I think you could probably call Nirvana a hidden gem. It made $10 million at the box office in Italy at the time… but I have no idea if that’s a lot for an Italian movie.

It hits all the cyberpunk themes and cyberpunk visuals, but it’s hard to say how big of a budget it had since this isn’t a Hollywood movie. What I’m trying to say is it doesn’t feel like a low-budget indie film but it also doesn’t feel like a big-budget American film either. It just falls into this weird 90’s mid-budget category. They have lots of interesting sets and locations but it’s still with 90s effects.

The story is about a video game designer whose current game he’s working on gets attacked by a computer virus which somehow gives the main video game character sentience (happens all the time, right?). The video game character hates living in a video game world and begs the designer to delete him. So the game designer hires a hacker to help him hack into his company’s servers and delete the game before it releases.

Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO4Q_6hr5II
This is a small Italian movie from almost 30 years ago, so it isn’t streaming anywhere… except maybe the internet archive.