A Glitch in the Matrix is built around a single real document: the speech Philip K. Dick delivered in 1977 at the Metz science fiction festival in France, proposing that the world might be a computer-generated re-run of an earlier reality, edited from outside by forces even its programmers do not fully control. Rodney Ascher, who took the same close-listening approach to fan theories about The Shining in his earlier Room 237 (2012), divides the film into seven sections, each opened by an excerpt of Dick's own recorded voice, letting that speech carry the argument rather than summarizing it himself.
Between those excerpts, four people convinced they have detected the simulation from the inside tell their own stories, each rendered as an anonymized computer-generated avatar rather than as themselves on camera, a choice that turns the interview format into evidence for how mediated experience has become. Philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2003 paper formalized the modern simulation argument, and writer Erik Davis supply the analytical frame around them, while clips from Dark City, The Truman Show and The Adjustment Bureau supply the film's visual vocabulary for a fabricated world.
One thread breaks from that pattern on purpose. Joshua Cooke, who in February 2003 shot and killed his adoptive parents at nineteen believing he was living inside The Matrix, appears without an avatar, narrating by phone in a flat, unadorned voice. He pleaded guilty before his attorneys' planned insanity argument, since dubbed the Matrix defense, was tested at trial, and was sentenced to forty years. The film places him last among its witnesses, its one case where the belief left the theater and cost two real lives, and lets his account close the film without narrating or softening it further.