WARNING: So many spoilers ahead! Plot twists unraveled. Endings revealed. Proceed at your own risk.
March 16 marks the 15th anniversary of the release of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, one of the greatest mindfuck movies of all time. What makes something a quality mindfuck movie? Sometimes, it’s a twist ending that seems to come out of nowhere and truly shocks you, because the reveal means you have to go back and rethink everything that happened during the course of the entire movie.
Take The Sixth Sense, for example. After you found out that Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) was dead the entire time, you had to recall every scene in which you thought Dr. Crowe interacted with characters besides Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Nope; it turns out he only interacts with Cole after he gets shot in the beginning of the movie. He really has been dead the whole time. M. Night Shyamalan, you trickster, you.
Other times, a movie fucks with your head from beginning to end. It leads you one way, then swerves sharply to the left. The plot isn't remotely linear, although it appeared to be (ahem, Triangle). Or you can’t even figure out what’s going on at all. Think Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Shane Carruth's Primer.
And then there are psychological thrillers like Black Swan and The Machinist, which trap the viewer inside a character’s breakdown without providing a complete picture of what’s happening. In the words of U2, “Now you're stuck in a moment, and you can’t get out of it.” Also in the words of U2: "Don't say that later will be better," because you'll be obsessing about what happened in that goddamn movie you just watched. (Sidenote: Is Bono a mindfuck movie prophet? Please discuss.)
But when it comes to this magical mindfuckery that makes you wonder what you just watched for hours on end, why would you ever want to want to get out of these moments?
And one more reminder that there are MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD — so major you may as well call them majorettes and stick 'em in front of a marching band twirling batons.
Se7en(1996)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Andrew Kevin Walker
William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is a careful, wise detective who is just a few days away from retiring. He's assigned to take a young rookie under his wing and show him the ropes of the gritty metropolis that's their turf. The young investigator, David Mills (Brad Pitt), is short-tempered and impatient, but eager to learn and get his hands dirty.
The pair slowly stumble upon a series of murders all bound by one familiar thread: the seven deadly sins. An obese man was forced to eat himself to death (gluttony); a defense attorney has his insides taken out (greed). Soon enough, Somerset and Mills find a good lead. A man named John Doe (Kevin Spacey) has been checking out library books about serial murders. They settle on him as their prime suspect and try to track him down as the murders continue.
After the fifth murder, a bloodied man meets Mills and Somerset at the police station, identifying himself as John Doe. He's been peeling off the skin on his fingertips all along, so it's impossible to perfectly ID his prints, but the men are convinced it's him. He promises to lead both detectives to the final two victims, but under very specific terms or he'll plead insanity.
Per Doe's instructions, the two detectives accompany their captive to a remote desert location. A delivery truck meets them, handing Somerset a box. Inside is the head of Mills' wife (Gwyneth Paltrow). When Doe brags about killing her and says that she was secretly pregnant, and he killed her out of his own envy. Mills weeps and hold Doe at gunpoint. Somerset protests, but he shoots him six times. Doe is the final death of the seven, because he forced Mills to give into his own wrath.
Hard Candy (2005)
Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh
Directed by: David Slade
Written by: Brian Nelson
Patrick Wilson plays Jeff, a photographer with a thing for teenage girls. He's charming and good looking, but the set up is as creepy as it sounds. Jeff preys on young girls, messaging them online and cultivating fake relationships that he seems to hope will end with real sexual favors.
Hayley is the latest girl talked into meeting him in person. But Hayley, who wears a notable red sweatshirt, has a plan of her own. She knows of Jeff's past transgressions with his victims, and she's decided to put a stop to it.
Jeff, it turns out, doesn't just flirt with underage girls. He also rapes and kills them, according to Hayley's spying. When he lures her back to his apartment, she drugs and tortures him to get information about a dead teenage girl whose death she suspects he had a hand in.
The tension in Hard Candy mounts with an eerie quickness, mostly because of the shifting power dynamic between Jeff and Hayley (the former thinks he's in control, the latter always is).
The Invitation (2016)
Starring: Logan Marshall-Green, Michiel Huisman, Tammy Blanchard, Emayatzy Corinealdi
Directed by: Karyn Kusama
Written by: Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi
It's been two years since a tragic accident killed Will (Marshall Green) and Eden's (Blanchard) young son in their Hollywood Hills home. Their marriage soon dissolved and, in an effort to move on, lost touch with one another. The movie begins with Will driving to his old house with his new girlfriend Kira (Corinealdi) — they've been invited to a dinner party, even though he hasn't heard from his ex-wife or her new husband in months.
