The 10 most confusing movies of all time
There are certain words that no filmmaker wants to hear associated with their movies, but despite its negative connotations in certain respects, “confusing” isn’t necessarily one of them.
While there are a huge amount of bad and forgettable features to have been released to the masses as a nonsensical mess through either a nightmarish production, a hack job in the editing room, or something in between, being intentionally vague has regularly nudged open the door towards greatness.
Several certifiable cinematic classics have made barely a lick of sense upon first viewing, and even multiple re-watches can fail to fill in the blanks to a satisfying degree. However, the aesthetic and atmospheric merits can often overcome the intentional narrative shortcomings and muddled plotting to create an entirely unique experience that thrives on its front-facing confusion.
Trying to create something deliberately confuddling is a risky gambit, and while the following ten films are all confusing in their own inimitable ways beyond a shadow of a doubt, none of them suffered as a result.
The 10 most confusing movies:
10. Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)
Having conquered the fashion world, Tom Ford turned his hand to filmmaking, making an impressive debut with period-set romantic drama A Serious Man. For his second feature, though, he raised the bar by delivering the often-bewildering psychological noir thriller Nocturnal Animals.
In the broadest of terms, Amy Adams’ gallery owner discovers a manuscript written by her first husband that forces her to re-examine and reevaluate her past, but that barely even scratches the surface. The narrative structure turns everything about the film upside down to incorporate the story of the manuscript into the plot of the film to lather the real-world setting with flashbacks, dream sequences, and literary excerpts to weave something so dense it becomes outright unwieldy.
While it fits the overarching themes of being unable to outrun the past and the malleable nature of how each individual perceives their own memories through the passage of time, the competing narrative strands offer a puzzling metaphorical and metaphysical ‘what if’ that uses its tale-within-a-tale hook to blur the lines right up until its ambiguous and open-ended final shot.
9. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
As one of the greatest directors in cinema history, Andrei Tarkovsky was never one to adhere to convention. Even at that, though, Mirror‘s status as a semi-autobiographical drama featuring a unique narrative structure and boasting poems written and read by the filmmaker’s father – with his wife and mother among the cast – creates a unique concoction that’s intentionally mystifying.
Essentially a stream-of-consciousness expanded to feature length and sumptuously shot, the bare bones that constitute the plot focus on the thoughts, memories, and emotional perspective of thinly-veiled Tarkovsky surrogate Aleksei. Switching between dreams, newsreel, and narrative, Mirror is a collection of loosely connected scenes that evoke a mindset as opposed to a film in the strictest sense of the word.
It’s exactly as esoteric as that sounds, too, with Mirror often making little to no sense and presenting itself as regularly impenetrable. Cast members play multiple roles with no explanation, the cinematography flits between colour and black-and-white without reason, and debate has raged for almost half a century over what constitutes the dreams and what’s rooted in reality.
Of course, there’s no concrete answer, and the best approach is simply to let it unfold and then draw whatever conclusions are left by the time the credits come up, and 100 viewers will undoubtedly have over 99 different assessments.
8. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Paul Thomas Anderson mounting the first and so far only Thomas Pynchon adaptation was never going to be a straightforward exercise in cinematic storytelling, with Inherent Vice revelling in a challenging nature that almost demanded multiple revisits.
Joaquin Phoenix’s private investigator, Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, is approached by a former flame to unravel the disappearance of her new lover and real estate mogul. Fairly simple on paper but frequently maddening in execution as it descends into a psychedelic and drug-addled allegory on grief. Even then, that’s just one of the many interpretations to be drawn.
Doc struggles to reconcile between reality and hallucination, something that’s made abundantly clear won’t be explained to the audience at any stage. Pynchon gained fame for building his reputation on being oblique in his writing, something Anderson relished, bringing his weighted and obfuscating prose to the silver screen through a string of off-kilter vignettes that ostensibly form something resembling a narrative, albeit one that’s left many unable to come remotely close to getting it untangled.
7. Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)
A rug-pulling psychological horror inspiring both classic video game franchise Silent Hill and the abstract imagery Christopher Nolan folded into Oppenheimer sounds head-scratching at first glance, but the legacy of Jacob’s Ladder thankfully extends far beyond the risible remake released in 2019.
Tim Robbins’ soldier gets caught up in a conspiracy that shatters his perception of reality, with his experiences both pre and post-Vietnam causing fractured visions, horrifying hallucinations, and disturbing flashbacks that have no interest in setting a clear distinction between what’s real and what isn’t.
Such is the myriad of ways the film has been absorbed; it remains entirely up for debate, not just what Jacob’s Ladder really means but also how it puts its message across. Its status as an anti-war story, a reflection on mental health, the unanswered trauma faced by armed forces veterans, the significance of Jacob’s son Gabe, the demonic entities he encounters, and the consequences of government experimentation are just a few elements are left completely open-ended, and that’s before his death recontextualises everything at the end of the first viewing.
6. Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, 2014)
A sci-fi action from the sibling filmmakers behind vampire thriller Daybreakers doesn’t seem the sort of movie to open the doors to widespread dissection, debate, and discourse, but the Spierig brothers showed no shortage of aspiration and ambition when it came to Predestination.
