Movies are meant to inspire us, scare us, make us laugh, and make us cry.
But sometimes they just leave us absolutely, totally confused.
2017 was a particularly dense year of confounding movies, so get ready to get confused.
Here are a few films that will bust your brain.
And consider yourself warned: there will be spoilers.
The Bad Batch
Set in the near future, The Bad Batch is about a group of criminal exiles who've been left
to live in a lawless, cannibal-riddled wilderness.
The neon-drenched backdrop of Comfort — the central society where humans eat rabbits and
not each other — serves as a stark contrast to the mania going on beyond the fence, where
civilization and civility are null and void.
In a grim introduction, Suki Waterhouse's Arlen is tattooed with a prison number and
dumped in the desert.
Soon after, she's abducted and drugged; and her limbs are amputated and devoured by a
group of cannibals.
Months later, she stumbles across a mother and daughter scavenging the landscape, and,
upon realizing they're cannibals, she takes out the mother and abducts the daughter as
an act of revenge.
The women turn out to be the family of Miami Man, who sets out to search for them and makes
an unlikely acquaintanceship with Arlen along the way.
He doesn't know she's responsible for his daughter's disappearance, of course, so he
asks her to help with the search, and the pair strike a peculiar friendship.
Jason Momoa's character doesn't bother to hide his brutality, and Arlen makes it known
that she hates his kind, and somehow it just works.
But this is where the film's plot starts to get lazy and go off the rails.
Arlen does help Miami Man find his daughter, and when they're all finally reunited, somehow,
it's never revealed that Arlen put mommy dearest in an early grave.
Instead, she rejects a chance to stay in Comfort and shack up with Keanu Reeves' leader character,
and ventures back into the bitter beyond with Miami Man, essentially taking the place of
the woman she axed.
By the end, the movie makes so little sense that its title couldn't possibly be more appropriate.
Personal Shopper
Featuring apparitions, half-open doors, and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night, Personal
Shopper has all the trimmings of a traditional supernatural horror.
But Olivier Assayas' thoughtful meditation on grief is anything but ordinary, swapping
jump scares for ambiguous, psychological trickery.
The film centers on Kristen Stewart's Maureen, a personal shopper by day and spirit medium
by night.
After her twin brother passes away from a heart condition, Maureen sets down a paranormal
path of discovery to make good on a deal the pair had during his lifetime: the first to
go would contact the other from beyond the grave.
Throughout the film, Assayas crafts a nuanced story that interweaves the narrative of Maureen's
grief with the gruesome slaying of her celebrity boss.
This is where the lines between reality, the paranormal, and her own wild imagination begin
to blur.
Whether Maureen really is communicating with her late brother or being manipulated due
to her fragile mental state, is far from clear, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and
puzzlement.
Assayas himself later clarified the meaning of the movie -- that Maureen was simply grieving
her loss the only way she knew how -- but anyone who saw this one in the theaters last
year was almost certainly scratching their heads after the credits rolled.
Colossal
This is a monster movie with a colossal twist.
After repeated drunken misbehaviour, Anne Hathaway's Gloria is thrown out of her boyfriend's
apartment in New York.
Determined to get her life on track, she returns to her hometown in New England, where she
bumps into an old friend in Jason Sudeikis' Oscar, and her drinking problems persist.
At the same time, director Nacho Vigalondo throws up surprise after surprise, starting
with the casual introduction of a monster attack in Seoul, South Korea.
That may seem at odds with the film's palette, but the attack does have a direct link with
Gloria's story — as she's somehow inexplicably linked to the beast.
When Oscar discovers he also has the same monster-replicating superpower, Colossal follows
another tonal shift.
Oscar shows his sinister side, callously manipulating Gloria by threatening to use his own monster
to kill thousands of people if she doesn't comply with his demands.
Oscar's chilling behavior turns the monster storyline into a conduit for emotional and
physical abuse and leaves Gloria with the challenge of overcoming her demons, both real
and imagined.
Vigalondo uses monster-movie tropes to provide a shrewd commentary on very real issues, and
while it is executed well, it's bound to give audiences whiplash with so many bizarre swerves.
Song to Song
Terrence Malick's filmmaking style frequently divides opinion, and Song to Song is no different.
Malick depicts a love-hexagon of the privileged in a way only he can, weaving a complex web
of infidelity, betrayal, broken hearts, and sentimentality in fluid edits and unconventional
framing.
The narrative itself is straightforward.
Set in the cutthroat music industry, Rooney Mara's hopeful musician Faye begins an ill-conceived
relationship with Michael Fassbender's powerful music producer Cook to help her career.
However, she falls in love with Ryan Gosling's B.V., another musician working closely with
Cook and begins a relationship with him as well.
After forming a three-way friendship, Faye, B.V., and Cook navigate the landscape of music
festivals and cocktail parties, as Faye's infidelity continues.
What makes Song to Song both brilliant and baffling is its replication of memory and
consciousness.
The story unfolds as if Malick cherry-picked individual characters' reflections directly
from their brains and scrambled them together into a collective stream of consciousness
that warps the linear narrative structure.
Like raw memories themselves, the flow of the story abruptly diverts, changing direction
on a whim, and by the end of it, it's hard to figure out what just played out on-screen.
A Cure for Wellness
Set in the breathtaking backdrop of the Swiss Alps, no one can claim Gore Verbinski's aesthetically
pleasing thriller lacks ambition.