Things start out warm enough, even as the stylishly modern house manages to dig up pained memories for Will. Then, out of the corner of his eye Will notices Eden's new husband David (Huisman) casually lock doors and cabinets. There are other couples there (old friends of Will and Eden's when they were married), good food, ritzy wine... it's a nice enough evening, albeit a bit awkward. Suddenly, the tone shifts. This isn't a reunion, it's a recruiting session for a cult.
A new, unfamiliar guest arrives. Everyone nestles into the living room and David asks them to keep an open mind as they watch a documentary of sorts. In the movie, a creepy pastor talks a dying woman through the end of her life. The couples all recoil, until the unfamiliar guest gives a kind of testimonial about loving his dead wife so much, and how this quasi-spirituality helped him overcome her death. The twist? He was the one who went to prison for killing her.
From there, Kusama perfectly manipulates the tension. Doors lock and unlock, and Will confronts Eden about blocking out their son's death between flashbacks of their former life together. In the thrilling climax they sit down to dinner. Eden serves a special drink. Will can't take it anymore — he demands everyone throw it out, and begs his girlfriend to leave with him. Just as he seems crazy, someone takes a sip and dies instantly. Will was right, the drink was poison.
The "invitation" was really an entry into a murder-suicide pact. Will and his girlfriend run frantically through his old house to escape Eden and David's wrath.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
Directed by: Mike Nichols
Written by: Ernest Lehman
Married couple George (Burton) and Martha (Taylor) arrive home from a party. Martha informs George that she’s invited a younger couple that she met there — Nick (Segal) and Honey (Dennis) — over for more drinks. Everyone is already quite drunk, but George and Martha get increasingly more drunk and verbally abusive towards one another.
Honey says that Martha told her about she and George’s son upcoming 16th birthday. This angers George. Honey runs to the bathroom to throw up from drinking too much. The night goes on and on with more upsetting moments.
George and Martha engage in a series of increasingly escalating games of psychological manipulation that makes their guests feel more and more uneasy. Finally, it becomes clear to Nick and Honey that the overarching game is for George and Martha to invent more and more details about their imaginary son, but to never mention his existence to anyone else. It seems that Martha lost this round, because she answers the title question, saying "I am."
2001: A Space Odyssey(1968)
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark
As one Reddit commenter summarizing the movie very succinctly describes it, “Black box gives superpowers. Black box plus monkey equals human. Human plus black box equals star baby. Star baby is awesome.” To expand on that a little, watch the four videos on the website Kubrick 2001, which delve into how it’s not just the monolith (black box) that speeds along evolution, it’s actually the discovery and improved development of functional tools that advances first apes, and then the human race.
The question is, though, what are the three monoliths that appear in the film — one one Earth, one on the Moon, and one on Jupiter? Since they have right angles, they aren’t naturally occurring in nature. As Roger Ebert wrote in 1968, “Who put [the monolith] there? Intelligent beings since it has right angles and nature doesn't make right angles on its own.” The monoliths are merely a device Kubrick uses to advance the plot, Ebert argues.
It’s not just the monoliths’ possible meaning that throws viewers into a quandary. The ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey usually confuses viewers the most. After Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dulles) defeats HAL 9000, the supercomputer that conspired to take over the humans’ spaceship, he receives a signal from the monolith on Jupiter. Bowman travels toward the monolith only to be captured by a vortex of light.
Rather than finding himself in a sort of Gravity situation, which viewers could much more easily understand (we all know that a human left adrift in space would just perish among the glowing stars and big, black holes of nothingness), Bowman winds up in a bedroom. He watches his older self eat his final meal and die in the bed. Bowman becomes one with this older version of himself. After he dies, another monolith appears by his bed. He reaches for it and becomes the “starchild,” a glowing fetus that is transported by float beside planet Earth.
“Now where did the bedroom come from? My intuition is that it came out of Kubrick's imagination; that he understood the familiar bedroom would be the most alien, inexplicable, disturbing scene he could possibly end the film with. He was right. The bedroom is more otherworldly and eerie than any number of exploding stars, etc.,” Ebert writes by way of explanation.
It’s quite the trip.
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Soylent Green (1973)
Starring: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young
Directed by: Richard Fleischer
Written by: Stanley R. Greenberg
Altered States (1980)
Starring: William Hurt, Blair Brown
Directed by: Ken Russell
Written by: Sidney Aaron, Paddy Chayefsky
Edward Jessup (Hurt) is a Harvard scientist who starts experimenting with sensory deprivation tanks. He wants to take his work further, though, so he starts working with psychedelic mushrooms — only the type he uses makes everyone who takes them have the exact same trip.
One night while tripping balls in his tank, Jessup reverts back to the state of a Simian man. He climbs out of the tank and wreaks havoc on the lab and the campus security guards. A pack of wild dogs chases him to a local zoo, where he eats a sheep for his dinner. Jessup then returns to his human form.
