What's it called when you lose contact with reality when watching a movie?

Solution 1:

Consider immerse.

My role is to make people completely immersed in the movie.

gachonherald.com

In fact, some "Avatar" fans, better known as "Avatards," have become so immersed in the movie that they suffer from withdrawals when it ends.

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The word for "regaining" reality is "emerge."

When we finally emerged from the movie we re-enacted the commercial.

amiright.com

Solution 2:

In psychology, this experience is known as spatial presence or spatial immersion.

Briefly, spatial presence is often defined as existing when “media contents are perceived as ‘real’ in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment.”

The idea is just that a game (or any other media from books to movies) creates spatial presence when the user starts to feel like he is “there” in the world that the game creates.

Also, there is a newly coined term called "experience-taking" which roughly means losing yourself in a fictional character. This phenomenon specifically occurs when you are reading.

Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own - a phenomenon the researchers call “experience-taking.”

Re-gaining reality and leaving the spatial immersion (or the thing causes this) is usually called "immersion-breaking". This term is usually used in gaming world.

You can also use "snap out of immersion" or "snap back to reality"

snap out of something Fig. to become suddenly freed from a condition. (The condition can be a depression, an illness, unconsciousness, etc.)

Furthermore, here is explained the difference between immersive experience and spatial presence: (from the book "Handbook of Digital Games" edited by Marios C. Angelides, Harry Agius)

Additional information from the book "Visual Representations and Interpretations edited by Ray Paton, Irene Neilsen":

Solution 3:

One criterion for judging the quality of a movie, at least from your perspective, is the degree to which the movie helps you "suspend disbelief," if only for a short time.

When we are really enjoying what we consider to be a good movie, we know, of course, that what we are seeing is not real. If, however, all the pieces (however you define them) come together in a pleasant (or even unpleasant) way for us, then we have effectively suspended disbelief and consequently enter into the story. Call it identification, if you will. We identify with what we are seeing portrayed for us.

I say "unpleasant" because for fans of horror movies, they may in fact become very uncomfortable and frightened by what they see on the big screen, but some folks like the horror genre precisely because they enjoy being scared!

For fans of other genre of films, they may be looking for sheer escapism, laughs, the romantic warm and fuzzies, satisfaction when the "bad guy" is caught and punished, relief when the underdog is triumphant, and so on.

Solution 4:

You can say:

I was so completely absorbed by the movie that when it finished it was like being thrown back into the real world.