Mindfuck Movies

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/mindfuck_movies.php

by chrisconley • 17 years ago

132 95 17 years ago

wallflower• 17 years ago

"I originally omitted Donnie Darko from this list but then I realized I would get hate mail if I omitted Donnie Darko from this list so I put Donnie Darko on this list."

unalone10• 17 years ago

Donnie Darko is such a terrible movie. It's utterly lacking in craft and expertise. People like it because - despite claims - it's easy to comprehend and simplistic in moral, but it's plain bad.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

I liked the movie, however it didn't need comprehension. If I was reviewing at the time this move came out, this is what I'd likely say: I thought the plot was simplistic and prayed on a naive thoughtless audience, it didn't explore any truly remarkable metaphysical ideas that hasn't been thought by teenagers watching too much TV with poorly defined goals.

Honestly, I don't think I'll ever need to see the movie again in my life because it didn't take a single iota of thought to connect the plot elements.

brianmckenzie• 17 years ago

The reasons you hate Donnie Darko are why it's good.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

There are few recent popular flicks that I think are worthy of consideration -- or at least honorable mention.

I'd add The Matrix. Although it's not great, it did have the most impact on the most people.

I'd add The Sixth Sense for the same reason. When you "get it" then you are almost forced to rewatch the movie to make sure it still all adds up. It does. It was a great work by M. Night, who (to me) is really not doing as well as he used to.

Retric• 17 years ago

He mentions both of them:

  (Bruce Willis was balding the whole time?!) 
  I love The Matrix. But

However, I think both movies where actually vary straightforward. I suspect they where popular in large part because they felt like mind bending movies, but most people never felt lost. The Usual Suspects is another great example of this. "Wait that was BS?"

unalone10• 17 years ago

I can't judge on The Sixth Sense, because I saw it knowing the ending and so nothing seemed too surprising. The Matrix is incredibly straightforward: the plot is rehashed philosophy mixed with a pretty simplistic story that allows for lots of fighting. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you watch it and it all makes sense in a cool "What if?" way. That opposed to, say, Eraserhead, where you finish the movie feeling like you've had your mind scrubbed hard with steel wool. Again, not necessarily a bad thing.

billturner2• 17 years ago

That's a good point on both the Matrix and The Sixth Sense, but more so on The Matrix. I think the first one was very well done and while not an entirely original idea, it bent your mind just enough. Sadly, for me anyway, they ruined the whole thing with the sequels.

EvilTrout• 17 years ago

A very good list. For me I was disappointed because I'd seen virtually all of them already.

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

U-Turn belongs there too.

csuper2• 17 years ago

requiem for a dream?

csuper2• 17 years ago

&pi

freakball• 17 years ago

&the fountain

billturner2• 17 years ago

There's always bound to be something you think needs to be on these kinds of lists. Personally, I'm disappointed there are no Alejandro Jodorowsky films on the list. I certainly think those qualify.

mariorz• 17 years ago

FWIW, I think Jodorowsky's films could be more accurately categorized as mindrape movies.

brl3• 17 years ago

Santa Sangre is my favorite movie of all time. I've probably seen it about 25 times since I always make other people watch it and end up watching it with them. It still gets better every new time I see it.

I think this is the only Jodorowsky film that qualifies for the 'mindfuck' category (the others are more just surreal and weird), but it really is mind-blowing once you understand it.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Anybody here seen Waking Life? I loved it!

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

Waking Life is a perfect example of something that sends out all the right signals for being artsy and deep to activate the GoodThink centers of your brain without having any actual substance. That movie made me want to punch the director.

chime• 17 years ago

I guess it's ironic that I've tried to watch "Waking Life" three different times and fell asleep midway each and every time. I still haven't fully watched it but I'm keeping it as my personal antidote for insomnia.

mapleoin• 17 years ago

Did you "get" the part about having to let go in order to get to heaven, or nirvana or whatever you call it? I had to watch it twice to get that.

brl3• 17 years ago

I loved it too. People either love it or hate it.

mand0• 17 years ago

Mind Game is a good one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Game_(film)

markessien• 17 years ago

If you really want a good time along the same vein, then watch "Let the right one in". BUT! You have to watch it without reading about it, or watching the preview. Just watch it without preconceptions.

