Everyone goes to the movies for different reasons.
Some people like just pure escapism, while others want to be intellectually stimulated,
or have a good laugh.
However, nobody goes to the movies because they just want to be totally confused, which
is a major problem when it comes to these six movies that still don't make any sense
to people.
...UNTIL NOW!
Trance
This Danny Boyle picture didn't make a huge impression on moviegoers when it came out,
with a twisty heist plot one reviewer noted as "purposely convoluted" and "impossible
to keep up with."
It doesn't help that the movie plays fast and loose with the bounds of reality, particularly
with the concept of therapeutic hypnosis, a real thing that the film portrays as something
closer to sorcery than science.
But it turns out that under all that intentional confusion, the film's plot is actually really
straightforward.
Elizabeth, the therapist played by Rosario Dawson, was behind the art heist central to
the movie.
See, she once was in an ill-fated relationship with Simon, played by James McAvoy.
In using hypnosis to make Simon forget their relationship, she also implanted the idea
of an art heist in his mind.
During the attempt to recall Simon's memories, Elizabeth forms a brief relationship with
Vincent Cassel's criminal boss Franck, but he ends up as manipulated as everyone else
by Elizabeth, an unbelievably smart puppetmaster who was willing to let a lot of people die
to get her hands on some money.
It all makes sense now.
Uh.. right?
Synecdoche, New York
It's no exaggeration to say that 2008's Synecdoche, New York is a movie about everything and everyone.
As Roger Ebert noted in his laudatory review, it's a story about "you, whoever you are."
The sprawling, ever-changing cast, which features different actors playing the same characters
in the production over the course of decades, speaks to the essence of identity, how we're
seen and perceived as we perform our roles in life, with our small successes, painful
failures, and major flaws.
Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is an artist obsessed with creating the perfect
artwork, and accomplishing the goal is just as impossible as living a perfect life.
No one can do it, and we will all die trying.
The key to understanding works by Charlie Kaufman, the scribe behind cinematic mind-benders
such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, is that there's
no distinction between the dream world and reality.
Everything is real, existing together in a surrealistic stew, and the impossible aspects
of the movie represent real feelings.
Very little in his films are literal, but everything feels true.
Solaris
In Steven Soderbergh's 2002 mindbender Solaris, a space station hovers over a mysterious ocean
planet, which despite decades of research has remained unknowable to its observers.
Worse, the only data scientists on Earth have received from the station has been borderline
nonsensical, and eyewitness reports of impossible beings on the planet's surface from people
who've been there are dismissed as hallucinations.
Chris, a psychologist from Earth, makes the journey to Solaris to examine the state of
the crew, and decide if observations should continue.
But upon arrival, he too begins to experience impossible phenomena, including visitations
from the phantom of his long-dead wife, somehow miraculously revived.
At the end of the film, Chris is visited by the apparition of a child.
When he takes the child's hand, Chris seems to suddenly be back at home on Earth, with
his wife alive beside him.
Only, then we see the surface of Solaris and the film ends.
So...what the heck happened?
Did he die and become one of the planet's phantasms?
Is he alive on Solaris, living in a fantasy world?
Did he actually get sent home somehow?
It's up to you as a viewer to decide.
"Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?
There are no answers, only choices."
Demon
This highly-regarded 2015 Polish horror picture follows an English groom as he arrives in
his fiancée's native Poland for a grand wedding before her gathered family.
After an encounter in the yard with a buried skeleton, the protagonist's emotional state,
and his sanity, starts to fray.
He's haunted by visions and possessed by a dead woman who wants to live and love again,
her takeover of his body culminating in his utter breakdown as the family presses on with
the ceremony.
Near the end, one family member mentions that the husband is gone, and indeed, he never
appears again, and the movie ends quietly soon after.
But what does this mean?
Did he vanish of his own accord?
Was he taken by the demon?
Or did the wife's family do him in to be rid of him?
There are no answers in this anticlimax.
The family's response, though, is clear: raze over the wedding site.
Forget this ever happened.
Put his truck in a lake and pretend he was never here.
The film seems to be a metaphor for postwar wounds and the distrust sowed by nationalism:
you can bury the past all you want, but your history will always find a way to resurface.
It just… might not make any sense when it does.
Upstream Color
If you were confused by the critically acclaimed 2013 indie film Upstream Color, don't worry,
because we're going to explain it as simply as possible.
Kris is infected by a parasite that plugs her into a shared consciousness, putting her
in a suggestible state that leads her to destroy her life.
Drawn to a pig farmer who uses music to attract the parasite, Kris has the parasite removed.
It is then placed in pigs, who are chucked into the river to drown.
After they die, the parasites infect orchids, leading to larvae, which are harvested to
create new parasites, which are used to infect more people and expand the shared emotional
network even further.
Kris and Jeff, another former host, interrupt this process by killing the farmer.
They then gather the rest of the victims at the farm and form a new community, breaking
the cycle of trauma.
The film is essentially an extended metaphor for human emotional connectivity.
Simple, see?
Arrival
At the end of the acclaimed 2016 sci-fi drama Arrival, alien visitors patiently explain
the whole movie to their human interpreter, Louise, played by Amy Adams.
Despite this, though, many fans left the theater still scratching their heads.
Why?
Well, it turned out those flashbacks showing the loss of Louise's young daughter weren't
flashbacks at all, but visions of Louise's tragic future.
The mind-blowing twist was confusing enough for some fans that a large portion of the
internet was devoted to explaining it, a process that, clearly, is still ongoing.