If there’s one thing movies do better than any other art form, it’s weirdness.
The combination of sight, sound, and music make for a perfect cocktail to take the audience
away on a wild and spaced-out ride; and in recent years filmmakers have even started
using film as a way to explore heady philosophical ideas like the nature of identity, time, and
consciousness.
With this in mind, the following are ten movies that have some of the most far-out, inventive,
and thought-provoking plotlines in film history.
There are countless honorable mentions that could have easily made this list, so please
feel free to leave any suggestions in the comments section.
10.
The Prestige
If you want to mystify an audience, you can’t go wrong by taking a page out of the magician’s
book of tricks, which is exactly what director Christopher Nolan did with his 2006 film The
Prestige.
The story follows two turn-of-the-century magicians who get into a fierce rivalry after
one of them invents an extraordinary—and totally inexplicable—new trick.
It’s a film filled with twists, reversals, and red herrings, and it asks some pretty
lofty questions about the nature of identity and obsession which are bound to keep you
thinking.
It’s like a ninety-minute magic trick transplanted to the screen—but unlike so many magic tricks,
it features a payoff that’s actually worth sticking around for.
Most Unforgettable Scene: The Prestige is at its best when it’s showing
the two magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, performing on stage.
Of these scenes, the best is surely the first occasion when Bale’s character performs
‘The Transported Man,’ the trick that sparks a deadly rivalry between his and Jackman’s
character.
The trick is simplicity itself—Bale’s character bounces a ball across his stage
and manages to somehow teleport between two doors, reappear, and catch it—but it’s
so elegantly portrayed in the film that it’s easy to understand why Jackman’s character
would become so obsessed with discovering its secret.
9.
Seconds
If you’re in the mood for a movie that’s really going to make you think, look no further
than Seconds, a little-known gem from the late 1960’s starring Rock Hudson.
The film follows the story of a middle-aged banker who is contacted by a shadowy organization
that offers a most-tempting service: new life.
For a fee, the company fakes the man’s death, sets him up in a brand new career and house,
and gives him plastic surgery so that he comes out looking like the famously handsome Mr.
Hudson.
Not a bad deal, right?
Well, think again.
These being the movies, things are much more complicated than they seem, and the story
soon takes an abrupt turn toward the creepy.
Director John Frankenheimer used some truly revolutionary shooting techniques for the
movie, and the result is a harrowing and hallucinatory experience that you won’t easily forget.
Brian Wilson sure didn’t.
According to his biography, seeing Seconds while in the middle of his drug years and
teetering on the edge of schizophrenia affected the Beach Boys front man deeply, and he claims
that after watching the film he didn’t go to the movies again for almost fifteen years.
Most Unforgettable Scene: Early on in Seconds, the company drugs the
main character in order to con him into accepting their service.
The filmmakers used ultra-wide angle and fisheye lenses to create a feeling of unease for the
sequence, and in some shots they even mounted the camera on the actor’s body, a technique
that has some really disorienting effects.
To top it all off, they even built a room with an off-kilter, warped floor that resembles
something you might see in a funhouse.
The result is one of the weirdest and most effective dream/drug sequences you’ll ever
see.
8.
A Clockwork Orange
When it comes to weirdness in film, Stanley Kubrick is king.
From 2001, to The Shining to Eyes Wide Shut, he was a director always interested in exploring
the deeper, more twisted reaches of the subconscious.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in A Clockwork Orange, his 1972 masterpiece of satirical
science fiction.
The story takes place in a dystopian future and follows the exploits of Alex, the sociopath
leader of a gang of ‘droogs’ who go around terrorizing people on the streets of Britain.
Alex is eventually arrested for murder and given a radical treatment that attempts to
instill an extreme aversion to violence in him—with somewhat mixed results.
A Clockwork Orange was quite controversial upon its release, and was even briefly banned
in the UK, but today it has become one of the quintessential cult movies for its bizarre
style and philosophical undertones.
Mostly, though, it’s remembered for being one hell of a strange ride, at turns disturbing
and hilarious—sometimes both at the same time.
Most Unforgettable Scene: A Clockwork Orange has so many seminal scenes
that it’s hard to pick just one, but when it comes to the bizarre, it doesn’t get
much more unsettling than the scenes where Alex undergoes his “treatment” to scrub
his consciousness of all tendencies toward violence.
He’s put in a movie theatre, strapped to a chair, and forced to wear a nightmarish
helmet that holds his eyes open while the screen shows one act of violence and murder
after another.
It’s not an easy scene to watch, but it is guaranteed to stick with you for a while.
7.