preavy• 17 years ago

Belle du Jour

limmeau2• 17 years ago

Don't know. Where's the "mind" in that?

kubrick2• 17 years ago

Fun list! He's got some facts wrong (e.g. 2001 was not made as a companion piece to the novel, which came later), and he apparently never understood Jacob's Ladder (think Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge as a full-length movie). But who knew you could watch all of La Jetée (inspiration for 12 Monkeys) on Youtube?!! (Speaking of 12 Monkeys, why isn't that on the list?)

dood• 17 years ago

I think the article is pretty much right about 2001: the book and film were both developed by both Clarke and Kubrick at the same time, though the book was released later [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)#Writing]

kubrick2• 17 years ago

It's a technicality. I did a thesis on the movie, and that's why I suppose I'm picking on a nit. Clarke wrote the novel later, but he and Kubrick wrote the screenplay together over the course of maybe three years. Clarke did always intend to novelize it, but a simultaneous release wasn't planned. (But I admit I'm totally picking nits.)

tortilla• 17 years ago

Good list. I'd add Oldboy (Korean) to that list.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

does 'the usual suspects' count or is that too mainstream ? Brazil ?

trezor• 17 years ago

The usual suspects counts more as a movie where you have the OH THAT MAKES SENSE feeling at the end of the movie rather than pure mindfuck.

While you will have to rethink the whole movie once you've reached the end, you are left with some sort of answer. Some of these movies on the other hand, like Memento, will make you wonder WTH really happened for hours and days after actually watching it.

swivelmaster2• 17 years ago

Brazil! Brazil!!!!!

One of my favorite movies.

And a serious mindfuck.

akeefer• 17 years ago

Awesome, awesome movie. Not for the faint of heart, though.

Let's hope that Will Smith and Steven Spielberg don't actually go ahead with remaking it (http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0615340/). What a travesty that would be.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

One question though, if the Korean movie did in fact 'cause' the Virginia Tech shooting, like I've heard before (I like that IMDB plays it light), then what happens when this movie is recreated in English and thousands of emotionally unstable white kids gets a hold of this?

AndrewO• 17 years ago

After watching Le Jetée, I kinda want to watch 12 Monkeys again.

mixmax4• 17 years ago

What's this doing on the frontpage?

Am I missing something obvious?

omarchowdhury• 17 years ago

You're missing the little thing under every HN post title that says "Points". This one has over 40.

mixmax4• 17 years ago

From the guidelines:

What to Submit

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Unless there's something I'm completely missing I don't see how this submission falls into the above category.

edit:

The question is partly serious: I've never owned a television, and haven't seen a movie for more than two years, so there could easily be something I'm totally oblivious to. It just seems like a post that would belong on Reddit.

mhartl2• 17 years ago

Mindfuck movies have the hacker nature.

Also, from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

mixmax4• 17 years ago

Sory, I didn't mean to be obnoxious. Just wondering.

edw519• 17 years ago

Could have been named, "Enterprise".

All time sequences reversed?

No short term memory?

Memento

What?

marksutherland• 17 years ago

Since this is fast turning into a list of good mind-bending movies, I'm going to put a shout out for eXistenZ, as it always seems to be slightly overlooked.

Also, most of Lynch's non-Dune stuff would fit in this category.

unalone10• 17 years ago

Seconded. Lynch's every movie is pretty twisted. Even Twin Peaks was bizarre.

limmeau2• 17 years ago

Except for the Straight Story, obviously.

browngeek• 17 years ago

Lynch's "Lost Highway". A fascinating mindfuck.

brl3• 17 years ago

Lynch's Dune doesn't belong in the 'mindfuck' category, but perhaps it needs a category of it's own. Something like 'Random nonsense about leather boys and sand worms interspersed with recognizable incidents from science fiction novel of same name'.

vegai• 17 years ago

Lynch's latest, Inland Empire... not only the biggest mindfuck I've ever seen, also includes the most scary imagery.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

I'll check some of these I haven't seen out. He's got a Hitchcock and Kurosawa film on there, and they're two of the finest directors of all time. Rashomon is actually one of my least favorite Kurosawa films, but it's still great - I just much more greatly like Ran (English: "Chaos", his best film), Ikiru ("Life", it drags towards the middle but the government council scene at the end is incredible), Kagemusha ("Shadow", wow what an incredible premise - really an overlooked masterpiece when looking at his career), and of course Seven Samurai. Then you've got Yojimbo which is an interesting story but kind of campy, and Rashomon which is a great piece of storytelling and a great piece of directing, but just isn't as satisfying of an experience as Ran, Ikiru, Kagemusha, or Seven Samurai. If I was recommending Kurosawa to a new viewer, I'd say watch them in that order, and then perhaps Rashomon.

