11 Movies That Will Make You Go “Huh?”

When you watch a lot of movies, every once in a while you’ll come across one that baffles you, and the range of reactions to this encounter are pretty fascinating. These types of movies aren’t simply the mindtrip types of movies like Inception or Memento that are labyrinthine in terms of their plot progression but are fairly clear by the end in what they’re about. Truly confusing movies, the type where you’re left wondering what the hell you just watched and what the point of it even being made could have been, can create responses anywhere from anger and resentment towards seemingly pretentious filmmakers to delight in the abstract, personal meaning a viewer can derive from something deliberately vague or opaque. I watched Upstream Color recently. It’s the new film from director and indie hero Shane Carruth who is known for his 2004 microbudget science fiction film Primer. Upstream Color played at this past Sundance Film Festival and was met with almost universal praise from the critics who reviewed it. What was also universal was the confusion surrounding what had happened in the movie, what it was supposed to mean, what it was all about, and this was largely considered a positive. When I watched it, I felt like a moron, but I also kind of liked it the way other people did even if it made me like myself less. I envied and resented Shane Carruth. I went through a range of emotions that one tends to feel any time some heralded piece of art is put before them. It was annoying and exciting. So I thought I’d consider other movies that have had a similar effect on audiences. Here are 11 confusing movies that are sure to stupefy and bewilder the best of us. 1) Primer If you only get a chance to see one time travel movie that was made for under $10,000 in your lifetime, I would strongly urge you to consider making it Primer. But it is also virtually guaranteed to make your head hurt. I just took a moment to read over the Wikipedia summary and my mind feels like mush now. Much like Carruth’s new film Upstream Color, Primer never goes out of its way to explain anything about what’s going on with its characters. It’s the type of lack of exposition people long for when they see a movie they consider overly explanatory like Inception, but then also complain about when it comes to a movie like Primer. The premise of the movie itself is simple yet brilliant. A group of engineer friends accidentally stumble on a time travel invention while working in their garage. The implications of such a discovery are obvious and massive, and the way the film plays out these necessary consequences feels true. It also depicts scientists as scientists, in the way specialists would discuss matters with each other, as opposed to many movies where it feels as though these experts are explaining everything to the audience while they’re supposed to be talking to each other. This leads to more confusion of course, but the feeling of not knowing what the hell is going on becomes one of this movie’s endearing pleasures rather than an obstacle. The time we spend trying to wrap our minds around which character is where and when at any given moment mirrors the characters themselves who undoubtedly have a lot to process cerebrally while they’re busy traveling through space and time. 2) Cloud Atlas This list could easily include other Wachowski works like the entire Matrix trilogy, yes even Reloaded and Revolutions, or the beautiful hot mess that was Speed Racer. It could also include Tom Tykwer’s previous film Perfume, which both suffers from and subsequently plays with the fact that film is still a medium that cannot engage all of our senses, such as smell. So when these three filmmakers with PhDs in WTF Studies teamed up to adapt David Mitchell’s renowned and widely regarded as unfilmable novel, the finished product unsurprisingly served a sizeable helping of what the what. The movie contains a puzzling plot like some of the aforementioned movies, in the sense that it can be difficult to string together what happens when and to whom, but also in the sense that it’s separated into pieces that we’re left to put together by the end. There are storylines taking place in the past couple of centuries, in the present, and in the distant future, the last of which is as unrecognizable a world as such a future world would logically be. The movie is polarizing even in the opinion of whether it is too obvious or too vexing, whether the connections between the stories is spelled out too plainly or not clearly enough to make it the least bit engaging. I found it to be intellectually puzzling and emotionally affecting. But especially in the scenes where Tom Hanks is speaking in dialect, I pretty much had a permanent single eyebrow raise going for the whole thing. 3) Holy Motors I still don’t know what the hell to make of Holy Motors. You’ve got this weird little man who traipses through the streets over the course of a day and night, apparently doing his job which consists of acting out bizarre scenes with other people. Odder still is that one of the first scenes that he participates in, performing in a motion capture suit with a partner in a kind of dance that seems meant to be some kind of sex simulation, is unbelievably beautiful and compelling in a way that keeps you entranced throughout. This is then followed by him changing costumes into a crazy street person who eats plants and assaults people. Pretty charming. None of it is meant to make too much sense, I don’t think, although plenty of critics have speculated about possible meanings contained within Holy Motors, such as the whole thing acting as a commentary on the state of cinema and the transition from film to digital technologies or something. I’m less than convinced of this. What I am convinced of is that this is a mystifying and wonderful movie, puzzling in what it’s supposed to express (if anything that specific) yet seemingly certain of what it has set out to achieve. It’s not jaw-dropping in the Spielberg sense, but perhaps in the way seeing an artist going absolutely ball-out, so to speak, can leave your jaw on the floor in amazement and incomprehension. 