His experiments transform him into increasingly troubling altered states. In one instance, he’s basically primordial soup; in another, he’s a vortex of light similar to the ones in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only thing that can bring Jessup back from these states is his wife, Emily (Brown). She starts going through these altered states with him; sort of like the ying to his yang, or the fire to his brimstone.
In Jessup’s final experiment, he becomes a sort of pre-life protoplasm. His wife is the flesh into which the protoplasm fuses, and together, they form human life. It’s through this melding that they emerge whole, and Jessup learns to value his own humanity as well as his wife (they had been on the brink of divorcing).
Videodrome (1983)
Starring: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Peter Dvorsky
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: David Cronenberg
Max Renn (Woods) runs a Toronto TV station that airs sleazy shows (softcore porn; hardcore violence), but he’s always looking for the next sensational phenomenon. His coworker Harlan (Dvorsky) is responsible for pirating signals from other broadcast stations, and he picks up a show called Videodrome that he thinks is coming from Malaysia. On Videodrome, anonymous victims are brutally tortured before they’re murdered in a chamber. Then, Randy Jackson says, “A little pitchy, dawg.” (That last part isn’t true.)
Max thinks Videodrome is the future of TV and orders Halan to start pirating it for their station. He also gets Nicki Brand (Harry), a radio host, to sleep with him after she admits she’s turned on by the events depicted on Videodrome. Around the same time, a pop-culture analyst named Professor Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who only appears on TV but is never seen in real life, predicts that television will one day supplant human life.
Harlan tells Max that the signal had actually been scrambled, and Videodrome ’s broadcast is really coming from Pittsburgh. Nicki goes there to audition to be on the show, which Max actually believes is fake. When Nicki doesn’t come back to Toronto, Max gets in touch with a feminist pornographer (Lynne Gorman), who tells him that Videodrome isn’t fake. It’s not just a TV show, either, it’s a political movement that Professor O’Blivion is behind.
Max finds O’Blivion’s office, The Cathode Ray Mission, and discovers that it provides homeless people with shelter, food, and water as long as they watch television, which was part of O’Blivion’s vision for the future. He’s actually been dead for over a year, though, and what people have been watching are hours of video he pre-taped in the event of his demise. O’Blivion’s socio-political movement, the Videodrome, is a war for the minds of North Americans.
The means of mind control is, of course, television; namely, viewing the Videodrome TV program. The show carries a signal that gives viewers malignant brain tumors. Max, who viewed Videodrome, also starts having hallucinations during which he thinks there’s a VCR in his stomach. O’Blivion didn’t want it to be used this way, though, but when he tried to stop his partners from doing so, they killed him.
Harlan actually showed Max Videodrome in order to get him to put it on the air as part of a government conspiracy to eradicate North America of homeless people. They insert a tape into the VCR in Max’s stomach (which has become real) that makes Max murder his coworkers. When he’s about to kill Professor O’Blivion’s daughter (Sonja Smits), who’s trying to stop the government’s plan to eliminate the poor, she’s able to reprogram him to instead kill Harlan, who’d been part of the government conspiracy to put Videodrome on the air.
Max shoots Harlan, then runs to an abandoned harbor. Nicki shows up on a television, saying that in order to completely defeat Videodrome, he has to "leave the old flesh behind." On the same television, we see Max shooting himself in the head. The set explodes, but when it does, it leaves behind bloody, human intestines. We then see Max, who watched the version of himself on TV shoot himself, do the same thing.
Jacob’s Ladder(1990)
Starring: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello
Directed by: Adrian Lyne
Written by: Bruce Joel Robbin
The movie starts during the Vietnam War, where an American soldier named Jacob (Robbins), loses most of his unit during an attack. He runs into the jungle and gets stabbed by a bayonet.
When he wakes up four years later, he’s on the subway in New York City reading Albert Camus' The Stranger. Jacob is living with his girlfriend Jezzie (Peña) in Brooklyn, but he remembers having a wife and three sons, the youngest of which died before the war.
Jacob keeps having disturbing experiences and seeing demons everywhere, until he’s contacted by a comrade from his old unit who went catatonic during the attack in Vietnam. The comrade recovered and is now living in NYC, but he's killed when his car explodes. At his funeral, the surviving members of Jacob’s platoon say that they’ve all been having horrible experiences.
They hire a lawyer to investigate what happened to them, but after he reads their military files that say the platoon was never actually in combat, and that the soldiers had been discharged due to psychological reasons, he backs out of the case.
All of Jacob’s comrades stop pursuing the case, but he continues his search for the truth. This gets him thrown in a car and taken to a hospital, where doctors tell him that he’s already dead.
When Jacob leaves the hospital, Michael Newman (Matt Craven), the man who treated him back in Vietnam, confesses that he was a chemist who had designed “the Ladder,” a drug that triggered aggression. A large dose had been given to Jacob’s unit, and they had actually attacked one another. Jacob recalls being bayoneted in the jungle, only this time he can see an American soldier wielding the bayonet.
