35 Iconic Mind-Boggling Movies You Have to Watch Twice

While most modern blockbusters routinely deliver stories that hum with a certain familiarity, these hit films did just the opposite. Abandoning the comfortable status quo of more traditional tales, these are some of the most notable films that have left audiences bamboozled as they tried to wrap their heads around what they had just watched. The fact is that some films insist upon being viewed twice — or three, or four, or twenty times — to be understood.

There are few things in cinema that can achieve the cultural staying power of the very best mind-bending movies. From sci-fi spectacles that leave audiences scatterbrained to mystery thrillers so layered with twists and turns that a repeat viewing is necessary to see how it all fits together, these mind-twisting movies have forged their own legacies with their dumbfounding nature, which have left fans perplexed. Featuring complex stories that demand repeat viewings to be digested, these are the best mind-blowing movies that left viewers’ heads spinning when the credits rolled.

35 ‘Enemy’ (2013)

Director: Denis Villeneuve

An understated yet eerie psychological thriller, Enemy was just one of two movies Denis Villeneuve released in 2013 to star Jake Gyllenhaal (the other being the crime mystery Prisoners). Imbued with the disconcerting motif of spiders, Enemy follows a college professor as he tracks down an extra in a movie who looks exactly like him. When the two finally meet, however, the lives of both men are changed forever.

It holds no qualms about being both persistently mysterious and difficult to track, but the complicated situation between the two men is never anything but completely enthralling to watch unfold. Based on José Saramago’s novel The Double, Javier Gullón’s screenplay always poses more questions than answers, especially after Enemy‘s bizarre and unsettling ending. Villeneuve takes great delight in withholding convenient resolutions from the audience, making for a film that needs to be revisited and scrupulously analyzed.

34 ‘Solaris’ (1972)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

When it comes to thought-provoking cinema which demands intrinsic viewing and multiple rewatches to be grasped, there is perhaps no greater filmmaker than Andrei Tarkovsky. His 1972 sci-fi film, Solaris, follows a psychologist sent to deduce why the crew of a space station orbiting an oceanic planet have all experienced a mental and emotional episode. However, the doctor soon finds himself experiencing similar feelings as the crew he is investigating.

An outstanding example of arthouse sci-fi’s philosophical ponderings on the human condition, Solaris has an atmospheric allure that has a way of washing over audiences even if the narrative can sometimes leave them behind. Haunting, meditative, beautiful, and entirely enigmatic, Solaris provides a unique viewing experience that shelters the depths of its secrets and ideas well, necessitating multiple rewatches to be explored in full.

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33 ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Viewed by many to be Ingmar Bergman’s defining film, The Seventh Seal runs with a relatively simple premise; a knight returning from the Crusades faces off against Death (Bengt Ekerot) in a chess game for his own life. Disillusioned with his faith, the knight draws out the game as he searches for answers, meeting traveling outcasts struggling to survive as medieval Sweden is ravaged by the Black Plague.

Through its stringent exploration of faith and mortality, The Seventh Seal has become a classic of world cinema. Its ferocious interrogation of the torment of belief and religion has seen Bergman’s work remain a thematically relevant film for almost 70 years. Overloaded with philosophical jousting over the nature of life and death, only so much of what the film contains can be digested on first viewing.

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32 ‘Incendies’ (2010)

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Another Denis Villeneuve film, Incendies would go on to become Canada’s selection for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards, successfully earning a nomination. Featuring both French and Arabic characters, it follows two adult siblings in Canada who strive to fulfill their mother’s final wish, delivering a letter to a brother they didn’t know they had and another to their father who they thought was dead. The journey sees them venture to an unnamed Levantine country where they learn of their mother’s harrowing war-torn past.

The film doesn’t confuse viewers with its story structure so much as it delivers such a brutal viewing experience that comprehending everything can be difficult the first time around. For many, Incendies will be a film that’s far too disturbing to revisit, but a second watch will allow for the underlying tragedy of family love to prevail over the film’s more unforgettably devastating reveals.

31 ‘Stalker’ (1979)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Like Solaris, Stalker typifies Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky at his poetically enigmatic best, giving viewers a richly compelling experience. Using its narrative as a platform to explore its weighty ideas of human desire, the dystopian sci-fi follows a writer and a scientist who are led by a guide to a secluded restricted area known as the Zone. Both men hope to discover a mythical place known as the Room, which is said to fulfill the desires of all who enter.

Visually sublime and rife with sensory messages and striking symbolism, Stalker is a masterpiece of thought-provoking cinema, sparking thousands of conversations that continue even now, well over 40 years since its original release. Exploring sci-fi’s defining central question – ‘What does it mean to be human?’ – with hypnotic majesty, Stalker is a philosophical gem that ought to be watched numerous times, with audiences coming to different understandings with each viewing.

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30 ’12 Monkeys’ (1995)

Director: Terry Gilliam

An intense, time-traveling thriller, 12 Monkeys follows a convict from a post-apocalyptic future as he is sent back in time to discover the origin of the virus that wipes out humanity. Investigating a group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, his assignment sees him make the acquaintance of a radicalized anti-corporate environmentalist and a psychiatrist.

