Mind-Bending Movies: 25 Films That Mess With Your Head
Some movies you watch. Others you argue about in the car on the way home, and look up at 1am, and rewatch a week later just to check if you were right.
This list is for the second kind. We built a Mind-Bending Movies playlist: 25 films that play with time, memory and what's real. Ten of them score a perfect 4 for Novelty on Quartile, which is exactly what you'd hope from a movie that's trying to break your brain a little.
Reality isn't what it seems
Inception is the obvious place to start: dreams inside dreams inside dreams, a city folding over itself, and a spinning top that people are still arguing about. The Matrix asked whether the world is real and then made bullet time the coolest thing anyone had seen. The Truman Show is the friendliest version of the same fear, a man who slowly figures out his whole life is a TV show. Shutter Island is best watched knowing as little as possible. And Paprika is Satoshi Kon's anime about a machine that lets you enter other people's dreams, and once you've seen it you'll spot its fingerprints everywhere.
Time is broken
Primer is two engineers who accidentally build a time machine in a garage, made on a famously tiny budget and so dense that people draw diagrams to follow it. Predestination is a time-travel loop that keeps folding back on itself until the last scene. Tenet runs time backwards and forwards in the same fight scene. Twelve Monkeys sends Bruce Willis back to stop a plague, with nobody believing a word he says. And Coherence is a dinner party on the night a comet passes overhead, and it gets very strange very fast for a movie that never leaves the house.
Memory and identity
Memento tells its story backwards because its hero can't make new memories, so you're as lost as he is. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a breakup movie where you can erase the other person, and it's the most romantic film on this list. Fight Club needs no introduction, and you know the first rule. Enemy finds Jake Gyllenhaal meeting his exact double, and it has one of the most talked-about final shots of the decade. Moon is Sam Rockwell alone on a lunar base near the end of his contract, until he isn't. Mulholland Drive is David Lynch's Los Angeles running on pure dream logic. And Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon again, is a pop star turned actress who stops being sure which version of herself is real.
Big ideas
2001: A Space Odyssey is still the biggest swing ever taken in science fiction. Arrival is about learning an alien language, and what that does to the way you experience time. It's tied for the highest Q on this list. Interstellar turns black-hole physics into a story about a father and a daughter. Ex Machina is a Turing test that goes in a direction nobody in the room planned for. Everything Everywhere All at Once takes a laundromat owner through the whole multiverse and somehow lands as a movie about family. And Being John Malkovich has a small door on floor seven and a half that leads directly into John Malkovich's head.
The twist you didn't see coming
The Prestige is two rival magicians, and the film is built like one of their tricks. Watch closely. And Donnie Darko is a jet engine, a giant rabbit named Frank and a countdown, and it's still one of the great cult movies.
Every film in the playlist links to its Quartile page, where you can see how it scores across Plot, Acting, Cinematography, Novelty and Ending, and where it's streaming. Watch one tonight and rate it while it's still rattling around your head.
Explore the full Mind-Bending Movies playlist →