8 Brilliant Mind-Bending Movies That You Need To See

There are a hell of a lot of movies out there which are essentially the same films with different faces. This familiarity can be exhausting, so when you see a movie that mixes things up a bit and has the audacity to put your brain in a blender, it can be a truly uplifting experience. It's nice to stretch your mind once in a while and take in something that's a little different. Listed in this article are movies that shake things up so much that by the time the credits roll, you're left feeling like a peppercorn that's been in a grinder. These films are outrageous, weird and head-scratchingly brilliant pieces of cinema. Not quite avant-garde to the point where everything is utterly nonsensical, but rather breaking codes of convention whilst adhering to many of the movie laws that kind of need to stay in place to keep audiences entertained. If you fancy giving yourself a vicarious, dizzy thrill akin to a repeated roller-coaster ride around the pages of a giant philosophy compilation textbook, then these 8 movies are a good place to start. 8) Videodrome Sometimes it feels as though David Cronenberg directs his movies with a hundred different arms protruding from his one body. Not only do his projects seem to contain an abundance of different things happening in every corner of the screen, but they're all often implemented in a weird, weird way. Videodrome is the epitome of the creepy-crawly cinema of Cronenberg: the sort of movie that's gross on the surface but still manages to burrow its way into your brain with subtle, unsettling themes at the same time. James Woods stars as an early 1980's TV executive who discovers a plotless show called Videodrome that depicts mindless torture sequences. After deciding that he wants the show broadcasted on his network, he begins to uncover the world behind the evil programme - a world that blurs the line between television and reality. The movie grows increasingly hallucinogenic and grotesque with each frame, eventually reaching a point where Woods is a thousand miles away from the character he was at the beginning of the movie. His charm and wit vanish behind a blank stare, and as Videodrome completes the last lap through a series of manic episodes, we as viewers are left looking very much the same way. The sticky, gooey mutated flesh that's evident in the likes of The Fly is on show in full force during Videodrome, which manages to come across as sort of campy yet revolting at the same time. One scene that can still be admired is the throbbing, exhaling television set, which morphs so vividly that at one point the screen appears to gulp up Woods' own head. The themes in Videodrome are quintessentially '80's on the surface, but all you need to do is take a look around at the world's current climate to discover how relevant they are today. Several of the special-effects have worn way past their expiry date, but the concepts such as a human stomach opening up to create its very own human video player are still as unsettling and bizarre as ever. Again, like with many Cronenberg movies, you're left with the film eating away at you; conflicted between wanting to applaud or curse the director for doing this to you yet again. 7) Synecdoche, New York I defy anyone to be able to explain Synecdoche, New York with any sort of success or accuracy after watching it the first time round. Charlie Kauffman's movie is a project so complex, multi-dimensional and mind-warping, that it may take two, three, or even four viewings to truly understand it. Even then there will remain aspects that you try to grasp, but force your hand to close on thin air. The late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a worn, depleted theatre director who takes on a new project that he decides to completely throw himself into. As the play expands, his reality and his project begin to gradually intersect with one another, blurring the line between his real life and his dreams. Endlessly layered and supremely intelligent, Synecdoche, New York is unrivalled by many in the way it so aptly mirrors human life: Simple on the surface yet wildly complex underneath. There are no eye-popping special-effects to portray the inside of the protagonist's mind; just simple aesthetics that we're all familiar with. Life is deep and meaningful enough without dazzling computer-generated effects dancing on top of it. Synecdoche, New York knows this, and shows it. And it's wonderful. 6) Being John Malkovich Being John Malkovich is smart, satirical, intriguing, darkly funny, weird, and originally original in every sense. The movie tells the story of a greasy puppeteer named Craig. He is an eerie and peculiar character who one day discovers a portal into the head of the actor John Malkovich, and is more than happy to escape away from the discomfort of his own skin and into someone else's. Charlie Kauffman's movie flips everything on its head, from turning glamorous Hollywood poster-people John Cusack and Cameron Diaz into haggered oddballs, to a reinterpretation of how people love one another. Malkovich himself admitted that he was kind of horrified when he learnt about the script, and understandably so given how the movie turns the inside of the actor's mind into a portal to be experienced by a wiling group of crackpots desperate to escape their own lives. The movie is one of the most imaginative spectacles you're ever likely to see, filled with wonderful performances and pushed on through some wonderful twists and turns. If the premise sounds a little too odd for you to stomach, Being John Malkovich is probably still worth taking a look at just to see the scene where Charlie Sheen (playing himself like always except this time using his actual real name) discusses the effects of getting stoned with the eponymous star. At least there's a little bit of familiarity in that scene. 5) Edge of Tomorrow What makes Edge of Tomorrow quite so spectacular is how it makes a wildly complicated idea appear as little more than simple fodder for a glossy blockbuster movie. Repeated time loops are not as easy to convey as they might seem, and are even more tricky to make into solid entertainment - even if the effortless Groundhog Day did fool us into thinking it was a piece of cake. Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill, the movie stars Tom Cruise as William Cage - a public affairs officer who is unwillingly thrust into a deadly war with an alien race attacking the earth known as "Mimics." His first venture into the war-zone ends horrifically as he is promptly disintegrated by one of the attacking creatures, only to wake up where he was the previous day - in preparation to go to war. Cage continues to repeat the same day, repeatedly slaughtered on the battlefield, as his pleas repeatedly fall on deaf ears all around him. There's an admirable amount of substance to the movie, which throws some positively evil creatures at its star as he uses his knowledge of the day to try and win the war all by himself. Cruise is superb, with Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton also impressing in supporting roles that require a hell of a lot of patience, persistence and discipline. Director Doug Liman never gets ahead of himself either, managing to depict the same day in different ways to a consistently thrilling degree. The only thing that fails about Edge of Tomorrow is its generic and forgettable title, which now arrives on DVD with the tagline Live. Die. Repeat. 4) Eyes Wide Shut In a career that spanned four decades, Stanley Kubrick's ambitiousness as a filmmaker never faltered. In many ways, his final movie - a 1999 erotic fantasy thriller named Eyes Wide Shut - was perhaps his most daring of all. Kubrick was an infamous perfectionist, and some have argued that the amount of sheer energy and imagination he put into this movie might have contributed to his fatal heart attack that came at the age of 70. Eyes Wide Shut is a fitting final cut for a master of the cinematic art form. A dizzying delve into the human psyche, with two of Hollywood's hottest stars at its centre in Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the movie examines the aspects of love, jealousy, trust, paranoia, and most prominently, sexual desire. The movie has the same sickly creepiness of an earlier Kubrick work in The Shining, but manifests itself in the form of a moody erotic drama as opposed to a horror movie. Littered with Venetian masks, frowning faces, and a whole lot of writhing, sweaty bodies, Eyes Wide Shut is a loopy mind-trip about fierce sexual cravings. It's pure mind-bending adult brilliance. 3) Waking Life Few films manage to so patiently and powerfully bring into question the legitimacy of our immediate surroundings like Waking Life. A selection of philosophical musings brought to life by advanced interpolated rotoscoping animation, the movie is fascinating and illuminating without ever coming across as self-righteous. All it wants to do is ask questions and break barriers - and it does this on the surface through use of a innovative animation technique, as well as through the questions that its characters ask in their dialogue. The movie appears to be one big dream, with the animation refusing to sit still for as little as a second. For the most part, we follow a nameless protagonist played by Wiley Wiggins, who drifts between conversations with intellectuals, and is sometimes never present at all. Every character in Waking Life has something to ponder and something to muse, and we're sucked into their woozy worlds by the dancing animation (created by filming as normal and then scribbling over the top of the camera footage). Directed by Richard Linklater - who undoubtedly remains one of the most important filmmakers of our generation - Waking Life is colorful and inquisitive from beginning to end; wonderfully recreating the sensation of dreaming with admirable accuracy. It's rare to come across a film that makes you want to expand your horizons and take a look at what might lie beyond the surface of ordinary life. 2) Holy Motors Holy Motors begins with a man waking up from a deep sleep, and discovering a door in his house that leads into a busy cinema. The man is Leon Carax - the director of Holy Motors - and he appears to have wandered into a movie screening within his own movie. Right from the off, we have a mind-bending meta-movie on our hands. Or do we? I'm not sure if anything in Holy Motors is supposed to add up, but there's enough substance scattered across the movie to make some sense of it if you really wanted. Arguably, that's the genius of Carax's mind-boggling feature: it can kind of be anything that you want it to be. There appears to be no limit to what form Holy Motor's protagonist can take. Beginning as a man named Oscar, he continues to adopt different characters depending on where he is driven to in his very own limousine. These include a gangster, a concerned father, a vicious kidnapper, a dying old man, and a sex simulation double. The mise-en-scene morphs with him as he darts between these "appointments," with the movie offering no coherent storyline other than the constant return to his limousine - driven by a woman named Celine - and a preparation for the next act/job/performance, or whatever it is. Holy Motors is strange enough to etch a furrowed brow into your features for time immemorial. But it'd probably be worth it. In in a twisted, infuriating way, it really is a spectacular piece of cinema. 1) Mulholland Drive Hauntingly beautiful and beautifully haunting, Mulholland Drive is a vivid dreamlike movie evoking every kind of emotion your mind is capable of producing, before contorting them into some other feelings you can't quite explain. I've yet to see a movie that becomes so much more compelling whilst it simultaneously becomes nonsensical. It's everything that cinema can do best, and more. Starring Naomi Watts as an aspiring actress attempting to break into Hollywood, David Lynch's film jumbles up the narrative, provides characters with multiple identities, and sets us up with a barrage of false narrative cues. Watts assumes a couple of names in the movie but never seems to know what's truly going on, and we align ourselves with her as a result. The plot is purposely peppered, yet every single scene holds an emotional resonance. We're never quite sure who these people are, but we care about them enough to try and discover more; piecing together their behaviour, their desires, their dreams, and their outcomes. Mulholland Drive like a picture puzzle of a serene blue sea: ultimately mesmerizing regardless of whichever way you put it together. It's typical Lynch, and it's typically brilliant.