4) Mulholland Drive In pursuit of the inherently confounding qualities of dreams, plenty of filmmakers have attempted to bottle the dream state feeling as experienced while awake in the most affecting way possible. Few have accomplished this as successfully as David Lynch, and nowhere is his surrealistic style more compellingly at work than in 2001’s Mulholland Drive starring Naomi Watts. Lynch himself has said that there is a trail a viewer could follow to ‘figure out’ the movie, but as far as I’m concerned, it works much better on an enigmatic, dream-like level. Which is to say I have no idea what it’s about and don’t really care to. It’s a movie that doesn’t contain a number of OMG moments that are exciting or confusing or whatever, but instead just has a general feel to it that’s somehow unsettling, as though the world depicted is not real, nor meant to be so. The cryptic nature of the whole thing lends itself to a tone of unease, which further reflects the state of mind of the Watts character. It also produces some haunting images that aren’t eerie in the way horror movie images typically are, but are the type you can’t get out of your mind and give you a feeling of discomfort when you think of them. For me, these consist of the guy sitting under the spotlight in the dark room, and the guy who spits his espresso into a napkin. Good god those freak me out. 5) The Tree of Life Terence Malick’s films are, to many, less a source of “…huh??” than of “ughhhhhh.” It basically comes down to whether you think poetry is pretentious, not pretentious, or pretentious but forgivably so. Because everything about his movies is pretty much based in poetry, or the poetic impulse. The narration by the various characters usually is a kind of stream of consciousness poetry meant to express something they’re going through, most often in the form of questions like “What is this love that loves us?” (an actual quote from To The Wonder, which I….liked?). Tree of Life is like all his other movies, only moreso. It captures these images in nature and of people and infants that are just gorgeous and full of meaning and emotion and pairs them with words and music in a way that transported many of us to our childhoods, portraying and nailing all these confusing emotions and experiences that we didn’t understand. Then at the end all these characters we’ve seen hang out together on a beach that is maybe heaven but definitely something metaphysical or symbolic because Sean Penn and the kid who plays the young Sean Penn are there together and they hug. It’s great and I’m sure I cried like James Van Der Beek at least one of the times I watched it, but hell if I know what it’s all supposed to mean, other than everything. 6) 2001: A Space Odyssey I have come to love the work of Stanley Kubrick precisely because every single one of his movies has led me in multiple instances to throw up my hands and scream “WHAT” audibly enough to disturb anyone who might be around me. Although much like a common response to Shane Carruth, who shares the reputation of being something of a genius, it’s easy to resent Kubrick for being too goddamn smart for his own good. Like, we get that you’re smart. You don’t have to be such a dick about it. Showoff. Like Tree of Life, this is a movie that sort of wants to tell the story of humanity’s entire history. It’s chock full of captivating and memorable images, and a musical soundtrack that underscores its colossal scope. The mysteries of the movie and its possible meanings are akin to the mystery of life, and the universe, and of space, and humanity—deep questions that appear to show paths that lead to answers, but ultimately it’s impossible to determine. Even people who have sorted out meaning behind the monolith and the big star baby and everything become pretty difficult to understand when trying to relate a theory of everything regarding 2001. So 2001 is probably like life: if you claim to have it figured out, you’re probably full of BS. 7) The Fountain Darren Aronofsky has become something of a mainstream indie star director following the massive consecutive successes of The Wrestler and Black Swan, the latter of which contains plenty of surrealistic moments that had people scratching their heads when they weren’t busy pissing themselves in fear. But in 2006 he made a film that was another cinematic attempt to tie in all of human history to make some sort of grand statement about humanity and life and the universe (this seems to be a trend in the WTF genre). The Fountain is perhaps one of the most gorgeous looking movies ever made, mixing rich visual effects with dazzling colors and this all wonderfully complements a love story centering itself on the realization that all love stories end, most often in death. It goes to great lengths to demonstrate the inescapability of this universal truth. For many people I’ve talked to, it’s a severely mindblowing and unintelligible film, leaving mostly the impression of bewilderment and dismissal. I find it to contain so much emotional punch and poetic truth, the kind that it’s such an immense challenge to put into words, that it’s one of those essential movies I wish more people would see and appreciate. Especially people who dug Black Swan