Now that he knows what truly happened, Jacob feels at peace. He returns to his family’s apartment, where he sees his dead son Gabe at the bottom of the stairs. Gabe takes his hand and leads him up the stairs towards a bright light. In the final scene, Jacob is in a triage tent, where military doctors declare him dead.
The Usual Suspects(1995)
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri
Directed by: Bryan Singer
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie
While being questioned about his role in a gun battle and drug bust gone wrong, Roger “Verbal” Kint manages to convince police that he should be let off scot-free. After he leaves the station and drops his limp, his interrogators look around the room and realize that the story Verbal concocted was based entirely on objects and names he glimpsed around the room.
Kint is actually Keyser Söze, the mastermind behind the whole scheme that led to the firefight on the ship. As he says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.”
Cube (1997)
Starring: Maurice Dean Wint, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller
Directed by: Vincenzo Natali
Written by: André Bijelic, Graeme Manson, Vincenzo Natali
Imagine five prisoners being stuck inside a constantly shifting, intricately booby-trapped, complexly mathematical Rubik’s Cube. They have no idea how they got there. They think they need to somehow escape in order to survive.
That’s what Cube is about, except in the end, the sole survivor ascends into a bright light. So, is the cube purgatory? A classic prisoner’s dilemma? Cube will give you a lot to think about.
The Sixth Sense(1999)
Starring: Bruce Willis, Hayley Joel Osment
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
A child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe (Willis) and his wife (Olivia Williams) return home from an event where he was being honored. A former patient of Crowe’s is waiting in their bathroom. He shoots Crowe and then kills himself.
The movie cuts to the following autumn, when Dr. Crowe starts working with 9-year-old Cole Sear (Osment), who claims he can see dead people and also has trouble in social situations. Malcolm works with Cole to develop his gift for communicating with the dead, but the doctor grows increasingly distant from his wife. They never talk anymore.
Eventually, Malcolm realizes what happened. He was actually killed the night he was shot. He hasn’t been able to leave the land of the living because he wants to let his wife know that she never came second to his work, and that he also can’t forgive himself for failing to help the patient who killed both Malcolm and himself. Cole really does see dead people.
Fight Club (1999)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Jim Uhls
The first rule of fight club is, of course, that you don’t talk about fight club. The second rule is that you disregard that one for the purposes of this roundup, with apologies to David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel upon which the film is based.
In this nihilistic tale, an unnamed insomniac office drone (Norton) meets a rebellious soap-maker named Tyler Durden (Pitt) on a plane. The two move into a dilapidated house on the edge of town and start an underground fight club that turns into a nation-wide organization called Project Mayhem, which protests capitalism and corporate organizations.
Eventually, the narrator realizes that Tyler Durden is merely a dissociation of his own personality. He discovers that as Tyler, he’s been plotting to destroy credit card companies by blowing up their office buildings. The narrator finally shoots himself in the cheek, killing his projection of Tyler. The film ends with the narrator and his sort-of girlfriend Marla (Bonham Carter) watching the city fall to the Pixies' “Where Is My Mind.”
Memento (2000)
Starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Ann Moss, Joe Pantoliano
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nola, Jonathan Nolan
Leonard Shelby (Pearce) suffers from anterograde amnesia, which means he can’t create or store new memories. This is making it difficult to track down the man he’s certain raped and murdered his wife (Jorja Fox). To make things even more confusing, the film is told through black-and-white and color sequences, and it’s not clear to the audience which come first chronologically. It’s also unclear which characters Shelby can trust — or if he’s even trustworthy himself.
Session 9 (2001)
Starring: David Caruso, Peter Mullan, Stephen Gevedon, Josh Lucas
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Brad Anderson, Stephen Gevedon
This movie was filmed in a real mental hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, which just adds to the authentic, chilling vibe you’ll have while watching. An asbestos removal crew (Caruso, Mullan, Gevedon, Lucas, Brendan Sexton III) is tasked with cleaning an abandoned mental hospital. While on the job, they discover a box that contains tapes of nine interview sessions with a patient named Mary Hobbes.
Hobbes has dissociative identity disorder, and she has three personalities besides her own. Of these, she only displays two of them — “the Princess,” who is childlike and innocent, and Billy, who is protective and childlike. Hobbes’ third personality, Simon, is so hidden that the Princess doesn’t know anything about her, and Billy is afraid of him.