With its shocking twists and its intricate, unraveling mystery, 12 Monkeys is an enthralling deep dive into insanity. Terry Gilliam’s dystopian ideals mesh with the sci-fi mystery quite perfectly, imbuing the film with a purposeful grit and a certain structural messiness, which makes it an immersive treat to go back and revisit. It also boasts spectacular performances from Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt to boot.

29 ‘Mr. Nobody’ (2009)

Director: Jaco Van Dormael

An enticing and thought-provoking sci-fi drama that engages in sliding doors speculation, Mr. Nobody was an underrated film upon release. It stars Jared Leto as Nemo Nobody, a 118-year-old man who is the last mortal human in an advanced future who recounts his childhood as well as his romances and hardships to a doctor and a journalist.

As he shares more of his experiences, the film also explores what other trajectories his life may have taken had he made different decisions at certain points. Mr. Nobody‘s complex and non-linear narrative structure makes for a confusing watch, but it is a movie worth returning to in order to understand and engage with more completely. It also has quite the visual display to make repeat viewings more enticing as well.

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28 ‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

Director: Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott’s incredible blending of hard-boiled science-fiction with notions of film noir remains the pinnacle of sci-fi entertainment, not only in terms of its story, but with its aesthetic as well. In a dystopian future where robots known as replicants work on off-world colonies, it follows a Blade Runner – a police officer who deals in replicant-related crimes – as he must hunt down a rogue group of androids that have returned to Earth.

Blade Runner focuses on both Deckard (Harrison Ford) and the replicants he hunts with a neutral lens, depicting the robots’ desire for longer, more prosperous lives as being the film’s driving humanity. While Blade Runner‘s broad strokes are easy to digest on first viewing, revisiting it is a rewarding experience as it allows fans to catch the finer details and, if they so wish, come to their own conclusion on whether Deckard is human or a replicant.

27 ‘Upstream Color’ (2013)

Director: Shane Carruth

A terribly underappreciated yet thought-provoking and intriguing movie that represents much of American experimental cinema at its captivating best, Upstream Color was as confounding as it was abstract from start to finish. The basic premise follows a young woman who is abducted and experimented on with larvae which makes her extremely susceptible to suggestion.

A year after Kris (Amy Seimetz) is released, she meets a man who underwent a similar ordeal, and they form a connection as their emotional and mental states are impacted by the experiences of other lifeforms the parasitic larvae come into contact with. As wonderfully bizarre as the story is, the full weight of its extravagant thematic ambitions warrants multiple viewings to comprehend.

26 ‘Vertigo’ (1958)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

As the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock was a genius when it came to complex thrillers with fascinating characters whose motives aren’t initially clear, which makes it quite surprising that so many of his films are easy to understand on their first viewings. One possible exception to that is Vertigo, a true classic that casts its lens of betrayal, deception, loss, and death to dazzling effect.

It follows John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), an ex-cop who is hired as a private investigator by an old acquaintance to tail his wife who has been acting strangely. Scottie begins to grow obsessed with the woman after her apparent suicide. It’s an intriguing though unpredictable film that blends romance, mystery, horror, and mind-bending psychedelia to be one of Hitchcock’s greatest and most confounding movies.

25 ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)

Director: Michel Gondry

Genre mashes of science-fiction and romantic drama are all too rare, as they often result in thought-provoking films that excel at making audiences care deeply for their characters. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the pinnacle of the subgenre with Charlie Kaufman’s Oscar-winning screenplay unafraid of a chaotic journey through the human psyche rutted with emotional turmoil.

It follows a couple in the wake of a sour breakup who each attempt to have a medical procedure done which will erase all memory of their time together. However, as they are confronted with the highlights of their romance, they have second thoughts about the process. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet put in powerhouse performances and the film’s beautiful yet deft story requires repeat viewings to be fully appreciated.

24 ‘The Usual Suspects’ (1995)

Director: Bryan Singer

Boasting one of the most famous movie twists in cinematic history, The Usual Suspects relied on smart storytelling to captivate audiences only to leave them completely fooled at the very end. The basic plot follows a criminal recounting the events that led up to a deadly shootout to a U.S. Customs agent looking into the case, telling him of the legendary crime lord Keyser Söze.

Utilizing the unreliable narrator trope to its fullest potential, the movie’s shocking finale would have had many first-time viewers rewinding and watching again to see all the hints they missed the first time around. It also crafted a legacy that sees the film remain popular decades later and has cemented it as one of the defining pictures of the 1990s.

23 ‘Cloud Atlas’ (2012)

Directors: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Lilly Wachowski

The Wachowskis are certainly no stranger to mind-boggling stories. Released in 2012, Cloud Atlas may be their most underappreciated release – at least since The Matrix – as an ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel which follows six different stories in completely different eras, suggesting a connection between souls over time.

Using the same cast members across the six differing tales, mixing up who plays what roles in terms of protagonists and villains, the film had little interest in easing audiences into the elaborate story. It leaps wildly, taking viewers from the Pacific Islands in the 1840s to the modern day and to a distant future beyond societal collapse at breakneck speed. It proved to be fiercely polarizing in the eyes of critics, with some celebrating its ambitious scope while others criticized it for being overly complex.