for more than just the lezzing out. 8) Synecdoche, New York Most people who are into the work of Charlie Kaufman have at some point felt the desire to climb into his brain the way his characters climbed into John Malkovich’s brain in Being John Malkovich. The guy’s mind works in ways that are strange and amazing. Synecdoche, New York gave new meaning to the term “meta,” which I don’t think was even being used in pop culture circles back in the ancient history period that was 2008. It makes Community look like a jumbled high school play. It’s also similar to another Kaufman script, 2002’s Adaptation, in the way it frames its story within a story. But again, this movie is like Adaptation on meth, diving deeper and deeper down the wormhole until both the audience and the characters lose track of what’s real and which person’s an actor and which one’s an actor playing an actor playing an actor playing a real person. There’s a lot of psychological motifs that run throughout the movie and Jungian references and all that intellectual stuff that can lead you to reading up far more about a movie than you’d ever wish to. But it’s also extremely funny in its implementation of these ideas and such an enjoyable watch that repeat viewings don’t seem like as daunting a prospect as it would for a graver, less humorous movie. 9) Donnie Darko Some of the best movie experiences happen when movies are able to pull off starting out as one type of film and then turning into something completely different and unexpected and crazy. One of the most memorable examples of this in recent memory is The Cabin in the Woods, which turned the horror genre on its head to great effect. Richard Kelly’s debut feature Donnie Darko is similarly a seemingly ordinary teenage angst-filled coming of age story until a bizarre twist turns it into something else entirely. The film works as both a teenage rebellion story and an apocalyptic, Take Shelter-like story of a person with information via premonition of sorts that the world is about to end. It would seem like a John Hughes movie if Molly Ringwald had ever been visited by a creepy looking rabbit who told her to burn things. It has its share of WTF elements involving space and time but this might be the sweetest movie on this list, in no small part due to the work of a young Jake Gyllenhaal and the character of Donnie as this troubled but endearing kid. 10) Dogtooth The craziest movie I have ever seen might be this movie out of Greece from 2009, which is basically impossible to describe in words—one of the signs of a film executed at the highest level. The reason I cherish WTF moments in movies so much is that witnessing something completely insane with your eyes versus reading about it are two completely different experiences, and the more profoundly powerful one is quite obviously the former. Dogtooth, in my romanticized memory of it, is like one big long WTF moment that contains little WTF implications in each aspect. Let it suffice to say that this movie shows the potential dark side of people who shelter their children from the world. Some interpret this as allegory; I think it’s just generally messed up. 11) Enter The Void If images are ideas, then Gaspar Noé’s 2009 film Enter the Void is a complete brain saturator. It’s a drug-infused movie that is as hallucinogenic an experience for the audience as for its characters. That is to say: it’s a trip. It makes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feel like Sunday School by comparison. And like most trips, you know, according to things I’ve read, it’s a movie you want to be over after the first hour or so, and yet it continues on far longer than you’d like it to, rehashing stuff over and over again, introducing new and even more loosely connected elements that only contribute further to a feeling of disorientation and impatience. I mean this in the most positive way. As an experience, Enter the Void is unparalleled in the wide-ranging sample of movies I’ve ever come across; as a visual stream of subjective consciousness, it has to be considered one of the most stunning, gripping, and impressive feats of filmmaking ever released. There’s a narrative mixed in with the trippy weirdness of Enter the Void, one that provides us with characters to engage with and arcs to follow, but the philosophy and metaphysical inclinations are far better realized on the screen than they could ever been in a screenplay. Something about the actual concepts put forth by some of the movie’s dialogue and aesthetic impressions is absurd on the surface but has a special power on the unconscious psyche. I think some people call this “pure cinema.” I call it effed up and wonderful. I tend to think that movies meant to pull at our emotional strings get a bit of a bum rap from critics and self-identified cinephiles. Likewise, movies that are heady and poetic and meant to make you think about what you’re viewing are under-appreciated by mainstream audiences. Deeply confusing movies are, to an extent, designed to alienate the audience, to give them the sense that they know nothing, and therefore must pay close attention if they want to leave the movie thinking they haven’t completely wasted their time. But having your mind blown by a movie is an emotional experience too, giving the viewer a kind of rush that comes with the feeling of epiphany or merely surprise. I would argue that the emotional and cerebral movie are more alike than it may seem at times. Even if bewilderment is the only response, confusing movies offer an experience that is unique to cinematic storytelling. Do you have any favorite or least favorite movies that left your brain in shambles? Share any and all WTF experiences below.