Everything starts to unravel when one of the men goes missing, and the ninth session tape is cut short, so they don’t know what happened with Mary, the Princess, Billy, and Simon. Eventually, it’s revealed that there might not be a Mary, and that Simon actually lives inside one of the men tasked with cleaning the asylum, and some members of the cleaning crew aren’t even real — they’re projections of his imagination. He murders some of the real men, though, because of course this movie is terrifying.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring
Directed by: David Lynch
Written by: David Lynch
This one’s kind of tough to explain in a simple plot synopsis, especially since there’s been so much debate about whether or not the first half of the film is actually a dream sequence. This October 2001 Salon article provides a thorough analysis of not only the film’s plot, but also what the fuck it all means. Or at least what the writers think it means, because they’re still unable to explain things like the mysterious box.
Lynch originally wrote Mulholland Drive as a television pilot for ABC. Therefore, there might actually be some storylines in the film that leave questions left unanswered, since Lynch would have been able to get to them in the longer time that a TV series allots for storytelling.
In this January 2002 article from The Guardian, however, five top film critics couldn’t come to a consensus as to whether or not the film was divided into two halves, with one being a dream and one grounded in the reality of what actually happened when Diane (Watts) put a hit on her girlfriend Camilla (Harring). Diane’s actions drive her to commit suicide.
Still, the film might be intended as a larger commentary on how Hollywood places women in boxes, only allowing ingénues to look one way, while women become disposable and easily replaceable when they reach a certain age. That might just be the most important mindfuck Mulholland Drive gives to viewers.
Donnie Darko (2001)
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore
Directed by: Richard Kelly
Written by: Richard Kelly
A high school student named Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is woken up by a monstrous rabbit who calls himself Frank. The rabbit leads Donnie outside and says the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. When Donnie returns home, he discovers that a jet engine crashed into his bedroom while he was out with Frank.
When Donnie describes Frank to his therapist (Katharine Ross), she tells his parents that he’s suffering from daylight hallucinations, which can be symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Donnie confesses to flooding his school and burning down a motivational speaker’s (Patrick Swayze) house.
Finally, it’s the day Frank prophesied the world would end. A vortex forms above the Darko house while Donnie is driving in the nearby hills. He watches an airplane fall from the sky. The events from the last 28 days start to replay in reverse chronological order. When they reach day 1, Donnie is back in his bed, laughing maniacally as a jet engine crashes into his room. Donnie dies instantly.
When he dies, all of the people with whom Donnie Darko interacted during the last 28 days start to wake up with disturbed looks on their faces. Characters who met and interacted during the course of the movie revert to being strangers, although they feel as though they know each other. They just can’t remember where or when they might have met.
Vanilla Sky(2001)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Written by: Cameron Crowe
Roger Ebert described Vanilla Sky perfectly in December 2001, “ Vanilla Sky, like the 2001 pictures Memento and Mulholland Drive before it, requires the audience to do some heavy lifting. It has one of those plots that doubles back on itself like an Escher staircase. You get along splendidly one step at a time, but when you get to the top floor you find yourself on the bottom landing. If it's any consolation, its hero is as baffled as we are; it's not that he has memory loss, like the hero of Memento, but that in a certain sense he may have no real memory at all.”
Vanilla Sky plays not only with linear structure, but with mixing dreams and reality, forcing viewers to question what’s real, what’s not, and whether or not reality is entirely subjective and surreal. It’s best to watch it rather than read a plot summary, really, but know that Tom Cruise jumps off a building at one point, and not in his usual badass Mission: Impossible type of way.
Oldboy (2003)
Starring: Choi Min-sik, Kang Hye-jung
Directed by: Park Chan-wook
Written by: Hwang Jo-yoon, Im Joon-hyeong, Park Chan-wook
Business man Oh Dae-su (Min-sik) is arrested for drunken and disorderly behavior in 1988. He misses his daughter’s 4th birthday because he is in jail. While his friend who picks him up from the police station is talking to Dae-su’s wife, he is kidnapped.
Dae-su is imprisoned with no human contact for 15 years in a hotel-like prison. He’s sometimes gassed with a mind-altering drug. Dae-su shadowboxes to pass the time. He has no contact with his captors, nor does he ever learn the reason for his kidnapping.
Fifteen years later, Dae-su is released onto a rooftop. His captor gives him a suit and some money, but he also calls and taunts him. Dae-su then befriends a young chef named Mi-do (Hye-jung), who takes him to her apartment after he collapses at her sushi restaurant.
Dae-su wants to track down his daughter, but all he can find out is that she was adopted by a Swedish couple. He turns his attention to his captor’s identity. He finally learns that his name is Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae). Woo-jin gives Dae-su an ultimatum: If Dae-su can figure out why Woo-jin kept him captive in the next five days, Woo-jin will kill himself. If Dae-su doesn’t succeed in finding out, Woo-jin will have Mi-do — with whom Dae-su has begun an emotional and sexual relationship — killed.
