Superior second viewings: 10 movies that need to be watched twice
The best movies are always going to be the ones that get rewatched the most, but sometimes multiple viewings are required to truly understand and appreciate what the filmmaker was trying to say.
Whether it’s an intentionally obfuscated narrative, complex character motivations that knock the audience for a loop, or multiple major twists that recontextualise every preceding minute in an instant, repeat viewing can often be the best way to grasp the director’s vision.
There’s a fine line between mystery and confusion in the moving image, with plenty of auteurs having aimed for the former only to end up squarely in the latter camp instead. When it works, it can often take the breath away, even if it regularly poses a great deal more questions than it provides answers.
For a variety of reasons, the following ten films are pictures that demand to be watched at least twice, even if some become much clearer than others when armed with the knowledge of what’s to come.
10 movies that have to be watched twice:
10. Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, 2014)
A riveting sci-fi thriller but also a completely maddening one upon first viewing, the overarching feeling after the credits start to roll on Predestination is that it has to be watched again to try and make sense of what the hell just happened.
Thriving on the paradoxes the genre often falls victim to, sibling filmmakers Michael and Peter Spierig concoct a mind, time, and reality-bending serial killer thriller that piles twists on top of turns and then overwhelms them with a series of rug-pulling revelations right up until the jaw-dropping climax.
If anybody watched Predestination once and completely understood and had no questions whatsoever about Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook being the same character from two different timelines who fall in love with each other—and by extension themselves—and have a baby who is also both of them, then they’re probably a liar.
9. The Sixth Sense (M Night Shyamalan, 1999)
M Night Shyamalan stunned audiences with what quickly became known as one of the most iconic twists in cinema history, but it’s equally important to revisit The Sixth Sense a second time to appreciate how he managed to pull it off.
Even though the ending never hits anywhere near as hard as it does the first time, rewatching the atmospheric supernatural chiller and keeping an eye out for hints and contextual clues provides a completely different but equally rewarding experience.
If anything, the fact Bruce Willis is dead all along is a lot more heavily signposted than anyone would care to admit, but it’s easy to say that in hindsight when Shyamalan pulled out of the all-time great sleight-of-hand tricks on an unsuspecting audience.
8. Enemy (Denis Villenueve, 2013)
Denis Villeneuve and Jake Gyllenhaal got weird for their second film together to hit cinemas in 2013, not that their other collaboration on Prisoners was a walk in the park by any stretch.
Eerie, unsettling, and capable of making the skin crawl through the power of mere suggestion, the ending of Enemy comes so far out of the blue and flies in the face of the quasi-realistic (if significantly heightened) thriller that followed to make a second viewing a requisite.
Intentionally obtuse and deliberately withholding key information that would smooth things out for the viewer, the grand finale of Enemy has been intensely scrutinised for well over a decade, and the folks picking it apart definitely aren’t the people who’ve only seen it once.
7. The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995)
Much like The Sixth Sense, Christopher McQuarrie’s Academy Award-winning screenplay is the reason why The Usual Suspects needs to be watched a second time, with the writer and director Bryan Singer leaving everything in plain sight.
Contextually relevant follow-up viewings have ensured many twist-happy tales have gained long-lasting second life, and keeping those peepers peeled for Verbal Kint’s masterplan makes the crime thriller as engaging as it was on the first go-round.
The most unreliable of unreliable narrators, everything Kint uses to misdirect the investigation is present and accounted for in every frame during his interrogation, with the fun coming from picking them out despite the finale scene’s surprise having already been ruined.
6. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
The posterchild for offbeat independent storytelling, Charlie Kaufman was never going to make a straightforward directorial debut when he stepped behind the camera for the first time.
Even by his standards, though, Synecdoche, New York is a mindfuck. A challenging experience that takes its time working its way under the skin, Philip Seymour Hoffman is in towering form as a theatre director who operates as the audience surrogate, plunging the cast – and those watching – into his surrealist worldview.
If there was anyone who had a hope of adapting a frustratingly opaque novel and doing it justice on the big screen, then it was Kaufman. However, there’s a lot left to be desired watching it just once, with that second viewing filling in the gaps and making its idiosyncracies all the more engrossing.
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
In fairness, any self-proclaimed cinephile who only deemed Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey as being a one-and-done movie doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on, but it’s repeat viewings that helped enshrine it as a masterpiece.
It asks some of the biggest questions humanity has ever grappled with, and in many cases, the film doesn’t have any interest in providing a concrete answer. It’s something that can be seen 100 times, and even on that centenary viewing, it throws up new nuances or surprises.
More than half a century on and scholars continue to wade deep into its thought-provoking ambiguities, with 2001 almost the epitome of a movie that demands to be seen as many times as possible to even consider gaining a true handle on what it is, what it’s about, and what it’s trying to say.
4. Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
Christopher Nolan has never been one to overexplain or oversimplify things for his audience, but never again as he even felt obliged to on a level comparable to Memento.
The filmmaker’s ambitious narrative tricks take a little getting used to the first time around, and in addition to offering many of the tropes and trappings that would become crystalised in his later work, a strong argument can be made that Memento is much better the second time around.
Sure, knowing the narrative’s ins and outs takes away some of its immediacy, but it also moves at such a brisk pace and refuses to get into specifics that it can be disorienting at times. If Nolan had to write it down to clarify, then one viewing was never going to be enough.
3. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
A curiously misinterpreted classic, considering David Fincher has never been shy in naming the targets he was aiming at; watching Fight Club for a second time almost makes it feel like a completely different movie.
The twist that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton had been one and the same the entire time was admittedly a revelation that blindsided audiences everywhere, but diving back into the story armed with that knowledge is every bit as rewarding.
Instead of a two-handed thriller that fires shots at consumerism, corporate America, and toxic masculinity, Fight Club second time out is an existential character study on one man’s struggle to find his place in the world, with that cultural and societal malaise manifesting as Tyler Durden, the man the narrator always wanted to be but didn’t think he could.
2. Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)
Made for a ridiculously thrifty $7,000, Shane Carruth’s status as a former engineer and mathematics graduate does make Primer show-offy in a sense because it’s one of the densest sci-fi films ever made.
On the other hand, it’s also a time travel story like no other, with the filmmaker loading up the screenplay with technically accurate scientific jargon and completely disregarding the notion of holding the audience’s hand in favour of letting them figure it out themselves. Or try to, at least.
Paradoxical to a fault, it’s not an understatement to suggest two viewings aren’t even enough to begin to comprehend Primer. Five, ten, or 20 may not be enough, either, but that was Carruth’s intention from the very beginning.
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
There are few better at mining the cinematic artistry of the abstract than David Lynch, and based purely on those parameters, Mulholland Drive is inarguably his masterpiece.
There are certain moments where Lynch lulls everyone into a false sense of security to think they’ve got it all figured out, only for the dreamlike detour through the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles to head off on one of its many erratic tangents.
In typically Lynchian fashion, the auteur has never been concerned with outlining the true meaning of Mulholland Drive, and it’s much better off that way. It’s many things to many people, and because he hasn’t taken a side, infinite rewatches can theoretically provide infinite perspectives.
