Beau is Afraid was the last one I recall. I think it was mostly the latter half of the movie where I started to get a bit confused and needed the ending explained to me.
What movies made you look up some kind of explanation afterwards? I feel like I have done it several times in the past for more surreal movies but can’t think of any other examples.
It can also be a TV show.
Primer. Watched it twice in a row. Then went online to read about it too.
As soon as I read the title of this post, I knew that Primer would be one of the first comments.
You are not alone, that is the hardest time loop movie to wrap your head around.
I’m gonna have to open that on a monitor.
Mainly because it’s so accurately done. It truly shows how insane it can get and it’s made worse by all the people violating their own “rules” repeatedly
12 Angry Men. Gen X kid here, not my style, B&W a fair bit before my time, too old.
My god. Put it on for a lark before bedtime on a worknight. Far too tired, stayed up all the way through, suffered the next day. Worth it.
If OP had asked, “Name a movie you couldn’t put down?” or “What’s a movie that sucked you in and you had no choice to stop?” Yeah. That one.
I didn’t grasp the implications of the final scene with Aaron and the workers until I checked the plot write-up on Wikipedia.
I think this movie is virtually impossible to understand in 1 viewing.
I was going to say this, but I figured I could just scroll until I found where someone else inevitably said it.
By the end, I was just letting the drama wash over me and not even trying to sort out which version of who was doing what in which timeline.
And honestly, I suspect that that’s the best way to appreciate it anyway.
Came here for this, glad to be beaten to it. I’ve seen this movie three times and I’m still not sure I could actually explain it.
Ha, me neither. Love everything about the movie though. The fact that Shane did everything for this movie (wrote, directed, produced, acted, music, editing), it was made on such a small budget (7k I think), and shot over 5 weeks, yet it really doesn’t feel “cheap” when you watch it, is such an achievement.
The Lighthouse. I really liked the movie but I would be lying if I said I understood it after watching it.
I watched that movie with my dad.
We were both equally confused and all the unexpected masturbation made it a tad awkward
I’ll bet. What about the masturbation in the movie?
Mulholland Drive
That’s cheating. No one knows what that movie is about.
I’ve heard that you can watch that movie in a loop starting at any point and it doesn’t make any more or less sense than starting at the beginning.
I think all of David Lynch’s movies could fit here. I tried watching his mini-series “Rabbits” over and over to understand, and I still have no idea what it’s really meant to be about.
- mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky)
- Enemy (2013, Denis Villeneuve)
- Men (2022, Alex Garland)
- Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer)
- Us (2019, Jordan Peele)
- Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)
- The Neon Demon (2016, Nicolas Winding Refn)
- Tideland, (2005, Terry Gilliam)
And a bunch more.
Which one is your fav out of this list?
Of these, I think mother!. The Images and vibes there are taking up the most rent-free space in my brain.
I neglected to mention Gasper Noe; basically everything he’s done. But his work leans too hard into palpable horrors for me to ever actively recommend.
Titane is excellent, though I prefer Ducournau’s previous film Raw
Honestly it seems like a lot of Aronofsky films are deeper than they appear at surface level.
Loved Pi back in the day.
2001 A space Odyssey
No country for old Men.
*Annihilation.
The more I read about 2001 and the more I watch it the more I love it!
2001 was a movie that made me go “wait, what? People like this?”
I heard it come up so often and was excited to watch it. Absolutely hated. One of the worst movies I’ve ever watched. I had to look it up a lot after I watched it because I was sure I had to be missing something big. But no, I wasn’t. Really not my kind of movie, I guess.
If you have the chance to see it in a cinema I highly recommend. Something about the big projection and sound, plus ideally an intermission really made it click for me
I watched it with my partner and we riffed on it the whole time. Thoroughly enjoyable. Making fun of the movie’s bad parts allowed me to get past the boredom and appreciate the good.
I mean, it was groundbreaking for its time and it redefined the genre and a lot of moviemaking in general, but it really didn’t age well as far as moviemaking goes. Yeah, it has severe pacing issues, is undeservedly way too long and it got way too trippy and abstract by the end. Frankly a whole lot of it feels like Kubrick masturbating over how great he is, with a lot of scenes being way too long and serving no real or useful purpose on on the movie.
