The Matrix Resurrections | A Complete Analysis of Its Hidden Plot from a Psychological-Thriller Perspective

Is The Matrix Resurrections a terrible movie? Reheated leftovers? Selling nostalgia? Half-hearted set pieces? A nonsense plot?

At first glance, The Matrix Resurrections looks like a lazy remake of the original trilogy. But beneath its slapdash surface, a hidden story may be waiting. Read that way, it becomes a psychological masterpiece and a cult-like subversion of the first three films.

First, let me briefly recount the surface plot, then I will offer my alternative reading.

The following contains major spoilers. Proceed with caution.

On the surface, The Matrix Resurrections tells this story:

The Matrix Resurrections: standard science-fiction version

The story continues, with Neo, Trinity, Anderson, Bugs, and the others reliving and reinterpreting the events of The Matrix.

The psychiatrist, who had been keeping an eye on Anderson, followed him to the theater. Police officers arrived with him and tried to rescue Anderson, but failed.

The red pill kicked in. After passing out, Anderson was transferred to the Mnemosyne. While unconscious, he had his head shaved and a port attached to the back of his skull. When he woke up, he felt his bald head, then the port, and sighed inwardly: Ah, so I really was living in the Matrix before. Now I have finally made it to the real world.

With the police on her tail, Bugs fled in desperation to the internet-addiction treatment center where she had once stayed.

The center is run by an old woman, who is trying to cure internet addiction with labor therapy—having the addicted boys and girls grow strawberries.

Neo believes Trinity, like him, has been brainwashed by the machines and imprisoned. He proposes waking her up. So everyone heads for the auto shop where Trinity’s real-world counterpart—the married woman Tiffany—works. Halfway there, Agent Smith, who is also the boss, suddenly appears and tells Anderson, “You’re actually pretty predictable.”

As it turns out, thanks to his more than 20-year friendship with Anderson, the boss figured that Anderson, who had a crush on Tiffany, would probably go looking for her. So he lay in wait along the only route, hoping to rescue Anderson from that army of brain-dead fans.

The boss egged on a bunch of homeless people to fight the brain-dead fan army.

Anderson often ran into these homeless people on his way to work. One of them was a little unhinged and constantly imagined himself as an elegant French aristocrat, occasionally blurting out a few lines in French.

Anderson was struck by him and once used him as the model for the Frenchman character in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

One of the homeless men had clearly watched Ne Zha not long ago and was pulling off a remarkably convincing cosplay.

To keep Anderson from leaving, boss Smith even blurted out the love he had buried in his heart for more than 20 years: “Anderson and Smith—we’re basically Ones and Zeros.” He made their roles crystal clear too, leaving everyone else blushing furiously.

Sadly, Anderson’s brain was getting more and more scrambled. He completely failed to get Smith’s love and instead beat him to a pulp.

Anderson shook off the crowd and made it to Trinity’s auto shop.

The psychiatrist, alerted by Smith, arrived and urged Anderson to go back for treatment.

This psychiatrist was certainly dedicated: he refused to give up on treatment under any circumstances.

Unfortunately, Anderson himself had already given up on treatment. His delusions flared up violently again. He imagined the psychiatrist as the designer of the new Matrix and came up with that ridiculous theory about generating power with love.

The idea of generating power with human bodies in The Matrix game was already pretty absurd—what’s wrong with nuclear or coal power? But compared with it, generating power with love is absurd beyond belief. Still, the more absurd it is, the more plausible it becomes: by this point Anderson is so thoroughly confused that his brain is incapable of coming up with anything halfway decent.

One symptom of the delusion in Anderson’s eyes is a confused sense of time. In his hallucination, the psychiatrist has mastered an advanced version of bullet time and moves incredibly fast.

In reality, from the psychiatrist’s perspective, Anderson suddenly started moving in slow motion and then ran away. The doctor and Tiffany were left staring at each other, equally dumbfounded.

After witnessing this farce, Tiffany could not stop worrying about her longtime “smoking buddy” Anderson. She went to the psychiatric hospital where the doctor worked to ask what was going on. Anderson followed her there, grabbed her, and demanded: “Are you coming with me or not?”

Tiffany saw that things were getting seriously out of hand, said, “I have a husband and children,” and walked away.

Anderson lost control and started swinging. The brain-dead fan army and the hospital guards descended into one giant brawl.