I haven't seen all of Hitchcock's films, but it's something I've been meaning to do. The thing both of these directors (Kurosawa and Hitchcock) have in common - they're both absolutely obsessed with presentation. They don't waste a single scene in their movies. In their better films, Kurosawa and Hitchcock don't even waste a single shot - everything is perfectly constructed for a very specific reason. Really incredible experiences to watch them, and highly recommended for people who love movies, stories, or simply just art.

joe_bleau• 17 years ago

The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel, 1962. I still don't get it.

nandemo• 17 years ago

I don't think this fits the "mindfuck" label. It's not hard to understand, it's simply absurd.

gruseom• 17 years ago

I'd add The Thirteenth Floor for anyone who likes Dark City, Abre los Ojos, or The Matrix.

bd• 17 years ago

There are many more mentioned in two related MetaFilter threads:

Mindfk movies

http://www.metafilter.com/79096/Mindfk-Movies

Help us rally around a common weirdness

http://ask.metafilter.com/109842/Help-us-rally-around-a-comm...

lazyant• 17 years ago

Jacob's Ladder is one of my favorite movies and for me the most mind-blowing ending ever. More recently we've had many movies that somehow had the same idea for an ending (don't want to mention them so not to spoil Jacob's Ladder) but AFAIK this was the first time that it was used.

Angostura4• 17 years ago

I haven't seen it since it was in the cinemas but I remember at the time it made a big impact on me. For some reason, I always link it with Angel Heart, in terms of that impact.

pi38322• 17 years ago

I love Jacob's Ladder to death, despite the fact that it once gave me vivid nightmares. Or maybe because of that.

But the ending really sucks. The last minute of the film just fucks the whole thing up by being so simplistic--in a sense it makes the whole movie easy to dismiss. It should just end at the stairway.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4218389/Jacobs_Ladder_(1990)...

zerokoder• 17 years ago

Disappointed that Lost Highway didn't make it..

Check out Charlie Kaufman's "Adaptation".. brain bending on a different level..

antidaily• 17 years ago

I'll add 'I Heart Huckabees'.

unalone10• 17 years ago

That's not really a mindfuck: it's straightforward and consistent according to its deranged world.

Fun movie, though. The soundtrack is incredible.

senthil_rajasek• 17 years ago

waiting for the "Life of Pi" as a movie. Night supposedly (rumor ??) has the rights to make a movie, would be an awesome one...

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

The original version of Sleuth (Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier) should be on the list.

sdragon• 17 years ago

Serial Experiment Lain. You probably haven't heard of it, and you had to be introduced first to the anime subculture, then be not frightened away by the number of bad releases in that genre, then adjust to the japan mentality, take into consideration the fact, that it was basically pre-matrix (1998), watch the movie in a one night marathon, then start reading the mentioned, and omitted literature. However, the sheer amount of mindfuck going on in each, and every episode vastly outnumbers every single movie mentioned above, and this makes it very worthwhile.

zandorg• 17 years ago

And blatant Vannevar Bush, Xanadu and Ted Nelson references!

noahlt• 17 years ago

Neon Genesis Evangelion for good measure.

ewiethoff• 17 years ago

As Rod Serling would say, "Submitted for your approval":

  Eraserhead
  Forbidden Zone
  Gaslight
  Invaders from Mars
  Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  Laura
  Minority Report
  Mirage
  Rebecca
  Suddenly, Last Summer
  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
  The Devil's Advocate
  The Wizard of Oz
  Total Recall
  Vanilla Sky

Some are better than others, of course. And some fit the mindf definition better than others. Oh, well. These are some films that popped into my head.

nreece• 17 years ago

Highly recommended mindfuck films from across the globe:

El Método/The Method (Spain): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427582/

15 Park Avenue (India): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449159/

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi/Spirited Away (Japan/Animation): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/

Moustache, La (France): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428856/

Monday (Japan): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0239655/

Shutter (Thai/Horror): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0440803/

Gaau ji/Dumplings (Hong Kong): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472458/

yargseiks• 17 years ago

Spirited Away wasn't really a mindfuck, actually; it was a lovely, fairly straightforward fantasy/coming-of-age story. Highly recommended nonetheless.

