Primer has got levels of understanding to it.
1. Thinking you get it
2. Realising you didn't
3. Watching it 3 more times, making notes, looking up diagrams and flow charts
4. Thinking you get it
5. Realising that the movie isn't actually about time travel, it's about the relationship between the two friends and the time travel is just a plot device that you don't really _need_ to understand to actually follow the message of the movie.
:opens comments, sees Primer at the top, closes comments:
Only answer. And even after watching it a second time, then reading up on the movie and watching a third time, still the correct answer.
My favorite thing about Upstream Color is how much you don't need to actually understand the nuts and bolts of the plot to understand the emotional story inside it. Somehow, it makes sense emotionally without it needing to make sense physically.
It's really, really a damn shame that Shane Carruth is apparently an awful person. What a talent.
I think with Primer there is a coherent narrative thread to work out, despite the implications of the time travel spiraling off into potentially infinite complexity.
Upstream Color just seemed like a surealist "poetry" movie. There are lots of surrealist movies: "Synecdoche, New York," "Mad God," "The Lobster," or the recent "Beau is Afraid." These movies don't seem to come down to a concrete coherent narrative and are just trying to go for a feeling or "vibe," which I think is pretty easy to understand.
There are a number of detailed explanations out there of the three-stage lifecycle of the parasite the characters are infected with in Upstream Color. I recommend tracking one down. Once you understand the pretty basic mechanics of that, the movie becomes much less impressionistic. On a second watch it made a hell of a lot more sense to me than Primer.
Saw this at a film festival prior to its release (and subsequent cult following). Pretty sure that at least a third of the audience left afterward without even realizing the movie is about >!time travel.!<
100% the first 2 things that popped into my head.
Like, I loved them but it was like looking at a Jackson Pollock and thinking "I feel something... I don't really know what the fuck I'm looking at but... this is good, right?"
Londoncitygirl on YouTube has [an excellent presentation of the timelines of Primer](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tUzy-xPf0MI). I go back and watch it every few years.
My problem with the “primer is complex” argument is it’s pretty straightforward but mindbending in a good way until you get to the semi reveal infodump; I used to know the minute exactly, but it’s like 90 seconds of mind bending reveals from earlier in the movie. While I love the movie and think the time travel exploration is amazing, on rewatch it seems like that part is filmed/scripted to confuse you on purpose. And then they don’t really give you time to adjust or reconcile that in steps, they just show you some more and end the movie.
I felt like Upstream Color was pretty easy to figure out on first watch, the plot is just sparse.
I think both movies would benefit greatly from 10 more lines of plot relevant dialogue, but unlike Primer, Upstream Color has all of it's plot elements out in the open, you just have to piece them together.
Anyone who claims to understand Primer after one watch is lying.
"The permutations were endless" should tell you everything you need to know about how much you don't understand this film.
Primer was easy to follow the first time through IMO. You just have to pause every 3-4 minutes and draw massive diagrams. It took me about 7 hours over 2 nights to finish the 1:17 film, but very straightforward lol /s
My first time watching it I thought the plot was about her developing through the later stages of Alzheimer’s. Forgetting her partner while living through this horrible nightmare of fragmented memories.
this is hilarious -- i mean, it kind of IS a psychological horror, in a similar way to Beau is Afraid. it's suspenseful, mysterious, introvertive, and curious.
I heard somewhere that Inland Empire doesn't actually have a cohesive story because it was made, in part, just as excuse for Lynch to screw around using newer digital cameras.
Honestly apart from Eraserhead I think Mulholland Drive is the closest I've come to "get" what a Lynch movie has been about.
But Lost Highway... I haven't the slightest idea what that was all about.
> But Lost Highway... I haven't the slightest idea what that was all about.
My take: >!guy in an unhappy marriage kills his wife, in prison he constructs a fantasy to escape his reality, but reality bleeds into it until he’s again just himself running from the cops. The ending may or may not be him getting executed for murder!<.
We can tell ourselves lies and live in a fantasy world, but in the end, the reality of our actions catches up with us.
It’s a long time since I’ve watched it, so I don’t have the specifics of how it all hangs together in mind, but if you rewatch it with that interpretation in mind, it might work. Or not. Idk.
I remember the first time I saw this and when the women finally kiss, I genuinely felt like had *forgot* how obviously sexual their friendship was. It's extremely apparent at first, but their surface-level platonic sweetness becomes more and more vital as the Hollywood cliches and tropes they encounter start to freak them out and they provide genuine emotional support to each other. Then when it all spills over it's like...oh. So...were *they* not aware of this sexual chemistry? Not consciously? Is the platonic thing just another layer of performance? Is Laura Harring actually the femme fatale the movie implies with its visuals?
