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: https://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.
It made quite a splash back in the day, but as it was before the whole movie piracy thing really took off it took me years before I managed to see it. I really loved the Italian version of cyberpunk, where everything moves at a million miles an hour, but some things never ever ever change, like coffee makers and carabinieri outfits.
Then I promptly forgot about it until now.