In fact, A Cure for Wellness suffers from being overly ambitious.
Like its mountainous terrain, the story twists, turns, and ultimately disorients its audience.
Events initially appear straightforward.
Dane DeHaan's up-and-coming executive Lockhart is tasked with retrieving his company's CEO
from a hiatus at a Swiss wellness center.
To his frustration, the staff at the center won't allow him to talk to the guy, and on
his way out of the center, he's involved in a car crash.
He awakens from the accident to find himself a patient at the same wellness center, with
his leg broken and covered in plaster.
It's then that Lockhart and his crutches squeak their way through a hallucinogenic journey
filled with freaky imagery.
The center is hiding a terrible secret, and Lockhart is on a mission to find out what.
The slow-reveal of the truth is frustrating and borderline nonsensical, as we discover
the center's doctor has been extending his own age by siphoning off substances from patients.
"No one ever leaves."
By the time the film serves up its final surprise, though, the audience's appetite for weirdness
has long been satisfied.
Raw
Julia Ducournau brings a fresh look at eating human flesh with Raw, the second cannibal-themed
movie on this list.
Unlike The Bad Batch, Raw gets under the skin because of its eerie authenticity, replacing
a dystopian wasteland with the familiar backdrop of a university.
This realistic depiction makes the French-Belgian horror too strong for some; at the 2016 Toronto
Film Festival, there were reports of audience members fainting.
Such a visceral reaction is understandable.
Raw begins like an innocuous coming-of-age tale with a young woman leaving home to join
veterinary school, where her sister is also studying.
During an unforgiving hazing process, she breaks her strict vegetarianism when she is
forced by her sister to consume a raw rabbit kidney, and this is where things get weird.
Really weird.
Having had a taste, our heroine then embarks on a cannibalistic quest for flesh that quickly
grows out of hand.
Ducournau doesn't broach such a taboo subject gratuitously.
Raw is hard to comprehend, but the conclusion will leave chills down your spine — and
a bite mark on the memory.
mother!
Director Darren Aronofsky said the script for mother! poured out of him like a "fever
dream", and the result dives to surprisingly dark depths of nightmarish vulgarity, ultra-violence
and barbaric bewilderment.
It begins with Jennifer Lawrence's title character and Javier Bardem's 'Him' living a life of
quiet solitude, when Ed Harris' 'Man' makes an unsolicited appearance at their door, asking
to stay, followed by his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer's 'Woman'.
Much like the flames that engulf the house at the beginning and end, events rapidly blaze
out of control as more and more people arrive.
Its entirety takes place within the claustrophobic and confined setting, which eventually descends
into a war zone, and an all-out assault on the senses.
On top of graphic violence, mother's most unnerving moments are delivered with everyday,
social non-conforming malice, where strangers show complete disregard for her wishes.
Trying to decipher the surreality at face value left many moviegoers guessing, which
is why Aronofsky had to come out and tell people he meant this to be a biblical allegory.
Mother represents creation, Him represents God, and the people are the destroyers of
both.
Considering how batty the movie is, though, it could mean a whole bunch of other things
or nothing at all, at the same time.
Killing of a Sacred Deer
Yorgos Lanthimos is no stranger to eccentricity.
He directed 2016's The Lobster, a story about a hotel where its single residents have 45
days to find a new romantic partner or else they turn into animals.
Initially, The Killing of a Sacred Deer appears less bizarre.
Scratch a scalpel under the surface though, and Lanthimos outshines his earlier effort.
The story focuses on Colin Farrell's talented surgeon Steven who befriends a boy named Martin.
Sprinkled with the director's trademark deadpan dialogue, there are numerous quirks and dark
humor moments that require close inspection.
There's the weird obsession with body hair, and Nicole Kidman's character pretending to
be an anesthetized patient just to be kinky.
And that's nothing compared to story's core.
Martin is out for revenge, believing Farrell's character to be responsible for the demise
of his father.
Martin tells Steven he has placed a curse on his family in an act of vengeance.
To undo the curse, Steven has to kill a member of his own family, or they will all die slow
painful deaths.
Much to Steven's exasperation, Martin's curse begins to manifest as his children lose the
ability to walk.
"My legs, they're numb."
How Martin enacts the curse is anyone's guess; he's seemingly able to make symptoms come
and go.
Those looking for answers won't get anything concrete either, and it's compounded by an
ambiguous ending that gives little away.
The Snowman
Expectations were high for this film because director Tomas Alfredson was the mastermind
behind one of the finest horror films of a generation, Let the Right One In, and The
Snowman boasted Michael Fassbender in the lead.
With such talent on both sides of the camera, how did the film end up with a 7% score on
Rotten Tomatoes?
The issue certainly wasn't Jo Nesbø's source material.
His novel of the same name is the seventh featuring alcoholic detective Harry Hole.
Following the same premise as Nesbø's novel, the story follows Hole as he searches for
a depraved serial slayer whose trademark is to leave a snowman at his victim's houses.
Unfortunately, issues with production melted any hopes of The Snowman being a hit.
Alfredson admitted that a tight production schedule left the film as a "big jigsaw puzzle"
with "a few pieces missing."
The result is a disjointed and confusing experience, with choppy editing, important storylines
that are never concluded, and characters introduced and later disappearing with no rhyme or reason.
Making matters worse, the marketing campaign for the film became an unintentionally hilarious
meme, which is hardly the way to make audiences take your thriller pic seriously.
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