The Man From Earth
Taking your viewers on a wild ride doesn’t always require millions in special effects
and a convoluted plot—sometimes it’s just about taking a good idea and exploring it
for all it’s worth.
Such is the case with 2007’s The Man From Earth, a small independent film that unfolds
like a mixture of a well-written stage play and a brilliant philosophical treatise.
The story centers on John Oldman, a college professor who, during a party with some friends,
makes the bizarre claim that he is immortal.
He explains that he was born in Cro-Magnon times, but never aged, and that for 10,000
years he has been walking the Earth, moving every five years so that no one will catch
on to his secret.
His friends are understandably skeptical, but they are willing to play along with what
they think is a game, and what follows is a lengthy dialogue on the nature of time,
knowledge, and aging that never ceases to be fascinating.
It’s a film that’s confined to a single room and a single subject, but even though
it’s shot on the smallest scale possible, the ideas it presents and the questions it
raises are bigger and more ambitious than movies with budgets ten times bigger.
Most Unforgettable Scene: The Man From Earth might as well be a filmed
play, so there are no big set pieces to remember.
There are several memorable moments, though, and of these the most notable has got to be
the scene where John first lets his friends in on the secret that he is more than 10,000
years old.
At first, they take it like a joke or some kind of parlor trick, but when the realization
finally hits them, it’s a sight to behold.
6.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Writer Charlie Kaufman has come up with some pretty heavy premises in his time, but his
best foray into the realms of the strange and bizarre came in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind, a sci-fi romance story notable for its mind-bending plot and mesmerizing
visual style.
Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet star as Joel and Clementine, two former lovers whose dysfunctional
relationship leads them to a technology company that specializes in erasing painful memories
from subjects’ minds.
This ingenious premise allows director Michel Gondry to really have some fun playing with
time and space, and in some scenes objects and people will disappear out of the shot
as they are systematically being erased from a character’s memory.
All this makes for some amazing sequences, but what really makes Eternal Sunshine such
a weird trip are all the questions it forces the viewers to ask themselves: are we nothing
but the sum total of our memories?
Would it be worth it to delete bad experiences from your mind even if you lost a little of
yourself in the process?
That kind of depth of subject matter is a rare find in movies, and it’s a big part
of what makes this film such a strange and memorable experience.
Most Unforgettable Scene: The trip the film takes through Joel’s memories
stops at a number of odd points in time, but by far the strangest and the funniest has
got to be a scene where we’re taken all the way back to when Joel was a baby.
Gondry shoots the scene from the floor up, as baby Joel sits under his kitchen table
desperately trying to get his busy mother’s attention, nearly losing his mind in the process.
It’s a hilarious, wonderfully imaginative scene, and easily one of the most memorable
parts of the film.
5.
Primer
Time travel movies are always one of the easiest ways to throw an audience for a loop, simply
because of the inherent paradoxes and logical traps that jumping back or forward in time
creates.
It’s a plot device that’s been used time and again, but rarely has it been employed
as effectively as it was in Primer, a 2004 science fiction film about two struggling
engineers who accidentally invent a time machine.
Primer is a movie that’s notable for two things: being made independently for $7,000,
and having one of the most convoluted, mind-blowing, and intentionally dense plot lines of all
time.
The filmmakers choose not to spoon-feed their audience any information, and the result is
a movie that features a good deal of technical banter and hard science.
The heady dialogue and twisty plotting is guaranteed to lose some of the audience, but
for those that get into it, Primer is ultimately one of the most rewarding and thought-provoking
movies of the last few years.
Most Unforgettable Scene: This is a movie that is focused entirely on
studying the paradox of time travel, so every little scene is a part of a bigger, more meaningful
whole.
But none of this is made apparent until about twenty minutes into the film, when the character
of Abe takes his friend Aaron out to a field by promising to show him “the most important
thing that any living organism has ever witnessed.”
When they get there, Abe hands Aaron a pair of binoculars, and the two watch as Abe—a
second Abe, fresh from the time machine—leaves the storage unit where the device is being
stored.
4.
Mulholland Drive
Pretty much every movie director David Lynch has made could be put on this list, but if
you’re looking for a good intro to the carnival of weirdness that is his career, start with
Mulholland Drive, a 2001 psychological thriller that ranks among his best films.
The story follows a young actress who moves to L.A. with the intent of breaking into the
movie business.
She soon meets up with a mysterious woman with amnesia, whom she tries to help recover
her identity.
From there, the narrative unravels into one of the most unsettling, complex, and downright
fascinating movies of the last few years.
