Altered States

A basement in Cambridge, 1968, the hum of a fMRI’s cooling fan. A neuroscientist fills a black tank with saline, drops in psilocybin tea, sinks himself deeper each night until the tank forgets which way is up. Mirrors hung in the tank show faces not his. Russell’s fevered splice of Freudian horror and cosmic paranoia: one headlong plunge through the membrane of sanity.

Streaming availability changes weekly. Check the Where to watch panel above — we re-pull TMDB's JustWatch index every week. If nothing's listed, the film is between licence windows.

Our similarity graph picks 6 films based on shared director, keywords, mood-cluster overlap, and MovieLens user co-rating — niche-biased away from blockbusters. Full list: /like/altered-states-1980/.

Ken Russell directed Altered States in 1980. See Ken Russell's full filmography, where to start with Ken Russell, or where to go after you've seen everything by Ken Russell.

Altered States was released in 1980 (EN original-language production), with a runtime of 103 minutes.