8 Brilliant Mind-Bending Movies That You Need To See

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.