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.
The income doesn’t prove its worth, but it does give me an idea of how well-known the movie is. So I figure most people probably haven’t heard of this one.