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Mind Screw/Film: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
* Parodied with the ending of ''[[Mystery Team]]''.{{context}}
* ''[[Sucker Punch]]'': It has an [[Imagine Spot]] (a brothel) which has one or three different [[Imagine Spot]]s within. During the imagine spot inside of the brothel, the characters participate in frenetic, over-the-top and [[Rule of Cool|awesome]] action sequences full of hidden symbolism. [[Unreliable Narrator|We're also not sure how much of what happened is the truth,]] and just who the protagonist is. And it subverts [[All Just a Dream]] so many times that you're not sure just whose dream it is. Logically, whoever's dream it was would be the protagonist, but good luck figuring that out.
* ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]''. The book, on the other hand, is considerably more comprehensible.
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* ''[[Black Swan]]''. What's real, what's a hallucination, and what's a visual metaphor? In this movie, it's hard to tell, and increasingly it's hard to tell if there's even a difference. Did the movie even happen at all, or will Nina wake up screaming five minutes after the credits?
** Mind screws are a recurring theme in pretty much all of Darren Aronofsky's films.
* The 2004 film ''[[Casshern]]'' had no explanation for the ending or for the various [[Deus Ex Machina]] moments that appeared throughout the film. For example, giant metal bolts of lightning that: Started the plot, transported the hero right to the point he needed to be with no question from anyone, ''and'' conveniently provided the final chamber with a giant hole in the wall.
* In ''[[Cemetery Man]]'', Francesco Dellamorte [[Can't Get Away with Nuthin']], {{spoiler|and all of his murders are pinned on someone else}}. This is because {{spoiler|Francesco isn't real, but is an imaginary construct of Franco. Fantasy bleeds into reality, and Franco begins to murder people in his insanity.}} Or maybe the dead are actually rising, the film isn't very specific on details.
** Not to mention that {{spoiler|The entire movie takes place in a snow globe}}.
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* ''I Love Your Work'' isn't as extreme as others on this list, as a simple {{spoiler|"I guess it was all in his head"}} makes sense of it as a whole, as the ending makes that seem like the most likely explanation. But some scenes are still pretty odd.
* ''[[Inception]]'' is not as mind screwing as one would expect. But the whole plot is about putting an industrial heir through one massive mind screw to mess with his free will. First he is put into an artifical dream where he gets kidnapped by people wanting the codes to his fathers secret safe, which he handles quite well. But then he gets put into a dream within the dream where he is approached by a stranger who claims to be part of his subconscious and they are both in a dream and under attack by kidnappers who wants to steal his company secrets. Then the laws of physics start to no longer apply correctly and he no longer takes things that well.
** Also the main character who is putting the man through the mind screw is having some lingering doubt that he himself is dreaming and his mind
** ''Inception'' uses [[In Medias Res]] openings. Not just at the start of the movie, but repeatedly, at multiple scenes, to intentionally evoke dreamlike logic. And the main plot is [[The Heist|a heist]] ''in reverse'', so it's necessarily a complicated story. {{spoiler|And the ending is [[Ambiguous Situation|ambiguous]] between the best happy ending possible and one of the worst.}} Aside from all that, though, it's not mind-screwy at all!
** When you have a character who asks 'Hang on, whose subconscious are we in again?' it's safe to say you're dealing with a mind screw.
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* ''[[Last Year at Marienbad]]'', considered one of the most famous mind screws in French cinema. The film has no discernible plot other than apparently two people who may or may not have had a affair a year ago in Marienbad (German name of a Czech city) meet each other again at some sort of elite social gathering. Other than that, it plays out like some sort dream over loosely connected scenes. People still have no idea what exactly it was about, but the cinematography was beautiful.
* The 1960s version of ''[[Lord of the Flies]]''. It's not even in a funny way. It's kind of scary.
* ''[[Mirror Mask]]''. My God, Mirror Mask... If the visual conception isn't enough (and this troper believes it is), then would some other troper explain what the whole point was? Or how it was the [[Spiritual Successor]] to ''[[Labyrinth]]''?
