Real puzzles: a selection of movies for an interesting evening

Have you ever started watching a movie and realized that you don't understand anything? Movie fans call such films puzzles. Some of them give you the key to solving them on their own, while some of them require you to puzzle over them even after you've watched them.

Moviegoers decided to share their favorite films of this genre on the Reddit platform. Here are the top five that will definitely keep you entertained in the evening. We've spied some of them in the discussion, and added some of our own.

Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's film begins with a tragedy in the family of linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams): her daughter dies and her husband, military astrophysicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), leaves her. Cut to the government asking the woman to help them establish contact with the aliens who have unexpectedly landed their ship on Earth. In the course of the story, the viewer realizes that Louise was never married, did not know Ian, and never had children. So what kind of drama was that in the beginning? And what does it have to do with aliens? Gradually, the movie reveals these secrets. It also describes in detail how the ability to understand each other can bring much more benefit to all parties than the ability to nuke something at any time.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

A surreal psychological thriller available on Netflix tells the story of a girl whose name we don't even really know - she is either Lucy, Lucia, Louise, or Ames. In any case, she is played by the brilliant Jessie Buckley. One winter day, she goes to meet her boyfriend Jake's (Jesse Plemons) parents, although she actually plans to break up with him. As the story unfolds, it turns out that the heroine knows things she shouldn't know, and her boyfriend won't be able to choose a version of how they met, and it turns out that he's actually a completely different person. "I'm Thinking of Ending It All by puzzle master Charlie Kaufman is one of those films that leave more questions than answers. Prepare yourself to dive into fan theories about what's really going on in the movie. Or read the novel of the same name by Ian Reid, which formed the basis of the movie.

The Fall

The film by Indian director Tarsem Singh is set in 1915. A young stuntman, Roy Walker (Lee Pace), is seriously injured while filming his first movie in Los Angeles and ends up in the hospital, paralyzed from the head down. All that keeps him alive are powerful painkillers. One day, a Romanian girl, Alexandria, wanders into his room suffering from pain in her broken arm. To entertain the child, Roy begins to tell her about the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and later his surreal story is joined by Charles Darwin with a tame monkey, Italian explosives expert Luigi, former slave Otto Benga, the evil Spanish governor Odius, and Roy himself in the form of a robber in love with a beautiful princess, the governor's prisoner, whom he plans to marry. The reality, in which the pain-ridden Roy dreams of suicide, is intertwined with an incredible fantasy created by his brain. And the happy ending of the film leaves a question: did everything really end well, or was it a child's imagination? Even if you don't find an answer to this question, you will get incredible aesthetic pleasure from this film.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The best film of 2022 according to the Academy Awards tells the story of an elderly Asian couple, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond (Jonathan Ke Kwan), who barely make ends meet by running a laundromat. One day, they get a bunch of bad news - they are expected at the tax office, and their daughter tells them that she is a lesbian and wants to introduce them to her girlfriend. While waiting in line to file the documents, Evelyn suddenly realizes that she has the ability to travel through parallel worlds and can use almost limitless possibilities to save the world from a mysterious evil entity. She plunges into an adventure that is completely different from her boring and miserable life. Critics were delighted with how the tandem of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who created this film, wove the aesthetics of superhero cinema into everyday life, avoiding the many conventions that comic book movies are guilty of.

Parasite

The South Korean comedy thriller by director and screenwriter Pong Joon-ho created a real sensation in 2020, becoming the first foreign film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. It tells the story of the impoverished Kim family, whose members literally live in a basement and eat scraps. For the society, they are like ghosts that everyone carefully avoids. However, one day, young Gi-taek gets a chance to fraudulently get a job with a wealthy businessman named Park as his daughter's tutor. Gradually, all members of the Kim family find themselves in his luxurious home. The poor begin to manipulate the rich for their own benefit, and all this leads to completely unpredictable consequences. At the end, the viewer is left to find the answer to the question: who were the real parasites in this story - the poor Kim or the rich Park? The debate about this is still ongoing on the Internet.

Subscribe to OBOZ.UA channels on Telegram and Viber to keep up with the latest events.