Dae-su remembers that he and Woo-jin went to the same high school, and that he saw an incestutous encounter between Woo-jin and his sister Soo-ah. Dae-su spread the rumor about their relationship around the school, not knowing they were related. Soo-ah committed suicide after the rumor made the rounds.
Dae-su admits to Woo-jin that he drove his sister to commit suicide. Woo-jin tells Dae-su that his revenge has been meticulous and carefully plotted. First, he captured Dae-su and kept him in prison for 15 years, periodically administering hypnotic drugs. Then, he planted the false evidence that Dae-su’s daughter had been kidnapped by a Swedish couple. In reality, Dae-su’s daughter is none other than Mi-do. Woo-jin drove Dae-su to commit incest with his own daughter, and he plans to tell Mi-do what has happened as well.
Dae-su begs Woo-jin to spare Mi-do from learning this information. Dae-su cuts out his tongue to show that he will never convey this information, or any other secrets, himself. Woo-jin says he will heed this request, leaves, and shoots himself.
Dae-su goes to a hypnotist to have the memories of committing incest with his daughter erased, but afterward, Mi-do finds him and tells him she loves him. He smiles when he hears this, but then his smile is replaced by a pained expression, as if he’s remembering what he went to the hypnotist to forget.
The Machinist (2004)
Starring: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Scott Kosar
A machinist named Trevor Reznik (Bale) is suffering from severe insomnia and has become extremely emaciated. Trevor is also troubled by mysterious Post-It notes that appear on his fridge, which have a game of Hangman on them. It starts to affect his work to the point where one of his coworkers (Michael Ironside) loses his arm in a machine accident. His coworkers blame Trevor for the accident, but he blames a mysterious new machinist named Ivan (John Sharian) that only Trevor seems to know about.
Trevor does have some brief moments of relief. He spends time with Stevie (Leigh), a prostitute, who enjoys his company. He meets a waitress named Maria (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) at the airport diner he frequents and takes Maria and her son Nicholas (Matthew Romero) to a carnival. At the carnival, though, Nicholas has a seizure in a funhouse.
Trevor thinks all of these mysterious events are part of an elaborate plot to drive him insane. His life begins to fall apart even more: He explodes at a coworker and gets fired. He doesn’t pay his utility bill, and the electricity in his apartment is turned off. He thinks blood is seeping out of his freezer.
Trevor thinks that Ivan is the source of his problems, so he goes to the DMV to track him down using his license plate number. They refuse to give it to him, so he goes to the police, saying that he was a victim of a hit and run, and that Ivan was the perpetrator. When Trevor gives the police Ivan’s license plate number, they tell him that the car to which that plate matches is registered to Trevor, not the mysterious Ivan.
Eventually, Trevor pieces together the details of what happened. There is no Maria, nor is there a Nicholas. He was the one who hit a boy who looked identical to Nicholas a year ago — which his mother (who looked exactly like Maria) witnessed — and then drove away. At the time, Trevor looked much healthier. The guilt over the hit and run is what led him to his current emaciated, insomniac state. The mysterious Post-It notes have actually been coming from him (he’s been dissociating), and the hangman game spells out “KILLER.”
The movie ends with Trevor going to the police to confess his crime. They lead him to a cell, and he falls asleep for the first time since the accident.
TPrimer (2004)
Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden
Directed by: Shane Carruth
Written by: Shane Carruth
Primer is considered one of the most confusing movies of all time. People have even mapped out the various timelines in an attempt to explain the plot. Writer/director/star Shane Carruth has a degree in mathematics and is a former engineer, so the film delves into complex temporal anomalies.
Two engineers named Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (Sullivan) create a person-sized box in which a human can travel through time. They try to carefully map out rules for their time traveling to avoid meeting their past or future selves and messing up the past, present, or future.
Abe and Aaron’s different personalities lead to confrontations over how they should use the box and the way in which their collaboration in the experiment should play out. They try to use their time traveling ability to make profitable stock trades, but their future selves keep appearing in their present timelines, causing increasingly escalating problems in their lives. They also cause trouble in other people’s lives; for example, Abe’s girlfriend Rachel (Samantha Thomson) almost gets shot.
During an epilogue, it’s revealed that multiple versions of Aaron still exist, and at least one future version is colluding with the original one. Abe, on the other hand, wants to keep his present self in the dark about what Future Abe knows. In the final scene, Aaron is directing the construction of a warehouse-sized box.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004)
Starring: Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey
Directed by: Michel Gondry
Written by: Charlie Kaufman
Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Winslet) meet on a train from Montauk to Rockville Centre on Long Island, New York. What they don’t know is that they’ve met before. They were even in a relationship before, but Clementine hired a firm called Lacuna, Inc., to erase her memories of their relationship after a fight, and when Joel heard about this, he decided to do the same.