I could say pretty much the same about Solaris too (the original Tarkovsky version which cinephiles always rave about, not Soderbergh"s, which I actually prefer), and if rumors are true, apparently Kubrick took a lot of ideas from it.
And I say all that as an avid sci-fi fan. The books from Arthur C. Clarke are more enjoyable.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but even after reading the explanation I still don’t know what happened.
After watching the movie twice, then reading the book and watching the movie a third time. I now know what’s going on.
Synecdoche New York
I didn’t have a chance.
One my favs as far as heady horror films go. I mean not horror in the traditional sense but getting old is terrifying.
I didn’t exactly need the ending explained, but Everything Everywhere All At Once has so much going on that I got really hyper focused on looking up commentary for everything in the movie. There were a lot of things I missed so I found it really valuable beyond just wanting to deep dive every little detail haha.
Surprisingly, after all the hype of Interstellar being incredibly confusing, I felt like I missed something because it seemed fairly straightforward (not the plot, which was obviously convoluted, just that I understood the ending). Then I looked up explanations of the ending and they fit my interpretation so that was a bit anticlimactic lol
For Interstellar, I think it’s either you get it or you don’t. I got the idea pretty well, aside from the physics and stuff behind it. I talked with some people who couldn’t understand it and tried to explain it but it still left them confused.
I don’t remember being confused. But it was definitely one of those movies where I had to sit for 15 minutes after the credits rolled to process the emotional impact.
Cloud Atlas (2012)
I didn’t think the plot of the film was too confusing, but trying to keep track of which cast member played which character in each respective time period while watching the film was challenging.
It took me like half the movie to understand the pidgin for New Hawaii.
The book doesn’t jump around. Each story is like a book opened to the halfway point, with another book inserted. They’re all nested like this down to New Hawaii, which plays through straight, before finishing each story in turn.
I love ambitious (if somewhat failed) movies like this, and I’m not really sure if the Wachowskis could have done a better job.
I completely agree with the last sentiment you shared! I think of Cloud Atlas as a flawed gem and am glad to have watched it at least once.
naked lunch. i think i read everything and was still confused.
I can think of at least two things wrong with that title
The wiki for Bird Box told me a hell of a lot more about what was going on than the actual movie did.
The Fountain. It kinda makes sense on first watch, but you really need to read the companion graphic novel to get it.
Soundtrack is fantastic too
Holy shit was that movie a mindfuck.
Memento is the most extreme cases of this I’ve ever experienced. A week later, I was still walking around with a notebook, slide rule, and french curve trying to work out what the hell actually happened in that bitch.
Have you tried watching it while on drugs
Les Revenants (The Returned). French series about a village where deceased residents start coming back from the dead. The ending was good, but there was a lot of ambiguity about what happened and why it stopped. I went down the rabbit hole and found some compelling reddit threads that tied it up rather neatly.
Not really for an explanation, but I looked up the original short story Total Recall (the 90’s version) was based on to see if it concretely says if everything was real or if everything was just in the protagonist’s head and it just cemented it for me that the story is way more ambiguous, and the Arnold film was taking the “it’s all real” approach.
The Arnold film (subtly) tells you that it isn’t real. In the beginning, when they are prepping Quaid for the implant, one of the technicians remarks “That’s a new one… Blue sky on Mars.” At the end of the movie, bam, blue sky on Mars.
There is zero chance that anyone could predict such an event, and no way for Hauser to have known about the reactor or what it would do. Hauser’s mission was to infiltrate the rebels and get to Kuato.
There’s a lot of other circumstantial evidence, and you could probably explain away a lot of other stuff. But the fact remains that nothing can’t be explained as part of the dream, and there’s one thing that can’t be explained as real.
The is this real or a dream idea was a major theme in many of Phillip K Dick’s works. Considering he wrote many of his novels and short stories while off his face on amphetamines and a cocktail of other drugs i guess it should not be much of a surprise.
I wonder if that is a reason so many of his works have been adapted for the screen. Eg:
A Scanner Darkly
Blade Runner
Total Recall
Minority Report
The Adjustment Bureau
Paycheck
Screamers
Impostor
The Crystal Crypt
Next
Paycheck
The time travel thing with Ben Affleck was written by the same guy as Blade Runner and Total Recall? Whoa.
I guess I’ll also have to see Imposter and The Crystal Crypt; they’re the only two on that list I’ve not seen or even heard of before now, but everything else was pretty cool.