By and large, time travel movies tend to boil down to the overarching theme of whether it’s the past, present, or future that defines the actions of the characters and the subsequent consequences of those actions. However, in the case of Predestination, it can be viewed as either all of the above or none.
Ethan Hawke may lead the cast as a temporal agent sent through time to stop the ‘Fizzle Bomber’, but the third act piles twists on top of turns and smothers them in revelations to create innumerable questions that all end up folding back into a paradox.
The short version is that Hawke’s Agent Doe was born female and abandoned by the man who vanished after leaving her pregnant before forcing her into gender reassignment against her will after discovering she’s intersex while her baby is abducted. John turns out to be not just the man Sarah Snook’s Jane fell in love with but also a version of herself from another timeline, meaning that Jane is John and had a baby that is also both of them to ignite the cyclical timeline in the first place.
5. Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)
Surrealism has been David Lynch’s bread and butter ever since Eraserhead, but things have arguably never been more confusing than in the two-stranded tale of Bill Pullman’s jazz musician facing murder accusations right before Balthazar Getty’s mechanic gets pulled into his own web of intrigue.
Theoretically, the main characters being transplanted into new bodies with new personas signals a literal and narrative identity shift, but even that can be undone once the story circles back around to its starting point. It’s entirely open to interpretation as to what each journey means and how it affects each character in isolation and in regards to Lost Highway at large, with Fred Madison’s unexplained transformation into Peter Dayton potentially a wish-fulfilment fantasy born from insecurities stemming from his own masculinity or something else entirely.
Inevitably, it’s never made clear, with Robert Blake’s Mystery Man seemingly the only person involved in Lost Highway who appears to have a clear understanding of what’s going on. Even at that, he was never going to signpost it for viewer if he wouldn’t let it be known to the characters, resulting in a hotly-contested descent into madness.
4. Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)
David Cronenberg and science fiction had proven to be a match made in cinematic heaven several times before, but Naked Lunch stands apart for avoiding the filmmaker’s previous habit of laying clear thematic groundwork in favour of something altogether more perplexing.
William S. Burroughs’ novel was deemed unfilmable for a good reason, with Cronenberg instead using it as the jumping-off point to a hodgepodge of passages taken from the page, sequences drawn from the author’s other works, and even aspects of his own personal life to deliver one of the most bizarre movies to have ever been backed by the might of a major studio.
Peter Weller’s Burroughs stand-in Bill Lee is an archetypal noir hero on the surface, but when the hallucinogenic effects of the bug powder manifest as giant insects splicing body horror and creature feature trappings into a metaphor for rampant drug abuse with a plot that becomes increasingly ludicrous.
Once he accidentally murders his wife and flees to Interzone in a delirious cacophony of design and atmosphere that either makes perfect sense or no sense at all depending entirely on the circumstances surrounding the who, what, when, where, and why of watching, all bets for trying to understand the chaos of Naked Lunch are off.
3. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)
Charlie Kaufman certainly knows how to confound an audience, with his adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things a great deal more complicated and contradictory than its simple setup would suggest.
Jessie Buckley accompanies Jesse Plemons to his family’s rural farm to meet the parents, which ends up changing everything she knew of both him and their relationship up until that point. In those terms, it reads as a formulaic character-driven drama, but this is Kaufman, so it’s nowhere near that simple.
A string of incidents begin to chip away at the notion of reality, with plot points regularly pivoting and snowballing into something else entirely, all while the lack of a single perspective raises questions on the veracity of how each character is witnessing, experiencing and interpreting the events that surround them. An extension of a simple fantasy that proves to be anything but, unreliable storytellers and dancing janitors are only part of what makes I’m Thinking of Ending Things every bit as engrossing as it is infuriating.
2. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
The last thing David Lynch wants to do is hold the audience’s hand and lead them through one of his labyrinthine stories, with Mulholland Drive curating and skewering the very idea of the American dream in all of its majesty and cruelty.
A fever dream unfolding on the streets of Los Angeles, the past and present collide headlong with reality and illusion in an atmosphere punctuated by a sense of lurching dread and constant unease that turns the aftermath car accident and the subsequent amnesia suffered by Laura Harring’s Rita into something else entirely.
Unsettling from beginning to end with scant interest in spelling out what it’s all supposed to mean, Mulholland Drive‘s fantastical surrealism and seamless segues between jarring terror and hagiographic nods to Hollywood’s Golden Age have been a source of endless debate since it first arrived to cause mass confusion and eternal argument.
1. Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)
As far as debut features go, few filmmakers have set out their stall quite like Shane Carruth, the former engineer and mathematics graduate who wouldn’t simplify the technical complexities of Primer‘s dialogue for the sake of an audience, who probably still couldn’t understand it even if he did.
A shoestring psychological sci-fi about the accidental invention of a time machine is a neat concept, but the dichotomy between ambition and consequence is the simplest thing to understand across a 77-minute running time that left more than its fair share of furrowed brows behind.
Things do begin in a linear fashion before careening off the rails, though, with Carruth’s refusal to spell anything out leading into a back half that was designed to be confusing before ended up even more so than its creator may have potentially intended, with multiple timelines and duplicates yielding a cross-section of temporal chaos and eternal paradoxes that simply cannot be grasped in one viewing, if not significantly more than that.
