Often, one of the best movies or TV series is that single which shakes your entire worldview so much that you cannot help but express your surprise by saying, “Wait… what just happened?”. These fictional works, which in a way laugh at reason and simply aim for the absurd, have an odd charm to them; although they never operate conventionally, they stay with you. To acknowledge their weirdness, here is a list of the nine most confusing, unfathomable, and engrossing screen experiences.
9. Hostage (2025)
Hostage is a political thriller on Netflix full of sarcastic remarks, and you want to figure out the plot only to find out that it is something else entirely. The story is a magnificent muddle of confusion: Mrs. Prime Minister gets kidnapped during a secret mission, the son of the French President is carrying some encrypted laptops, but nobody is interested, and global leaders are pretending that they are lost, as if they didn’t know where their next important meeting was. It is absurd, it doesn’t make any sense, and yet it totally captivates you. Hostage is the outcome of the mix of the gorgeous images and the total logic breakdown, a “beautiful nonsense” you keep looking at, although your mind keeps protesting.
8. Mad God (2022)
Mad God, made by the legendary stop-motion master Phil Tippett over a period of 35 years, is more of an expedition into the nightmares of someone else than a film. It is completely silent, has no story, and is absolutely insane, which is why it is amazing. A hooded stranger travels through a rotting world of deformed puppets and frightening monsters, with each shot being more horrifying than the previous one. The film is a combination of art, horror, and insanity all in one single hypnotic fever dream. To view it is to surrender to the depths of the subconscious, a place one may never fully leave, but which will haunt one forever.
7. Persona (1966)
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is still among the most puzzling and deeply psychological works of art in the film category. After throwing at the viewer some downright shocking images of a crucifixion, a dead animal, and a corpse, it switches to the portrayal of the relationship between a nurse and her mute patient, an actress who has lost her ability to speak. Afterwards, the movie goes beyond its own borders with the film burning, the storyline getting mixed up, and the truth being smashed. What is real? Who is who? Does everything exist or not? Persona is a riot of ghosts, brains, and stubbornly multilayered.
6. Annihilation (2018)
Alex Garland’s Annihilation is a noisy cocktail of the genres sci-fi, horror, and existential terror. The Shimmer is a place where the laws of physics and biology that we know are changed. So, a team of scientists entered the zone to find out the truth. When Portman, as the character, sees her doppelganger of weird perfection, there is no room for reason. You have to question identity, reality, and even the reason for evolution. It is a beautiful movie, but also a terrifying one, and it is mind-boggling as well. It is better to see it twice, the first time to follow the story and the second time with the confusion.
5. Mulholland Drive (2001)
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a film that breaks the rules of any kind. The film noir whodunit that it is at first soon became a dreamlike nightmare of fragmented identities, false memories, and madness. Naomi Watts as the actress whose reality is between fantasy and nightmare and thus blurring, makes an excellent job. A dream? A delusion? Both? Lynch never provides the answer because Mulholland Drive is not about the answer. It’s about the feeling.
4. Tenet (2020)
Tenet is a wild, edgy, and cool spy thriller by Christopher Nolan that more or less feels like a scientific puzzle. The film revolves around “time inversion” situations, where characters interact as if one is going forward and the other is going backward in time. The hero, figuring out that he’s the one from the future who’s actually writing the script, may very well give you a brain-in-a-blender effect. Simply put, Tenet is awesome, impressive, and quite a complicated mess of sorts; it’s not something you understand, it’s an impression that you get, and that impression is a wonderful kind of confusion.
3. Inception (2010)
While Tenet was a time-related theme, Inception treated the same theme through dreams that were nested inside each other. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb is the leader of an operation that delves into the subconscious, mixing dream with reality on every level. And the spinning top: it is always spinning, never falling, and continually creating arguments. Is he aware? Still dreaming? Both? Nolan purposely keeps it ambiguous, thus turning the explanation into a riddle that lasts even after the credits are done.
2. Donnie Darko (2001)
Not many films could combine teenage rage, time travel, and absolute terror of existence in such a way as Donnie Darko did. The protagonist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, sees a giant rabbit that tells him the end of the world, and to his astonishment, everything that happens is very tightly related to fate, other dimensions, and whether he is a lunatic or a genius. The movie keeps telling us that it never provides a direct answer, but keeps coming back to its own riddles. Donnie Darko is a dark, depressive, and eternally debatable one of the most atypical and complex pieces of the past that has amassed a cult-following.
1. The Insanity of Short Films
Maybe shorts were the first to bring the anarchist idea to the film industry. In most cases, these directors choose to use these small-scale projects as their way of showing their most unusual and ambitious ideas, which, in general, are limited by factors like runtime or sometimes even by logic. Actually, shorts kind of have the whole surreal thing to themselves, whether it be Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon or Don Hertzfeldt’s funny and absurd Rejected (“My spoon is too big!”). There are also Stant Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, which revolutionizes the concept of an autopsy film, and Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a love story told only through still photographs.
They do not take much time to present to the audience what creative freedom and delightful confusion can be found in feature-length ones. Sometimes the best stories are completely illogical, and that happens to be their strength. If a film leaves you confused, laughing your amazement, or silently staring at the credits with astonishment, it is not a defeat; it is art. Because, in the cinema universe, confusion can be the most delightful of emotions.