* The 1965 science fiction horror ''[[Monster a Go-Go!]]'' attempts to pull off a mind screw at its climax, although as with everything else in the film - acting, special effects, sound recording - this fails utterly. In brief, director Bill Rebane ran out of money before he could finish the film; the footage was was later purchased by producer Herschell Gordon Lewis, who finished it as cheaply as possible, with extra scenes shot a year later and some spurious narration. The end result was a disjointed, haunting mess, in which characters we don't know talk at great length about a threat we never see. The kicker comes at the end; after sixty minutes of plotless meandering, it ''finally'' seems as if the radioactive monster has been cornered, in a sewer. The army are called in, and we watch some soldiers dressing themselves in radiation suits for five long minutes. But just as it seems that some action is about to take place, ''a cosmic switch is pulled''. {{spoiler|''There was no monster''. "There was no trail. There was no giant, no monster, no thing called "Douglas" to be followed."}}
* [[David Lynch]]'s ''[[Mulholland Drive]]'' Or, to an even greater degree, ''[[Eraserhead]]''.
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** Mr. Lynch is so well known for his [[Mind Screw]]s, that he had to title his one non-maddening movie ''The Straight Story''. And it's still kind of weird.
* [[David Cronenberg]]'s ''[[Naked Lunch]]'' is a lot less disgusting than the book it's named after (it actually borrows from a large part of the works of William S. Burroughs), but only slightly less confusing.
** Speaking of Cronenberg films, ''[[eXistenZ]]'' is Philip K Dick-like in the mind screw department. It features a VR game within a VR game within a VR game within a VR game, the characters openly question whether they're still in the game at every level (and for bonus points, compare real-life to VR), switch sides multiple times, and reference things that happened at other levels.
* The movie π (''[[Pi]]'') has a paranoid mathemathical genius, Hebrew numerology, conspiracies, neurological headaches, [[Cosmic Horror|the secret name of God]], and {{spoiler|the protagonist taking [[This Is a Drill|A Drill]] to his head to escape all this crap}}. To top it off, it's in black and white. And is scored to techno music.
* ''[[Primer]]'', thanks to [[Time Travel]], [[Second Hand Storytelling]], and a case of [[The Ending Changes Everything]]. There is an explanation for almost everything that happens, but you have to watch the movie at least twice to put all the clues together.
* The very end of ''[[Reazione a Catena]]'', with {{spoiler|the main killers being shot to death with a shotgun by their '''8-year-old''' son, and his sister commenting,
* ''[[Repo Man]]'' for sure, but played for laughs.
* [[Guy Ritchie]]'s ''Revolver''. It involves a formula that supposedly allows the main character to win any game, a blood disease that disappears for no apparent reason, a crime lord apparently being the same person as the voices in everybody's heads... Yeah.
* The scene in ''[[Spaceballs]]'' where Dark Helmet watches himself on a VHS tape. He got so confused that he cannot grasp the concept of "when".
* The ''[[Star Wars Holiday Special]]'' has quite some moments of mind screw, largely thanks to the fact there's absolutely no subtitles for non-human creatures' languages (such as the wookies). For instance, we'll perhaps never know what the hell where the tiny circus-performers like things the little wookie was watching, let alone the white swimming things that appeared in the machine that grandpa wookie was watching.
* ''Stay.'' It all makes sense at the end {{spoiler|the entire film is the product of Ethan's dying mind absorbing his immediate surroundings}}, but through the course of the narrative, good luck trying to make sense of anything.
* ''[[Suspiria]]'': the plot is nothing else than a "witches doing evil wizardy after being discovered" kind of thing. The camera angles, scary soundtrack, eerie camera angles, buckets of blood, and macabre scenery, though....
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* The beginning of ''[[The City of Lost Children]]''. Most, not all of it, make sense by the end.
* ''[[The Fountain]]''.
* 1968's
* ''[[The Matrix]]''. The sequels have a mild case of it, anyway; in the first movie, Morpheus took the time to explain what was going on.
** Not mild with the Architect in ''Reloaded''...
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* The ending of ''[[Time Bandits]]'' as well as just about every other [[Terry Gilliam]] film ever made.
** Don't touch it! It's Evil!
*** Completely...
**** What do you mean? The ending of ''[[Time Bandits]]'' couldn't be simpler: [[God]] finally catches up with the bandits right as the [[Satan|Evil Genius]] is about to kill them and escape from his prison within the age of legends. God destroys the Evil Genius, rehires the bandits, telling them it's time to get back to work repairing all the holes in time, and sends the boy back to his home. A charred fragment of the Evil Genius' corpse comes through the time-hole with him, however, and his parents are killed when they touch the fragment, which also causes their house to catch on fire. One of the firemen who comes to put out the fire is the physically identical reincarnation of Agamemnon. [[Sarcasm Mode|What part of any of this is the least bit mysterious?]]