Smith suddenly appears—but this time, unbelievably, he is on Anderson’s side. After getting beaten up, Smith realizes that dragging Anderson back to reality will not make him happy. So he grits his teeth, lets go of his love for Anderson, accepts Bugs’s idea, and joins their side. (That explains why Smith keeps switching sides.)

Anderson suddenly notices that Trinity, who had clearly already left, has reappeared in the group.

Double vision appears before Anderson’s eyes. He seems to see Trinity and Bugs overlapping.

But soon Bugs’s image disappears, and the figure settles into Trinity’s form.

Here is what really happened:

Rejected by Tiffany, Anderson was pushed further into his illness. The figure he saw was actually Bugs.

Because Bugs had been playing Trinity in the first three games, Anderson, in his daze, mistook Bugs for Trinity.

That brief double image was the last flicker of reason struggling inside Anderson. But hallucination soon overwhelmed reason completely: the double image vanished, and Bugs became Trinity for good.

Bugs, mistaken for Trinity, of course does not expose the truth. This is an unexpected turn even better than she had imagined.

She had only ever seen herself as A Bi in Murong Fu’s eyes. Now, somehow, she has become Wang Yuyan.

So she goes along with it and stages a lovers’ escape with Anderson.

In Anderson’s eyes, now completely lost in hallucination, the patients who have come to watch at the hospital all become NPCs controlled by the machines.

Surrounded, Anderson once again tries to solve the problem with a “leap of faith.” At the last second, Bugs catches him and saves him yet again. In Anderson’s eyes, Trinity has achieved true awakening, become the next-generation Chosen One, and used her flying ability to save him.

But the truth is:

This time, Anderson is still the one who awakens. Only “awakening” belongs in quotation marks here: from this point on, Anderson has plunged completely into a world of delusion and can no longer see reality.

In the end, the two Chosen Ones really do live happily ever after, inseparable and utterly shameless—but none of it happens inside the Matrix. It happens in Anderson’s subjective mental world.

Their more likely real ending is this:

Bugs goes into hiding with a completely deranged Anderson, stays by his side, and plays an endless game of make-believe with him.

Bugs may often wear a wan, sorrowful look as she sits beside Anderson, but her eyes, when she looks at him, are also full of happiness.

—Doesn’t this ending feel strangely familiar?

No need to wonder: this ending was lifted straight from Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.

Aren’t Neo and Trinity at the end—or rather, Neo and Bugs—just Murong Fu and A Bi in the final scene of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils?

In his never-ending imperial dream, Murong Fu restores the Kingdom of Dayan and finally becomes its emperor, just as he always wanted.

And the completely insane Anderson finally enters the Matrix and gets his wish: he becomes the Chosen One, Neo.

To everyone watching from the outside, the endings of Murong Fu and Anderson are absolute tragedies. But for the two of them, how could they not also be immense happiness?

That is my reading of The Matrix Resurrections as a psychological thriller.

I know this alternative interpretation is probably just the wishful thinking of a movie fan who cannot accept the obvious—my own overactive imagination and overreading.

But humor me and let me be Murong Fu. If Morpheus offered me a red pill and a blue pill, I would choose the blue one. I would rather believe that my psychological-thriller version of The Matrix Resurrections is the real version.

In my version, The Matrix Resurrections cannot simply be dismissed as a terrible movie. It becomes a cult film that takes a completely different route.

And that way, the fourth film does not drag down the first three. Instead, it overturns them.

From this perspective, it first overturns the trilogy’s technological premise: it shows us that you do not need high-tech machinery to be unable to tell reality from illusion.

Want to step into illusion? Who needs virtual reality? Who needs a port in the back of the head? Just go completely insane!

Reality does not have to be rendered convincingly by a virtual world before you can no longer tell truth from fiction. Even in the real world, sometimes you cannot tell what is real and what is an illusion.

—This is psychological thriller overturning science-fiction thriller.

More importantly, the film overturns the trilogy at the level of its core idea. The central notion of the first three Matrix films is that “what feels real may not be real.” But our psychological-thriller version of The Matrix Resurrections completely overturns that idea. It tells us: “What feels real is the only reality.” Everything comes down to how it feels.

Why worry about whether the world is real or not?

So what if it is a reflection of flowers in a mirror or the moon in water?

What I believe

is real.

Written and video edited by: Zhichao Wei

The Matrix Resurrections: standard science-fiction version

The story continues, with Neo, Trinity, Anderson, Bugs, and the others reliving and reinterpreting the events of The Matrix.

The story continues, with Neo, Trinity, Anderson, Bugs, and the others reliving and reinterpreting the events of The Matrix.

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