It’s the kind of movie where each viewer is destined to come away with their own personal
reading of what it means, and there’s little doubt that this is what Lynch, who has refused
to comment on what he believes it’s all really about, always intended.
Most Unforgettable Scene: Outside of its main plot, Mulholland Drive
is made of up small vignettes, many of which are based around characters that have little
or no contact with the major players.
But it is one of these scenes that provides the film’s most unforgettable moment.
The sequence takes place in a diner, where two men are eating breakfast.
One begins to describe a terrible dream he’s been having, and as he does the details of
it start to unfold around him, right down to the gruesome creature that’s hiding in
the diner’s back alley.
It’s a masterful scene that rivals the best horror films in terms of creepiness.
Try as you might, you won’t easily forget it.
3.
The Matrix
What is there left to say about The Matrix?
This film was a real game-changer in Hollywood, and when it came out in 1999 it immediately
became established as one of the weirdest, most influential, and stylistically inventive
movies of all time—and all this despite having Keanu Reeves in the starring role.
The film is essentially based around a simple philosophical idea that’s been troubling
philosophers since the days of Descartes: how do we know what is real?
The filmmakers took this thought experiment and built their story around it, throwing
in a dose of heavy firepower and kung fu for good measure, and the result is a movie that
is at turns thought-provoking as well as pure, simple fun.
It features some of the most eye-popping visual effects and action scenes in recent memory;
but what The Matrix will really be remembered for is pushing the envelope of the kinds of
subjects that can be tackled in movies, whether it’s the nature of sensation and experience
or our ever-changing relationship with technology.
Most Unforgettable Scene: During Neo’s training in how to bend the
rules of space and time while in the Matrix, there is a scene where he and Morpheus are
transported to a dojo straight out of a Hong Kong action movie and forced to square off
in hand-to-hand combat.
All of the best parts of the film—from its intriguing concept to its superior fight choreography—are
on display in this scene.
2.
Fight Club
1999 was a big year for mind-blowing movies, and of these Fight Club is the one that still
hits the hardest.
Insomuch as it can be explained, the story follows a nameless office drone (played by
Edward Norton) that comes in to contact with a flamboyant soap salesman played by Brad
Pitt.
Together the two start an underground bare-knuckle boxing club, and after it catches on, they
slowly mold their group of disaffected young men into an unofficial guerilla army that
rebels against the status quo by performing bizarre acts of sabotage and vandalism.
Anyone who’s seen Fight Club knows this is just a tiny part of the story, but that’s
why this film continues to be one of the weirdest experiences you’ll ever have at the movies.
The filmmakers keep throwing new curves at the audience, each more preposterous than
the one before, and it all leads up to one of the most warped, mind-bending, and truly
surprising twist endings of all time.
But the film doesn’t just work on a gimmick.
It’s also one of the most thematically audacious stories of the last few years, tackling everything
from violence and masculinity to advertising and consumer culture.
Most Unforgettable Scene: Fight Club is filled with memorable moments,
some of them hilarious and some of them downright disturbing, but one of the best comes when
Norton’s character, fed up with his job, literally beats himself up during a meeting
with his boss.
After punching himself in the face and throwing himself through a glass table, he tells security
that his boss attacked him, and manages to walk away with a hefty settlement that allows
him and Pitt to really shift their mischief making into high gear.
1.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The late 90s might have been a renaissance of inventive style and bold ideas on screen,
but none of it would have been possible if not for the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick’s
seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It might be difficult to understand now, but before 2001, the kinds of ideas that would
become the staple of modern mindbenders just weren’t being addressed in mainstream film,
and science fiction was certainly not taken seriously as a genre.
Kubrick not only spent millions constructing the most realistic vision of space travel
then possible, but he matched it all with a story that actually tried to tackle not
just the origin of humanity as a thinking species, but also speculated on where our
next scientific leaps might take us.
I won’t even pretend to know exactly what the final third of the movie means, and I
don’t know if anyone really does for sure, but what is certain is that 2001 gave its
viewers more food for thought than any movie before it, and forty years later it still
hasn’t lost one ounce of mystery or inventiveness.
Most Unforgettable Scene: 2001 is divided into four chapters, and of
these the most mind-blowing is certainly the last, a section called ‘Jupiter and Beyond
the Infinite’ that features an astronaut being sucked into a ‘star gate’ and getting
hurtled through space and time.
What follows is a lengthy explosion of color and sound that can only be described as a
psychedelic.
It’s one of the trippiest sequences in film history, so much so that when 2001 first premiered,
it gained a reputation with the youth culture as a popular movie to see while high on acid.