** ''[[Brazil (film)|Brazil]]'' is a prime example of this. It's about a man living in a corrupt bureaucratic government who uses his dreams as an escape. It gets difficult to separate what's real and what's not, especially at the end when he's going insane {{spoiler|as his best friend tortures him.}} [[Executive Meddling|In the original ending, at least]].
* [[Jim Henson]] (yes,
** He also made a humorous but bewildering teleplay called ''The Cube'' (no relation to the Canadian film and its sequels). It's about a man trapped in a cube shaped room. He has no idea where he is or how he got there. Other people can enter and leave freely, but he cannot. People change into other people, objects appear and disappear, bizarre philosophical interpretations of his situation are suggested and dismissed, and when he gets cut he bleeds strawberry jam. Is he dead? Insane? Part of some twisted psychological experiment? Or is he really just a character in a television program? In a way this film deconstructs this trope, as an overabundance of explanations are provided by other characters, though which (if any) is the truth is never revealed.
* ''[[Un Chien Andalou]]''. Just try to read the [[wikipedia:Un Chien Andalou#Synopsis|Other Wiki's synopsis]]. [[Word of God]] says that was entirely deliberate. Quoting [[Luis Bunuel]] on the rules he and [[Salvador Dalí]] set for them selves in writing the script: "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." and "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."
* ''[[Videodrome]]''{{context}}
* ''Waking Life''{{context}}
* Jean-Luc Godard's film ''Weekend''.{{context}}
* ''[[What the Bleep Do We Know]]'' is a ''major, major'' offender of this one. If you can make some sense out of the cryptic, convoluted [[Techno Babble]] about Quantum Mechanics, Religion, Life, the Universe and Everything, you'll see how this movie easily beats ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]'' in terms of head-trippiness, even though even [[The Other Wiki]] agrees it's all just quantum mysticism mixed with the ideas of some new age school. [http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/bleep.html According to Intuitor.com], it also completely messed up Quantum Physics, horrible research, biases and scientific inaccuracies destroyed any hope of correct science.
** Here's the key: there is a middle-aged woman doing her best attempt at a deep male voice partway through the film. The name given on screen is "Ramtha". Her cult funded the entire movie.
*** The woman is JZ Knight, who claims to be ''channeling [[You Fail History Forever|a 40,000 year old Indian spirit]]''. [[Translation Convention|Who speaks suspiciously good English]]. And [[You Fail Physics Forever|doesn't understand squat about quantum mechanics]].
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* ''[[Westworld]]'' is an odd case in that it ''almost'' makes sense, and keeps setting itself up as if for [[The Reveal]]. By the end, we've still got a [[Amusement Park of Doom|decadent amusement park]] where a bunch of [[Ridiculously-Human Robots]] [[Robot War|started killing people for no apparent reason]]. Add in gallons of [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]], and you've got yourself a headache.
** -and then it's remade as 'Jurassic Park'.
* ''The Blades of Glory'' ending.{{context}}
** Not so much [[Mind Screw]] as it is [[Rule of Funny]].
* ''[[The Men Who Stare at Goats]]'' is full of this, but is played for laughs. The final scene in particular stands out.
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* Japanese auteur [[Takashi Miike]], when he's not being the master of extreme violence and gore, is a master of the [[Mind Screw]]. His most mind-bending film, however, has to be ''[[Gozu]]''. Disappearing corpses, a river without a bridge, creepy transvestite waiters, unreliable guides with bizarre skin conditions, young women giving birth to full-grown men, middle-age women selling breast milk, an almost deserted former fishing town, Yakuza who live in a junkyard, an American reading her dialog from a queue card, and a huge minotaur wearing baggy underwear. And that doesn't even begin to describe how twisted this movie is. The strangest thing is that [[Mind Screwdriver|it all makes perfect sense]] when you realize {{spoiler|it's all a symbolic representation of the protagonist's inner journey, told with symbolism from both Japanese and Greco-Roman mythology, and represents his coming to terms with his own homosexuality and love for his Yakuza "older brother", and his "rebirth" as a new person}}.
