Too many movies make it a point to explain every single plot point. But there's a certain pleasure to be found in confusion. TIME looks at the best cinematic mind benders.
“Didn’t we meet at Marienbad last year?” an unnamed man asks an unnamed woman. So begins one of the most confusing (and frustrating) movies ever made. Two people are at a French château. One says they know each other. The other denies it. Back and forth they go, over and over, while director Alain Resnais’ camera endlessly stalks the château’s spooky corridors. All the while, organ music blasts out at unpredictable moments. Some well-dressed people stand in a sunlit garden. They cast shadows. The triangle-shaped trees surrounding them do not. There appears to be no plot. It’s all very dreamlike. What is this movie about?
Before Christopher Nolan’s Inception, there was Memento, a great big puzzle of a movie whose protagonist suffers from short-term-memory loss. With the help of Polaroids, notes and tattoos (give him credit, the man is dedicated), Leonard Shelby tries to track down his wife’s murderer, known only as “John G.” As he tries to piece everything together, so does the audience, which sees much of the action as fragments shown in reverse chronological order. We alternate between black-and-white and color, forward movement and back, truth and lies. Leonard doesn’t know whom to trust … and neither do we.
