Five Cent Deposit

This past year or so I've realized that the movies which appeal to me the most are those with "unreliable" structure.

I don't mean flicks like The Usual Suspects where it is used as a device- almost solely there in order to spring a surprise ending on you, but where everything is neat and tidy in the first dozen reels and in the final reel- the only time things are confusing is the 90 second montage of exposition.

What I'm enjoying are films where every moment in the story is colored by weirdness. Every performance is designed to support the idea that something isn't right- but you'll never really know what. The "real" version of events is never illustrated. You only are presented with versions that are very subjective to individual experience.

Memento is of course a fine example. So is Mulholland Drive. Waking Life qualifies. Twelve Monkeys does also.

I guess I'm talking about what some call "mind*****" movies. I don't care for "clever" plot twists. I've studied film a bit, I went to acting school, I devour all I can get my hands on about the moviemaking "process". And I've watched TONS of movies. So these days, I am almost *always* an objective viewer. It can be difficult for me to watch a movie without seeing it critically the whole way. Even beautifully crafted films and performances suffer sometimes- I just don't "experience" the movie the way I did when I was a kid. Most movies are told as objectively as possible, in order to be "understood" at the lowest cerebral level. I want movies that aren't about storytelling- they are about opening up a world of subjective experience to those outside of that experience.

So movies where you aren't told what happens, but have to interpret what you see... and really suck you into seeing through the eyes of a protagonist with an identity that feels very real, are what I end up watching over and over again.

For example, I had no trouble "getting" the twist in Memento. I didn't need to watch it 12 times in order for it to "make sense". I watch it over and over again because it feels so real, yet so different from the rest of my life. It balances very beautifully- it has just the right degree of "relatability" and just the right degree of "foreign-ness".

Plot doesn't matter- just recommend to me some movies where this balance exists. Where you watch over and over not in order to "figure everything out", but because they are able to transport you entirely into someone else's experience, and where that experience is different enough that it doesn't always "make sense".

Five Cent Deposit

To clarify- pretty much any movie that successfully puts you inside someone else's experience is going to be "weird" to me. So I'm not so much asking for examples of the classic definition of "unreliable", i.e. surreal or untrue or whatever. A movie could have a very straightforward story, and the protagonist could be sane and have a reasonably clear perception of the events around him. Just having those events relayed entirely through the filter of the protagonist's eyes is enough to make it "weird". The thing is, this isn't often done for films with conventional stories to tell, so most of the examples that I can think of are like I described above- "something isn't right".

But really, seeing anything at all through another person's eyes is "not right", so if you can think of movies that work successfully on this level without resorting to true "weirdness", I'd love to know about them. Thanks in advance.

Mondo Kane

SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

mcarver

1-900 (1994)
Adjuster, The (1991)
Amores Perros (2000)
Andrei Rublev (1969)
Barton Fink (1991)
Bliss (1985)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Bound (1996)
Boxing Helena (1993)
Brazil (1985)
Breaking the Waves (1996)
Cabeza de Vaca (1991)
Chungking Express (1994)
Convent, The (1995)
Coup de Torchon (1981)
Dead Man (1995)
Devil's Backbone, The (2001)
Don't Let Me Die on a Sunday (1998)
Element of Crime (1984)
Everything Put Together (2000)
Fallen Angels (1995)
Fando y Lis (1967)
Immortality (1998)
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995)
Lantana (2001)
Maborosi (1995)
Man Who Wasn't There, The (2001)
Mararķa (1998)
Mauvais Sang (1986)
Memoirs of a Survivor (1981)
Million Dollar Hotel, The (2000)
Of Freaks and Men (1998)
Orlando (1992)
Pillow Book, The (1996)
Ponette (1996)
Querelle (1982)
Red Dwarf (1998)
Red Violin (1998)
Safe (1995)
Saragossa Manuscript, The (1965)
Servant, The (1963)
Single Girl (1995)
Six Ways to Sunday (1998)
Woman in the Dunes (1964)
Zed & Two Noughts, A (1985)
Zero Kelvin (1995)

Tony Block

MULHOLLAND DR.
FEMME FATALE

JLJanis

Fight Club springs immediately to mind... "I am Jack's off-the-cuff suggestion..."

Giantrobo

Joker 2019

"Unreliable Narrator" has been popping up a lot for me lately.

EinCB

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master.

story

Isn't there an adaptation of Tristram Shandy that's basically this sort of thing?

wendersfan

I think you mean the one directed by Michael Winterbottom.

Also, Rashomon

majorjoe23

Damn it, wendersfan beat me. Or did he?

Dan

In many cases, providing a film title would kind of effectively be a spoiler.

Norm de Plume

Adam Simon's Brain Dead (1990) is this sort of film, and one of the great, shamefully unheralded films of the 1980s. The chintzy poster/DVD cover might have played a part in its being overlooked.

Groucho

The 2019 version of Little Women has elements of this.

inri222

The Usual Suspects
The Tenant
Gone Girl
Memento
The Informant
Lost Highway
American Psycho

TheAllPurposeNothing

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Little Big Man
Adaptation
Jacob's Ladder

Abob Teff

I'm a little confused on what exactly you are looking for ... (trying to use examples not named already) ...

Films where the story is told from multiple and conflicting views (e.g., Rashomon)? If that is it, I would add a guilty pleasure of mine: Basic.

Films where the story is folding over and over on itself? Go visit the Coherence thread for those mind noodlers. Good conversation happening there.

Films where the timeline is fractured as a storytelling mechanism? Duncan Jones' pair of Moon and Mute.

Or films where reality is subverted and the viewer (and characters) don't know what is going on? Dark City or Donnie Darko.

spainlinx0

This is an 18 year thread bump. This thread can legally vote.

davidlynchfan

need to check this one out as it just got an Arrow video release.