22 ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001)

Director: Richard Kelly

Donnie Darko is a classic sci-fi psychological thriller that chronicles the journey of the titular protagonist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a disturbed teenager living in a suburban community who begins to have dreams of a huge rabbit named Frank. As Donnie begins to follow Frank’s directions, strange and terrible events occur, and he realizes that he may be living in a parallel reality, and that his visions may be a warning of an inevitable catastrophe.

Directed by Richard Kelly, the film received critical acclaim for its thought-provoking story and its exploration of themes such as time travel and parallel universes. It has an uncanny ability to inspire apprehension and fear in viewers through its atmosphere and pacing. This, along with Donnie Darko‘s non-linear plot and jarring ending, places it among the mind-blowing movies that require more than one viewing to fully grasp.

21 ‘Inception’ (2010)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Among Christopher Nolan’s most popular films, Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a talented thief who is given the opportunity to redeem himself by accomplishing the impossible: implanting an idea into a person’s subconscious. Cobb and his crew infiltrate their target’s dreams, employing a range of modern technologies to plant the idea and control the dream. As the team goes deeper into the target’s psyche, they are forced to confront their own guilt and regrets, which builds to a dramatic and mind-bending ending.

It was an instant success thanks to its uniqueness, mind-blowing action sequences, and complicated and thought-provoking plot. Its impressive visual effects and sound design perfectly complement its blend of action, science fiction, and psychological aspects. Inception‘s use of nonlinear storytelling and dream logic, as well as its treatment of issues like the nature of reality and the power of the mind, make it challenging but rewarding to rewatch.

20 ‘TÁR’ (2022)

Director: Todd Field

Director Todd Field‘s TÁR rightly gained recognition during the 2022-23 awards circuit, particularly for Cate Blanchett‘s remarkable performance, which earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. The film is centered on the fictional renowned composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Blanchett), who is soon thrust into the spotlight for her questionable interactions with mentees.

Subtle, daring, and bold all at once, TÁR will catch viewers off-guard with its wholly original perspective and nuanced storytelling. There are so many clues and small details throughout the film that absolutely demand a second (or even a third) viewing of what is sure to be among the greatest movies of this decade.

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19 ‘The Prestige’ (2006)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Throughout his illustrious career, Christopher Nolan has regularly proved that he is at his absolute best when he is at his most ambitious, and The Prestige is a prime example of just that. Based on Christopher Priest’s novel, it tracks the violent rivalry of two 1890s magicians and their relentless endeavor to perform the perfect trick and best the other in the process.

Ego and deceit define the two characters as the story’s twists and turns continually fool the audience, seeing the narrative drift from a period-piece, character-driven thriller to a convoluted web of science-fiction mystery. It’s surprising how neat and satisfying The Prestige‘s conclusion ends up being, making it worthy of multiple rewatches where audiences see so much more, from overarching plot points to how relationships between characters evolve.

18 ‘Synecdoche, New York’ (2008)

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Ever the unsurpassed master of opaque yet tender storytelling, Charlie Kaufman‘s directorial debut can only be described as entirely surreal. Something of a cult classic, Synecdoche, New York offers a challenging viewing experience perfect for those who like plenty to grapple with when they watch a movie. It sees Philip Seymour Hoffman star as a lonely and unfortunate theater director who convinces a group of actors to live in a mock-up of New York City in preparation for a new play.

Hoffman’s typically brilliant starring performance is well-supported by an extensive ensemble cast which is forced to do a lot of the leg work to hook the viewer into the film’s surreal atmosphere and intriguing yet unconventional plot. Ultimately, Synecdoche, New York demands multiple viewings to be wholly dissected and understood.

17 ‘Predestination’ (2014)

Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig

Well, there are mind-boggling movies, and then there’s Predestination, a contained, paradoxical sci-fi mystery that turns the dial up to eleven. Following a time-traveling agent tracking a criminal known as the ‘Fizzle Bomber’ through time — and the perilous journey of self-discovery his inexperienced partner goes on — it is a great and underrated sci-fi gem that disturbs as much as it intrigues.

Predestination sees the twists pile on top of each other in relentless fashion, with Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook putting in brilliant performances as the characters make one shocking discovery after another. While a second watch is essential to understanding the film’s central mystery and its disturbing subplot, it could also entice viewers to think deeper about the film and leave them even more confused than they were after the first watch.

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16 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1990)

Director: Adrian Lyne

A harrowing and deeply tragic journey through the psyche of a disturbed man’s mental decline, Jacob’s Ladder is a rattling viewing experience, to say the least. It follows Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a Vietnam War veteran who begins to lose his grasp on reality as his life is overrun by flashbacks and hallucinations of his experiences, which include the war, his dead son, and his earlier marriage.

The grueling tale of paranoia and panic has the ability to linger on the audience’s minds long after the credits have rolled with its uncanny ability to make viewers feel what Jacob experiences. An engrossing, nerve-shattering psychological horror film, it demands to be rewatched to be truly understood as a whole. Having said that, one viewing was understandably more than enough for many audience members.

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