There are few better feelings than coming out of the cinema and reeling from the sheer insanity of what you’ve just seen, like your brain has been totally fried by the madness of it all. Many filmmakers will try to evoke this feeling with their twisty narratives and fantastical visuals, though often they simply try too hard and, in the end, we can see through their cheap parlour tricks.
A real filmmaking talent, meanwhile, will blast us through the back of the cinema with a shock and awe campaign of style and ideas that we could never have even imagined.
These 10 mind-bending films are all equipped with that power; they all presented a fascinating concept, ran with the ball, and delivered an absolute belter of a climax that left us quite unsure as to what we’d just seen. Each film has had tremendous staying power ever since its release, and with good reason.
Be warned that SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW.
10. Enter The Void
After the visceral impact of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, it was going to take a lot to live up to that mixture of visual exuberance and sheer brutality, but by God, did Noe do it or what? The film takes place largely in the seedy neon nightclubs of Tokyo, following an American drug dealer named Oscar who, in the opening reel, ends up being fatally shot by the police.
The remainder of the film takes place over just a few minutes of real time, as Oscar has an out-of-body experience while his life drains away, trawling through his memories and fantasies in a trippy, phantasmagorical odyssey.
The vast majority of the film is shot from a first-person view, and Noe’s masterful direction seamlessly blends imagery that appears impossible to achieve practically. With its graphic depictions of violent murder and a very creepy incest vibe throughout, this is a film that without question keeps you on your toes, ending with a harrowing sequence in which Oscar has a false memory of his own birth, complete with an extensive visual of him travelling through his mother’s birth canal in first-person view. Unforgettable.
9. The Game
David Fincher’s The Game is a tricky, twist film that certainly keeps you guessing if nothing else. Wealthy investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) lives a lonely life, and on his 48th birthday, is given a present by his brother Conrad (Sean Penn), a “game” in which “players” are pushed to their physical and psychological limit as they come to believe that their life is in danger.
Though Van Orton is seemingly rejected for The Game, this is just a trick, and soon enough he finds his worldly possessions being taken away, as well as people trying to take him down.
At the end of the movie, Nicholas appears to commit suicide, leaping from a roof and crashing through some glass, though he in fact ends up crashing through breakaway glass and landing on a giant airbag, as it’s revealed that all of the gunplay was part of The Game, while his brother Conrad was in on it the whole time in order to get Nicholas to enjoy his life and not become suicidal like their dad. At the end of the movie, Nicholas appears to have done just that.
8. Source Code
Duncan Jones delivered a one-two punch with the irresistible sci-fi Moon, followed up by his unforgettable existential thriller Source Code. The narrative revolves around a U.S. helicopter pilot named Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who last remembers being in Afghanistan and wakes up in a mysterious room, being tasked with operating a propretary military tech called “Source Code”, which allows the user to enter into the last 8 minutes of someone’s life via an alternate timeline.
Stevens enters the life of Sean Fentress, a man aboard a train that explodes. His task? Find the bomber so that he can then report the identity back to his superior officers (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright), but things get dicier when a) Stevens incredulously falls in love with the friend of the man whose body he is inhabiting (Michelle Monaghan), and b) he discovers that he essentially died in Afghanistan, and his current experience is just his brain on life support.
The movie ends with Stevens managing to exist in an alternate timeline, which is even more mind-blowing when you realise that he’s still impersonating Sean Fentress while living happily ever after with Monaghan’s character. Woah.
7. Trance
Danny Boyle is no stranger to psychological thrillers as he proves in Trance, which depicts art auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy) becoming embroiled in the theft of a painting at the hands of Franck (Vincent Cassell).
Simon ends up suffering amnesia after a blow to the head, and can no longer remember where he helped stash the painting, so Franck enlists hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to help him out. However, Elizabeth begins engaging in a sexual relationship with both Simon and Franck, before revealing that Simon is her former abusive lover who failed to kick a gambling addiction, hence him getting involved in the present theft.
Once Simon realises this, he tells Elizabeth – who now knows the location of the painting – run away with it, but she returns with a truck and kills Simon. We then learn that all along, Elizabeth hypnotised Simon to go back to gambling, which would lead him to his present fate, and she then offers Franck the choice of forgetting everything she told him by clicking on the “Trance” app on an iPad she sent him. Franck’s decision is left ambiguous.
6. Videodrome
David Cronenberg’s explosive thriller revolves around Max Renn (James Woods), a TV executive who is disappointed with the flagging ratings of his network, and after being shown a Malaysian torture porn show called Videodrome, decides to commission similar fare for his own network.
However, Max soon discovers that Videodrome is a political movement of sorts, to allow TV to replace our everyday lives and the way we think. Max then hallucinates his torso resembling a VCR, a side-effect of watching Videodrome being that the viewer receives a brain tumour for their troubles.
Max ends up having a video-tape inserted into his torso which brainwashes him into murdering his TV network colleagues, before being told that the only solution now is to “leave the old flesh” and abandon this world, at which point he sees a video of himself blowing his head off with a gun, and then imitates it, uttering the final phrase, “Long live the new flesh”. Perhaps Cronenbeg’s most decisively disturbing and mind-melting work, Videodrome is something else to behold altogether.