Joel doesn’t want Clementine to be erased from his memory, though, and he struggles to preserve the moments they had together by hiding them deep in his subconscious. The last thing he can remember her saying is to meet him in Montauk.
After they meet again on the train, they discover their Lacuna records. Even though they know they dated, broke up, and had their relationship erased from their minds before, they decide to give it another chance.
Atonement (2007)
Starring: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan
Directed by: Joe Wright
Written by: Christopher Hampton
This adaptation of Iwan McEwan’s novel of the same name earns a spot on the mindfuck movies list simply because of how it completely rips the rug out from under you at the end. There you are, thinking Briony (played by Ronan at 13, Romola Garai at 18, and Redgrave as an older woman) is writing this story to atone for her huge lie, and there's going to be a romantic, happy ending. That lie being how she falsely accused Robbie Turner (McAvoy) of raping Briony’s visiting cousin Lola (Juno Temple), which completely ruined not only his life, but that of her sister Cecilia (Knightley).
The incident tears Briony and Cecilia’s family apart, because Cecilia stands by Robbie; knowing he’s been falsely accused. Years later, Briony describes visiting Robbie and Cecilia, who are now married, to apologize. Cecilia says she can never forgive her, while Robbie demands Briony tell both her family and the authorities what really happened. Even if Briony were to tell the authorities; however, nothing could be done, because Lola actually married her rapist (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Decades pass, and Briony is now an author. Her final novel (she is dying of vascular dementia) is called Atonement. She gives an interview about the book in which she reveals that it’s only semi-autobiographical. While most of the beginning is true to life, the part where she visits Cecilia and Robbie is fabricated. Briony was never able to visit them to ask for forgiveness because they never met again after Robbie left to fight in World War II. He died at Dunkirk, and Cecilia died shortly after during The Blitz. Oh cruel, cruel fate.
Triangle (2009)
Starring: Melissa George, Michael Dorman
Directed by: Christopher Smith
Written by: Christopher Smith
Jess (Melissa George) goes on a boat trip with a group of friends. The boat capsizes in a storm, and the group survives by climbing on the upturned vessel. They spot an ocean liner and board it, only to find it deserted. Jess experiences a flash of déjà vu once on board the ship, and she also gets the feeling that there’s someone else there.
One by one, the members of the group begin to die. Some of them are shot by a mysterious masked shooter, who then chases Jess, but she’s able to push the shooter overboard.
After everyone in her group dies, and Jess is left alone, she hears yelling. She sees herself and the others alive again. They’re standing on the capsized boat in the same position they were in before they boarded the ocean liner. Jess realizes that she’s stuck in a time loop, and she’s actually the figure on the ship who killed her friends.
Inception (2010)
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan
Dominick Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team enter the dreams of executives to steal corporate secrets. In the big heist depicted in the movie, the team has a new type of challenge: plant an idea into a CEO’s (Cillian Murphy) subconscious, which the businessman (Ken Watanabe) tasking them with the job calls inception.
Cobb is also struggling with guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who committed suicide after the two spent 50 years in a shared dreamscape and couldn’t distinguish between dreams and reality when they woke up. Cobb’s guilt causes problems with his team’s current mission, because he keeps projecting Mal into dreamscapes.
As the team travels into deeper and deeper levels of the dream labyrinth architected by Ariadne (Page), there’s more room for error, which obviously occurs. After Inception came out, people spent hours trying to map out the various levels of the dream landscapes into which the team traveled. Finally, Christopher Nolan released his hand-drawn version of the map to help viewers understand.
Audiences were also confused by the film’s ending. The movie’s last shot is of Cobb’s totem — an object the dream-invaders use to determine if they’re still in a dream or back in reality — a spinning top. If the top keeps spinning, he’s probably stuck in someone else’s dream. If it stops, he’s back in reality. Inception ends before we can see what happens to the top. Does it keep spinning, or does it fall?
Nolan finally explained the ambiguous ending during the commencement speech he delivered to Princeton’s class of 2015. He said it didn’t matter if Cobb was awake or dreaming, because he’d been reunited with his children, which is all he really wanted. “He was in his own subjective reality. He didn’t really care any more, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid,” Nolan said.
Black Swan(2010)
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin
Nina Sayers (Portman) has spent her entire life striving to be a perfect ballerina. It’s an obsession fueled by her stage mother (Hershey). When Sayers is cast as the White Swan in her company’s upcoming production of Swan Lake opposite a more easygoing newcomer (Mila Kunis) as the Black Swan, she begins to have a complete mental, emotional, and physical breakdown.
