Beau is Afraid was the last one I recall. I think it was mostly the latter half of the movie where I started to get a bit confused and needed the ending explained to me.
What movies made you look up some kind of explanation afterwards? I feel like I have done it several times in the past for more surreal movies but can’t think of any other examples.
It can also be a TV show.
Primer. Watched it twice in a row. Then went online to read about it too.
As soon as I read the title of this post, I knew that Primer would be one of the first comments.
You are not alone, that is the hardest time loop movie to wrap your head around.
I’m gonna have to open that on a monitor.
I didn’t grasp the implications of the final scene with Aaron and the workers until I checked the plot write-up on Wikipedia.
Came here for this, glad to be beaten to it. I’ve seen this movie three times and I’m still not sure I could actually explain it.
Ha, me neither. Love everything about the movie though. The fact that Shane did everything for this movie (wrote, directed, produced, acted, music, editing), it was made on such a small budget (7k I think), and shot over 5 weeks, yet it really doesn’t feel “cheap” when you watch it, is such an achievement.
I was going to say this, but I figured I could just scroll until I found where someone else inevitably said it.
By the end, I was just letting the drama wash over me and not even trying to sort out which version of who was doing what in which timeline.
And honestly, I suspect that that’s the best way to appreciate it anyway.
Mulholland Drive
I think all of David Lynch’s movies could fit here. I tried watching his mini-series “Rabbits” over and over to understand, and I still have no idea what it’s really meant to be about.
The Lighthouse. I really liked the movie but I would be lying if I said I understood it after watching it.
I watched that movie with my dad.
We were both equally confused and all the unexpected masturbation made it a tad awkward
I’ll bet. What about the masturbation in the movie?
lol
- mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky)
- Enemy (2013, Denis Villeneuve)
- Men (2022, Alex Garland)
- Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer)
- Us (2019, Jordan Peele)
- Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)
- The Neon Demon (2016, Nicolas Winding Refn)
- Tideland, (2005, Terry Gilliam)
And a bunch more.
Honestly it seems like a lot of Aronofsky films are deeper than they appear at surface level.
Loved Pi back in the day.
I didn’t exactly need the ending explained, but Everything Everywhere All At Once has so much going on that I got really hyper focused on looking up commentary for everything in the movie. There were a lot of things I missed so I found it really valuable beyond just wanting to deep dive every little detail haha.
Surprisingly, after all the hype of Interstellar being incredibly confusing, I felt like I missed something because it seemed fairly straightforward (not the plot, which was obviously convoluted, just that I understood the ending). Then I looked up explanations of the ending and they fit my interpretation so that was a bit anticlimactic lol
The Green Knight (2021)
2001 A space Odyssey
No country for old Men.
*Annihilation.
The more I read about 2001 and the more I watch it the more I love it!
2001 was a movie that made me go “wait, what? People like this?”
I heard it come up so often and was excited to watch it. Absolutely hated. One of the worst movies I’ve ever watched. I had to look it up a lot after I watched it because I was sure I had to be missing something big. But no, I wasn’t. Really not my kind of movie, I guess.
I mean, it was groundbreaking for its time and it redefined the genre and a lot of moviemaking in general, but it really didn’t age well as far as moviemaking goes. Yeah, it has severe pacing issues, is undeservedly way too long and it got way too trippy and abstract by the end. Frankly a whole lot of it feels like Kubrick masturbating over how great he is, with a lot of scenes being way too long and serving no real or useful purpose on on the movie.
I could say pretty much the same about Solaris too (the original Tarkovsky version which cinephiles always rave about, not Soderbergh"s, which I actually prefer), and if rumors are true, apparently Kubrick took a lot of ideas from it.
And I say all that as an avid sci-fi fan. The books from Arthur C. Clarke are more enjoyable.
Have you read Rob Ager’s analysis?
Cloud Atlas (2012)
I didn’t think the plot of the film was too confusing, but trying to keep track of which cast member played which character in each respective time period while watching the film was challenging.
It took me like half the movie to understand the pidgin for New Hawaii.
The book doesn’t jump around. Each story is like a book opened to the halfway point, with another book inserted. They’re all nested like this down to New Hawaii, which plays through straight, before finishing each story in turn.
I love ambitious (if somewhat failed) movies like this, and I’m not really sure if the Wachowskis could have done a better job.
I completely agree with the last sentiment you shared! I think of Cloud Atlas as a flawed gem and am glad to have watched it at least once.
Memento is the most extreme cases of this I’ve ever experienced. A week later, I was still walking around with a notebook, slide rule, and french curve trying to work out what the hell actually happened in that bitch.
Have you tried watching it while on drugs
naked lunch. i think i read everything and was still confused.
Les Revenants (The Returned). French series about a village where deceased residents start coming back from the dead. The ending was good, but there was a lot of ambiguity about what happened and why it stopped. I went down the rabbit hole and found some compelling reddit threads that tied it up rather neatly.
Papillon
Not the remake (why was this even made.)
It’s a totally straightforward film. But it just gives me some powerful vibes that I can’t put my finger on. I think there are some deeper underlying themes and I wish to understand them better.
The wiki for Bird Box told me a hell of a lot more about what was going on than the actual movie did.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) English2•9 months ago
Dark. It was a struggle to track who was doing what, when, and why
Not really for an explanation, but I looked up the original short story Total Recall (the 90’s version) was based on to see if it concretely says if everything was real or if everything was just in the protagonist’s head and it just cemented it for me that the story is way more ambiguous, and the Arnold film was taking the “it’s all real” approach.
The is this real or a dream idea was a major theme in many of Phillip K Dick’s works. Considering he wrote many of his novels and short stories while off his face on amphetamines and a cocktail of other drugs i guess it should not be much of a surprise.
I wonder if that is a reason so many of his works have been adapted for the screen. Eg:
A Scanner Darkly
Blade Runner
Total Recall
Minority Report
The Adjustment Bureau
Paycheck
Screamers
Impostor
The Crystal Crypt
Next
Paycheck
The time travel thing with Ben Affleck was written by the same guy as Blade Runner and Total Recall? Whoa.
I guess I’ll also have to see Imposter and The Crystal Crypt; they’re the only two on that list I’ve not seen or even heard of before now, but everything else was pretty cool.