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête), and Orpheus.

Try the version of Beauty and the Beast with the Phillip Glass soundtrack (basically turning the film into an opera).

johnlongawa• 17 years ago

Thanks for the list.

The Machinist is up there with Memento and Vanilla Sky. The Butterfly Effect might be in that league (directors cut only - different ending than the theatrical release).

pi38322• 17 years ago

Lists like this should really contain links to torrents of the films.

wheels• 17 years ago

Hmm, I find the list kind of "meh". There are some good films on there, but a lot of them I don't consider adventurous enough to be on among The Truly Strange. Lynch's stuff fits that bill well, but doesn't belong on the same page as e.g. Donnie Darko. A lot of these are really just witty.

spyrosk• 17 years ago

First of all due to this thread I think that I won't be going out for at least a month. Thank you HN.. :P

I'd like to make my own contribution to this thread since it hasn't been mentioned. It's "The man from earth". Not exactly mindfuck material, since it lacks that "surreal" element, but at least on my case, each time I finish it I can't help but just sit silent and think about the claims it poses, from a philosophical point of view. In that sense it could be in the mindflirt-romantic-dinner-with-potential category..

rogercosseboom• 17 years ago

Wow, I'm so glad Primer is on this list!

zupatol• 17 years ago

Some films by Alain Resnais deserve to be on this list:

Je t'aime, je t'aime: a time machine experiment gone wrong. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063152/

Providence: a story told while it's being written. Sometimes the writer changes his mind, sometimes his imagination takes him where he doesn't want to go. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076574/

Smoking / No Smoking: two films that explore different possible 'forks' of the same story. The first fork is the decision by one character to smoke a cigarette. In the first film she does, in the second she doesn't. There are three or four forks in each film which all completely change the fate of the characters. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108167/

Other films that come to mind:

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys , by Michael Haneke. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216625/

Akira has an ending just about as powerful as the ending of 2001. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/

Beyond a reasonable doubt (Fritz Lang) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049006/

(but why am I writing this on hacker news?) Vertigo (Hitchcock) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/

Ras_• 17 years ago

The Crying Game, Soylent Green, Requiem For A Dream, Misery

areaMan• 17 years ago

Anybody having any views on Primer? I watched it after reading about it on Kottke. Around the sametime a few days earlier I had watched Memento. And the contrast was as clear as heaven and earth.

Memento was v.intellectually stimulating and if you watched it closely (maybe twice) everything was there in the movie itself to figure out the 'mindfuck' elements. The very minute details which you may still miss were clearly explained in some article online, so all in all it was a comprehensive experience. It made you feel good at the end of it because everything had an explanation.

Whereas Primer just seemed like a bad movie and maybe partially because it was low budget. Throughout the movie I just thought I couldn't clearly see what was there in the scene. Many scenes felt like there was no proper light or sound.(youtubeish). And the storyline seemed so out of whack, and I remember watching it thrice, and lurking on the official movie forums trying to figure out the timeline and 'mindfuck'ness of the movie, but it just seemed like the whole movie could sort of come together only if you could imagine that half the movie was not shown. There were so many timelines in forums, and all of them seemed to miss out on major plotlines, which they would explain with a handwave as "director is v.smart and intended it to be so and you could feel that's what he wanted to portray... it was just not shown on screen...blah blah". The director himself lurked out on forums and gave conflicting and deliberately confusing interviews at the time on indie media sites and honestly he never seemed to explain wtf was going on.

In the end instead of a real mindfuck movie (like Memento), to me it just felt like a bad movie, where nothing could be explained and everything was left half-finished. I am still open to be convinced otherwise though it seems unlikely.

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