Holy Motors(2012)
Starring: Denis Lavant, Édith Scob, Élise L'Homea
Directed by: Leos Carax
Written by: Leos Carax
Monsieur Oscar (Lavant) appears to be a regular businessman until he enters a limo in the morning after having breakfast with his wife and children. Once in the car, he receives a dossier from his driver, Madame Céline (Scob), and takes off his banker disguise. He puts on a different costume; now, Oscar is an elderly beggar who walks the streets of Paris, asking for money.
Oscar is actually an actor, but his roles exist in the real world. Throughout the day, he returns to the limousine for more assignments from Céline. These take him everywhere from a motion-capture studio to a high-fashion photoshoot with a top model (played by Eva Mendes).
Even when Oscar gets physically injured while in character, he’s unscathed when he returns to the limo. At times, he interacts with characters that look identical to ones he played earlier in the day. Towards the end of the day, he meets a woman named Léa (L'Homea), who calls him “uncle.” Oscar pretends to die, and Léa cries.
At this next appointment, Céline pulls the car up next to an identical limo. Inside is a woman named Eva (Kylie Minogue), with whom it’s implied Oscar actually has a child. However, Eva appears to be an actress like Oscar, and she tells him that she has an appointment. She’ll be stepping into the role of a flight attendant who spends her final night in an empty building with a man. Oscar leaves the building so that Eva can meet up with the man, but he then sees the two jump to their deaths. Oscar cries as he runs past their bodies and gets in the limo.
At his last appointment, Céline hands Oscar a dossier saying that he’ll be going to “your house” to meet up with “your wife” and “your daughter.” When he goes inside; however, his wife and child are actually chimpanzees.
Now that the day is over, Céline takes the limo to the Holy Motors garage, which is filled with many limousines of the same make and model. She leaves for the night after covering her face with a mask. After Céline is gone, the cars start talking to each other, worrying about becoming obsolete.
Upstream Color (2013)
Starring: Shane Carruth, Amy Seimetz, Thiago Martins
Directed by: Shane Carruth
Written by: Shane Carruth
Yup, it’s another Shane Carruth mindfuck masterpiece. In this one, a man called the Thief (Martins) kidnaps Kris (Seimetz) at a nightclub and drugs her. He keeps her in a hypnotic state of distraction, using techniques like getting her to transcribe Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on a paper chain. The Thief starves Kris so that he can infect her with a type of live larva that he harvests from blue orchids. He also manipulates her into liquidating her home equity and giving him the money.
When the Thief drops Kris off at her home, she wakes up ravenous with roundworms crawling under her skin, which she tries to remove with a kitchen knife. She fails at this.
A man called the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig) lures Kris to his farm so he can transfer the roundworms from her body a young pig’s. Again, Kris wakes up with no memory of what has happened to her. When she gets home, she sees the blood on her sheets from when she tried to remove the worms. Scared, she calls the police, but she hangs up because she’s not sure what she would tell them happened. Kris tries to return to work, but she gets fired after her unexcused absence. She tries to buy food at the grocery store, but the Thief has stolen all of her money.
One year later, Kris encounters a man named Jeff (Carruth) on a train, and the two have an almost telepathic connection. When they spend the night together, they realize they have identical scars — they were both infected by the larva and then had the roundworms removed, but they also have no memory of this happening. Like Kris, Jeff also had his personal funds stolen by the Thief. He then lost his job after trying to embezzle money from his brokerage firm to cover his tracks.
Kris and Jeff also have a telepathic connection with the pigs that received their worm transfusions, although they don’t know this. That’s another part of the worm-pig-orchid cycle, as Shane Carruth calls it. The Sampler is able to check in on people who are telepathically connected with the pig’s lives, and he writes songs about them. He sells these songs through a company called the Quinoa Valley Rec. Co.
When one of the pigs gets pregnant, Kris thinks she's pregnant. The doctor tells her she isn’t; she actually had endometrial cancer, which was removed, and is now infertile. When the pig gives birth, the Sampler throws her piglets into a sack, which he tosses into the river.
This sends Kris and Jeff into a deep depression. They turn against everyone else in their lives and hunker down in Kris’ house, expecting the worst. While this is happening, we see the sack with the piglet’s corpses, from which a blue substance — the same blue as the orchids the Thief extracted the larva from in the beginning — is traveling upstream into the surrounding waters. Orchids are growing out of the water, and farmers are collecting the blue flowers to sell.
Kris, Jeff, and the Sampler slowly start to remember the things that have happened to them. Kris starts mumbling Walden. In a dream, the three of them sit down together and discuss being aware of each other before the Sampler has a heart attack. Back in reality, Kris and Jeff are on the pig farm. She shoots the Sampler, and he dies.
Kris and Jeff find records of everyone who has been drugged the way they were and get them to come to the farm by sending them copies of Walden. They remodel the farm and start providing a better life for the pigs. No more pigs are drowned, so the Thief has no more blue orchids from which to get larva and start the worm-pig-orchid cycle again.
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