of Mad Men plays an adjustment bureau big-wig).The film’s inevitable position alongside other “behind the curtain” films like The Matrix and Th bass guitar scales e Truman Show makes Bureau feel a little ham-fisted in comparison. (Imagine if Neo had spent most of his time romancing Trinity, or, rather, dealt with The Matrix only so that he could romance Trinity. Wild.) This growing catalogue of films is worth considering: why so many films of this ilk? The superficial answer is that they’ve worked at the box office before, so studios will keep making them. A cynic might find that the most fitting answer herehow could the masses resist this confection, the endless lure of the rom-com and the current interest in conspiracy films? But this very appetite suggests something deeper.Ordinarily we would claim someone was suffering from psychosis, if they claimed to have “answers” delivered to them by some agency or person that is only visible to them; if they suggested they knew of the secret workings of this world controlled from elsewhere.