Christopher Nolan's Tenet may look like a regular spy thriller on the surface, but once you start watching it, you'll realize how chaotic the plot actually is. In the story, people can manipulate the direction of objects and events through "inversion", meaning some action sequences and scenes effectively happen forwards and backwards at the same time. The movie rarely pauses to explain its rather complicated mechanics and rules, which makes the plot all the more challenging to understand. | © Syncopy / Warner Bros. Pictures
Under the Skin follows an alien woman who drives around Scotland picking up unsuspecting men. The movie intentionally withholds any information about who she is and what she wants, and many scenes feel more like visual experiments than typical storytelling. Its strange imagery and sparse dialogue leave much of the plot open to interpretation. | © A24
12 Monkeys follows James Cole, a prisoner from a post-apocalyptic future who is sent back in time to investigate the origins of a deadly virus. From there, things quickly become complicated as the movie jumps between timelines, memories, and perspectives, leaving viewers to question what is real and what has already happened. By the end, piecing together its seemingly disconnected moments can feel like solving a puzzle with several missing pieces. | © Universal Pictures
Lost Highway is an identity-bending mystery from David Lynch. Its story focuses on a musician accused of murdering his wife who mysteriously transforms into a completely different man. The movie jumps between characters, identities, and realities without giving too much information away. Like much of Lynch's work, the experience is less about solving a mystery and more about figuring out what the strange imagery might represent. | © Ciby 2000 / Asymmetrical Productions
Denis Villeneuve's Enemy follows a college history professor who discovers an actor who looks exactly like him. What happens next is a bizarre psychological mystery involving identity and paranoia. The movie leaves a lot for viewers to interpret in its recurring imagery and shocking final scene. The spider imagery alone has generated enough theories to keep people debating the movie years later. | © A24
Gaspar Noé's surrealist art film Enter the Void follows an American drug dealer in Tokyo whose consciousness appears to continue observing the world after his death. The film shifts between memories, hallucinations, and flashbacks as it explores his relationship with his sister and the events surrounding his death. In addition to all that, its unusual first-person perspective and nonlinear storytelling make it difficult to discern between what is reality and what is fantasy. | © Fidélité Films / Wild Bunch
Memento is confusing simply because it tells its story in reverse. The film follows a man with severe short-term memory loss as he attempts to find his wife's killer. Because the protagonist can't form new memories, neither he nor the audience can fully trust any of the information being presented. The movie jumps backward through the main storyline while another narrative moves forward in black and white. Eventually the two storylines collide, revealing just how complex and intentionally disorienting the movie really is. | © Summit Entertainment / Newmarket
Inception's dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream structure still makes viewers' heads spin to this day. Characters can enter multiple layers of dreams, with each level operating under a different set of rules concerning time and gravity. On top of that, the movie constantly shifts between these realities while building toward a finale that involves several storylines that take place at the same time. It's the type of film that you have to pay close attention to, otherwise you'll completely lose track of everything that's going on. | © Legendary Pictures / Syncopy / Warner Bros. Pictures
Inland Empire follows Hollywood actress Nikki Grace as she takes on a role in a new movie. As time passes, she gradually loses track of the boundaries between her character, the movie, and, ultimately, reality. Stories appear inside other stories, identities shift, and scenes seem to repeat in altered forms. The movie's plot has stumped people because of its broken narrative structure. Interestingly, it was reported that Inland Empire was created without a complete script, so Director David Lynch would write specific scenes as he went along. | © Absurda / StudioCanal
Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, is an ambitious exploration of life, death, art, and identity. The late great Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a theater director who creates a massive replica of New York inside a warehouse and begins staging a play based on his own life. Actors portray real people, those actors get portrayed by other actors, and decades seem to pass without clear boundaries. The movie is confusing because it is intentionally overwhelming and deliberately blurs the lines between reality and simulation. | © Sidney Kimmel Entertainment / Sony Pictures Classics
Donnie Darko is a psychological thriller that follows a troubled teenager who begins receiving bizarre messages from a mysterious figure in a giant rabbit costume. From there, the film introduces visions, time travel, alternate realities, philosophical concepts, and a strange series of events. Its ending provides some answers but also raises plenty of questions. It's the kind of movie that can feel completely confusing on a first viewing. It definitely requires a second viewing if you want to get a grip on what has taken place. | © Flower Films / Pandora Cinema
Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island follows U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels as he investigates the disappearance of a patient from a remote psychiatric facility. Strange clues and conflicting accounts appear as he dives deeper into the mystery, which makes it difficult for him to determine what is actually happening. The movie constantly plays with perception and memory, and that forces viewers to reconsider almost everything they have seen. There are plenty of twists and turns, but that is what makes the film so engaging. | © Paramount Pictures
Made on a tiny budget, Primer is a niche indie film that's infamous for turning time travel into an incredibly complicated puzzle. The story follows two engineers who accidentally discover a method of traveling through time, but their attempts to exploit it create tangled timelines and duplicate versions of themselves. The movie provides very little hand-holding, which forces you to pay close attention to the dialogue and subtle changes between scenes. Some viewers have produced large diagrams to help others untangle the movie's storyline. That should give you an idea of how complex this movie is. | © THINKFilm / Shane Carruth
Stanley Kubrick's experimental film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously spends long stretches of its runtime communicating through visuals rather than dialogue. The movie begins with mysterious monoliths, jumps millions of years into the future, and eventually takes viewers into one of cinema's strangest and most unexplainable endings. You'll be left with more questions than answers by the time the credits start rolling. It's definitely less of a movie that explains itself and more of one that invites interpretation. | © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Mulholland Drive is practically the gold standard for confusing movies. What begins as a rather straightforward mystery about an aspiring actress and an amnesiac woman gradually turns into something far stranger. Dreams, alternate identities, Hollywood fantasies, and seemingly disconnected characters mesh together until it's hard to figure out what actually happened. To this day, people are still trying to piece together what really happened in the end. | © Universal Pictures
Some of the best movies are the ones you don't fully understand the first time around. That said, these 15 films are arguably the most confusing movies of all time. They'll make you think and wonder if any of it actually made sense.