5. Memento
The first of two Christopher Nolan movies on this list, Memento revolves around Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia, meaning he cannot store new memories, a side-effect of an assault by two men which resulted in his wife’s death.
Scenes of Shelby conveying this to us are depicted in black and white, while the scenes of him investigating in colour are played in reverse order, as we see him tattooing himself and taking polaroids in order to remember the various steps of his sleuthing.
Shelby ends up killing Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), the man he believes is the escaped assailant called John G. Soon enough, however, flashbacks reveal that Leonard has been confusing aspects of his life with Sammy Jankis, a case study of his (he’s an insurance investigator), and that his own wife in fact survived the attack but died of an insulin overdose due to his amnesia.
The film ends with the presumption that Leonard essentially created this puzzle as a coping mechanism of dealing with his error, and the film ends with him firmly committed to that vision.
4. The Usual Suspects
Bryan Singer’s superbly twisted thriller follows the interrogation of a crippled con-man named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), who is one of two survivors of a mass murder aboard a boat. The film revolves around his testimony to U.S. Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chaz Palminteri), where he tells a wildly contrived, even confusing story about what caused him and four other criminals to end up on the boat that night, and the shadowy, fearsome crime boss Keyser Soze, who served as their backer.
The chicanery of this story is revealed as a smoke-screen at the end of the movie, when Kint is let go, only for Kujan to have a last-minute realisation, that Kint has been fabricating the story on-the-fly, using various items pinned to Kujan’s notice-board to quickly come up with something.
A fax appears identifying Kint as Keyser Soze, but by the time Kujan gets outside, Kint, who had been faking a limp for the entire movie, has sped off into the night. “And like that, he’s gone.”
3. Fight Club
A rare movie that exceeds the book it is based on, David Fincher’s masterful Fight Club revolves around a narrator referred to by most fans as Jack (Edward Norton), who suffers from insomnia and is essentially eking his way through a comfortable, materialistic middle-class existence.
On a flight, he has a chance encounter with a soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who takes him under his wing when his apartment is destroyed in a “freak explosion.” Together, the two set up Fight Club, where angry young men come to beat the snot out of each other in order to vent their existential angst.
Fight Club eventually becomes Project Mayhem, an anarchist organisation with countless members, and with numerous cells capable of acting independently of one another. As everything begins to get out of hand, we’re smacked in the face with the unforgettable twist – Tyler Durden is Jack. They are the same person, and when Jack believes himself to be asleep, Tyler is in fact taking over.
As Tyler plans to blow up a number of credit card buildings to set the debt record back to zero, Jack takes charge and shoots a hole through his own cheek, which convinces his mind that Tyler is “dead”, appearing to regain his sanity as the credit card buildings nevertheless collapse.
2. Mulholland Drive
Without question David Lynch’s crowning achievement in feature film, Mulholland Drive centers on an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a beautiful ingenue who arrives in Los Angeles and meets “Rita” (Laura Harring), a woman suffering from amnesia after surviving a brutal car accident.
Amid their investigations to try and figure out what happened to Rita and her real identity, Lynch treats us to a number of surreal sequences, including a movie director (Justin Theroux) whose production is being controlled by the mob, a bungled series of assassinations, and a strange club called Silencio.
After a blue key is put in a box, the story shifts, with Watts now playing a failed actress called Diane Selwyn, who is obsessed with an actress called Camilla Rhodes (Harring). When she realises her love is rejected, she ends up shooting herself, bringing the tale to a barmy end as the mysterious blue box ends up in the hands of a homeless beast walking the streets. Trying to make sense of the film is a challenge, but there’s absolutely nothing like it out there, and it looks incredible.
1. Inception
Christopher Nolan’s Earth-shatteringly original sci-fi follows the efforts of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to see his children again. Cobb is a dream infiltrator, using proprietary military technology to enter people’s dreams for the purposes of corporate espionage, and this job has Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) asking him to influence a rival businessman (Cillian Murphy) to break up his company in the wake of his father’s death.
In return, Dom will be given safe passage back to the U.S. – he is presently a fugitive – but implanting an idea in someone’s mind is extremely challenging, and it requires Cobb to perform Inception; to penetrate an idea several layers deep into the man’s subconscious.
Cobb assembles a gang, and then we learn the mechanics of dream exploration, such as the fact that each time the characters establish a further dream within a dream, it becomes less stable and also liable to more prominent time dilation. By the time they penetrate the fourth layer, Limbo, they risk getting stuck there forever, where their minds will essentially be turned to mush.
Furthermore, Cobb has to contend with the haunting presence of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), in his subconscious, which threatens to sabotage the whole thing. In the end, though, Cobb manages to implant the idea successfully, and narrowly escape with his sanity. However, the ambiguous final shot leaves it unclear as to whether Cobb is still awake or dreaming – it is left for us to decide…
Which brain-melter is your favourite? Are there any other head-scratchers we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
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