These 8 Underrated Mind-Bending Movies Messed With My Head For Weeks

It’s one thing for a good movie to entertain an audience and even get them to feel something, but making a viewer really think about what they just saw is a rare quality in film. Some of the best mind-blowing films have given moviegoers something to thoughtfully chew over for years now, leaving a lasting impression in the annals of cinema history. However, some brain-bending stories go unnoticed in the pop culture zeitgeist despite just how good they are at eliciting some big questions.

For the most part, sharp thrillers and horror movies are mostly likely to cover these bases without getting celebrated, eclipsed by sci-fi epics or poignant mystery dramas. These kinds of films might have incredible plot twists or twisted metaphorical imagery in lieu of a standard plot, leaving viewers puzzling over their content for days at a time. In any case, it’s a shame some philosophical and horizon-expanding films haven’t been getting their due recognition.

8

Primer

Critically stimulating, perhaps to a fault

If there’s one plot element that consistently gets complicated any time it’s introduced, it’s the many cinematic interpretations of time travel. No film truly leans into the complex questions the hypothetical technology might provide quite like Primer, a critically-adored but seldom spoken of independent film. The story revolves around two entrepreneurs and scientists who make a massive breakthrough in time travel, though their experiments soon prove to be dangerous to reality.

Unlike most high-concept science fiction films, Primer makes little to no effort to dumb down its complex hypothetical mathematics for layperson audiences. This put a bad taste in the mouths of audiences, but enamored critics, who lauded the film’s uncompromising and realistic depiction of the scientific process. Complicated, dense, but ultimately worth penetrating, Primer is one of the most realistic takes on time travel ever put to screen.

7

Timecrimes

A dizzying thrill ride where the protagonist is his own worst enemy

Another theory-bending time travel movie, Timecrimes is more of a Groundhog’s Day-type time loop situation rather than traditional time travel. The Spanish-language sci-fi thriller centers on a middle-aged man in the Spanish countryside, Hector, who suddenly finds himself in a stand-off with a mysterious man with bloody bandages on his face. This man turns out to be him as he goes on to meet a scientist that puts him in a looping time paradox, meeting and battling with multiple versions of himself.

Like Primer, even understanding the plot of Timecrimes is something that takes at least a couple of watches. However, once some sense can be made of it, the gripping tension and eerie mystery is given a chance to shine. The film does a lot with a little, having only a handful of locations and even fewer characters, showing off just how lean of a story can be crafted from a well-thought-out time travel paradox.

6

Vivarium

A terrifying glimpse into suburban purgatory

Despite being relatively recent, Vivarium is a criminally overlooked horror movie that supplements its dread with plenty to think about. The film stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as a young couple looking to buy a house, touring a cookie-cutter domicile in an eerily empty suburb. Upon attempting to leave, the two find themselves trapped in an endless row of identical houses, and before long, a human-looking infant is dropped off at their doorstep along with supplies to raise it.

Watching the young couple break down as the dread of their menial new existence sinks in is horrifying in a way few other movies in the genre can accomplish. Endless mysteries are also seeded with the bizarre race of aliens doing all this to them, forcing the hapless couple to raise their young ones in the confines of a maddening custom-built reality. With trippy falls through layers of reality, gradually fraying chunks of sanity, and creepy inflatable throat sacks, Vivairum is an underrated recent horror movie that offers a lot to chew on.

5

The Night House

A terrifyingly long glimpse into the face of oblivion

Another recent horror movie that went woefully underseen, The Night House has one of the most creative and high-concept ideas for a supernatural villain ever conceived. The plot follows a grief-stricken widow grappling with the apparent suicide of her husband. When she finds out about some mysterious activities he was engaging in behind her back leading up to his death, including the construction of the mysterious titular house, she comes into contact with an existentially terrifying supernatural force.

The Night House‘s villain is not only death itself, but the literal concept of nothingness and annihilation, laying dormant in the protagonist’s soul for years after a near-death experience. It’s amazing how creatively this villain is portrayed, seen as a series of human-looking silhouettes against a background of wall moldings, shadows, windowpanes and waves. The concept of oblivion following death is one of the most morbid and esoteric ideas to forge a horror movie villain out of, but The Night House somehow manages to personify it.

4

The Box

An unknown follow-up from a one-hit-wonder filmmaker

Richard Kelly’s time travel mechanisms in Donnie Darko are the stuff of mind-bending movie legend, but it’s a shame his other filmography isn’t as celebrated for its wit and creativity. Enter The Box, a box office failure of a film from Kelly featuring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as Norma and Arthur Lewis, a married couple who are given a box by a mysterious stranger with a classic ethical dilemma attached to it. Should they open the box, they receive one million dollars, but a random person will die.

It’s amazing to watch two actors as talented as Diaz and Marsden grapple with their morality in the wake of their financial destitution, and Frank Langella is also excellent as the mysterious, disfigured stranger who offers them the choice in the first place. The film has a lot to say about personal ethics and how they might be corrupted by outside forces as simple and insidious as capitalism. It’s hard not to watch The Box without putting oneself in the shoes of the hapless protagonists and imagining how to respond to their dilemma.

3

Fractured

An anxiety-ridden search paved with madness

Another director famous for a psychological thriller whose other works aren’t as appreciated is Brad Anderson of The Machinist fame. Perhaps his single most criminally-underrated work is Fractured, a Sam Worthington star vehicle that provides a more straightforward mystery with a dizzyingly unbelievable ending. Worthington stars as a father and husband who takes his daughter and wife to the hospital after the former hurts herself in an accident, only to fall asleep and wake up with them missing.

What follows is a frantic search throughout the hospital for his missing family. At first, the hospital staff seem to be in on the conspiracy, though it’s hard not to wonder if Worthington’s character’s family ever existed in the first place. The actual twist ending that reveals their fate is one of the most creative and devastating plot developments of the last ten years, making it all the more unbelievable that more audiences didn’t give Fractured a try.

2

Mad God

The magnum opus of a dedicated artist

Special effects mastermind Phil Tippett is the steady hand behind iconic stop-motion special effects in famous series like RoboCop and Star Wars. But his own magnum opus, and film called Mad God, is a far more bizarre and logic-defying thrill ride into depravity that defies typical description. The plot, as much as there can be said to be one, follows a lone gas-mask-wearing assassin deep into a harrowing journey into hell as he attempts to deliver his ordinance, a time bomb briefcase.

Famously, Mad God took 30 years to finish, and the intricately animated stop-motion world makes every second of this time count. The trippy visuals are a frightening journey that begs to be dissected, with total lack of any dialogue to speak of leaving only the convoluted metaphor of the nightmarish imagery to unpack. Thus, Mad God is not mind-bending because of information overload or a clever twist, but because of how many different ways its visuals can be interpreted allegorically.

1

Dark City

The original model more popular films mimic

In the eyes of many, The Matrix is the ultimate mind-blowing science fiction film that popularized the idea of a false reality. However, one year earlier, a techno-noir thriller called Dark City unleashed a similar premise with woefully underrated results. The film begins as a typical noir detective story, showing a lone amnesiac man suspected of murder attempt to clear his name by finding the real killer, all the while running from the eerie group of “Strangers” chasing him.

It’s eventually revealed that The Strangers are aliens observing a captive population of humans, kept psychically pacified and unaware of the fact that they only exist at night because their city is really a giant space station drifting through the void. This kind of existential cosmic dread isn’t easy to manufacture, and Dark City pulls it off while oozing with a distinct noir style. This stylishly gloomy movie deserves to sit on shelves reserved for science fiction masterpieces as monumental as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Metropolis.