* ''[[Marebito]]'' by Takashi Shimizu, the director of ''Ju-on; The Grudge''. A man obsessed with fear finds his way into a warped underground labyrinth world, is menaced by "Dero" ("Detrimental Robots"); and rescues a feral girl who turns out to be a vampire, who he keeps chained up in his apartment, and feeds by killing other people and draining their blood. But is that really happening? Do any of them actually exist? Is the girl real, perhaps his own daughter who he abuses and treats like an animal, while he kills people to feed his own delusion? Or has his detachment from reality actually enabled him to stumble into a real alternate, quasi-supernatural world? The ending completely refuses to resolve any of these questions; leaving them up to the viewer to answer.
*
* ''[[Oldboy]]''{{context}}
* "Northfork".{{context}}
* The Swedish film ''Persona'' features an actress who goes mute, except maybe she really isn't but wants to get away from her life. Her nurse wants to become the actress because she hates herself, and maybe she did. Or didn't. The actress also has a son that is involved...somehow. The opening scenes feature dead bodies, a sheep being stabbed with a knife, and [[Writer Revolt|an erect penis]]. What does all this have to do with the rest of the film? [[Non Sequitur Scene|No idea]], as it's even more out of place than the rest of the movie. Anyone who says they get what's going on [[True Art Is Incomprehensible|is lying]].
** The abstract images which open the film are probably an homage to [[Un Chien Andalou]]. Bergman realized his work no longer seemed as groundbreaking as it once had, so he was announcing to the world his intention to go deeper into stylistic experimentation.
** Bergman purposely put in a film break to [[Breather Episode|give viewers a moment away from the surrealism.]]
* ''[[Performance]]''. When the sudden [[Music Video]] ''follows perfectly''...
* The Trial in ''[[Pink Floyd]]'s [[The Wall]]'' in which the main character is put on trial by his inner demons.
** The Trial is especially mindscrewy. But the entirety of the movie is a [[Mind Screw]].
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* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=344q2gyBcCI Hopital Brut.]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtJW1WRfRg4 "The Color of Pomegranates"], a Soviet-Armenian film [[Very Loosely Based on a True Story|loosely based]] on the life of 18th century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. But instead of being a straight biography, it's an artistic film comprised mostly just a bunch of bizarre scenes that don't make much sense to anyone not familiar with Sayat-Nova's poems.
* ''The Attic Expeditions''{{context}}
* Dalton Trumbo's film adaptation of ''[[Johnny Got His Gun]]'' was done largely by making the film one big mindscrew, caused by the character's explosion-induced loss of his ability to see/hear/speak (as well as his limbs) inducing nightmarish visions inside of his head to pad out the film.
* ''[[Cry Wolf]]'', best summed up with this exchange.
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* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEPSIAkmzAE This] short film adaptation of the Maurice Ogden poem "The Hangman". Also doubles as [[Surreal Horror]].
* ''Meek's Cutoff'', specifically the end. What was the point of it again?
* No mention of this: [[Rocky Horror Picture Show|A man and his fiance-that he takes the time to remind everyone of- end up entering a castle inhabited by generic horror movie servants who work for a transvestite Tim Curry who somehow creates a
* ''[[Psycho Beach Party]]'': What happened? How much of it was fake and who faked what?
* ''[[The Science of Sleep]]'': Due to the main character's constant and confusing dreaming it's hard to keep up with what is a dream and what isn't. And did that time machine actually work?
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* My God, ''[[Felix the Cat: The Movie]]''. Just...just watch it. Reptilian creatures, a magic bag, a half-robot evil overlord, a sentient tear, a dimensional transporter, mice-lizard hybrids, [[Yellow Submarine]]-like sea creatures, a [[Circus of Fear]], a forest made of giant hair follicles with head-hunting creatures that are always losing their own heads, evil cubes and cylinders, and a book of ultimate power that defeats the bad guy by being thrown at him. And to top it all off, there's also a German version.
* The horror movie ''[[She Dies Tomorrow]]''. Go Google this movie, and it's practically guaranteed the first page of hits will have at least three people trying to explain the plot, all of them different. Whether it even qualifies as "horror" is debatable; at very least, this is a psychological thriller that makes you ''think'' while watching it.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{TOPLEVELPAGE}}]]
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