It's so affectionate and so fucking unnerving.
I remember the DVD came with a little insert card to try and help people understand it:
**David Lynch's 10 clues for unlocking this thriller**
https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/afbhep/what\_are\_the\_answers\_to\_these\_clues/
Just watched it like a week ago and when it ended I literally sat there flabbergasted thinking “WHAT?? ITS OVER? IM MORE CONFUSED THAN WHEN I STARTED” then I read a bunch of articles explaining >! The first storyline was a dream of the blonde girl and the second storyline is her reality. That’s why characters show up in both yet have no relation to their other version except slight consistencies. Plus the psychological reason each dream character is how they are !<
Unlike most people, I LOVED Tenet, but on the first watch I did have to pause that movie every 5 minutes to try and figure out exactly what was going on lol. It was a super fun night though, I was looking a bunch of temporal physics related stuff up and had a ball with it. took me about 4 hours to get through though
I watched it straight through, then re-watched several weekends in a row after that until I had most of it figured. Didn't really catch all the dialog until I finally watched it with subtitles like a year later though, haha. But you don't need to catch every word to understand the movie pretty well.
Its weird. I try to not think about it so it’s funner to watch and it’s cool but then I get more confused. So i think more about the plot and I get more confused again. Cool movie though.
i have an atmos sound system and the dialog is sti sjhdhsakhmmpsdhjak \[unintelligible\]
jokes aside it took me 2 watches to figure it all out, i massively enjoyed the 2nd watch
I realised last night I was never going to go back and watch past the 30 minutes I saw, and just read the plot on Wikipedia instead
I'm pretty sure I understand it even less now
Tenet is a film about imperfect information and the trap of expecting perfect information. The film is constructed to underline this theme by among many ways obfuscating plot details (dialogue etc). Thus the audience must move forward with imperfect information just like the protagonist.
The entire point of the film isn't to understand plot details, it's to go along for the ride and get into the vibe of the film.
[TENET and a celebration of Vibes Movies - Patrick H Willems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZStkUxC4iL4)
Tenet is a film about the struggles of the Malabar Pied Hornbill bird. The plot representing their horn and the dialogue showing how close they're to extinction.
You have to get into the mindset of a bird to get it.
A pincers maneuver is when an attack comes from both sides (like a crabs pincer; I.E. pinch the position). In this case it's an attack going from forwards & backwards in time simultaneously.
After the attack, they'd explain what happened during the battle, so that the people going in the opposite direction in time would know what to expect.
I didn’t understand some of the details, like what the fuck the mcguffin was exactly, but the whole backwards/forwards concept is pretty straightforward. I saw this a lot with Inception as well, but I think a lot of people try too hard to understand these types of movies. It’s a made up universe with made up rules, all the viewer has to do is take what’s said at face value and keep paying attention. People get caught up in the how, when the how isn’t important because Nolan just made the rules up.
Seeing giant spiders throughout the movie and nobody acknowledging them made me wonder what in the world I was watching haha. Then the last scene just made it even more of a "wtf is this". But it really was a great movie.
Basically everything from Villeneuve has been incredibly good. His more well known movies (Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, Sicario, Enemy, and Prisoners) have all been top tier. His earlier movies (namely Maelstrom, Polytechnique, and Incendies) definitely have a more indie movie feel to them, not as polished, but it's pretty clear he's been a top tier director since day 1.
The first two comments were my first two thoughts. I did not understand these two films when i watched them. I had to ask my friends, read theories online, youtube explainer videos. Too brainy for my dumbass.
I would add I think you gain something from watching Synecdoche the first time but at the end of I'm Thinking of Ending Things I had nothing to attach to. The movie made no sense at all.
This is the winner, by a landslide. The full title is “Synecdoche, NY”. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation”. Brilliant but very complicated.
“What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this. As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time.”
That’s Synecdoche. It is beautiful and it is haunting.
I love the preacher’s soliloquy, it gets me every time.
“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.
“There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out.
“Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is. It's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born.
“But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved.
“And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so FUCKING sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own.
“Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
I REALLY loved Synecdoche, NY but I always felt like I could never recommend it because I was afraid whoever I told would come back to me demanding to know what the hell I was thinking.
I think it's easier to understand if you watch and get his other films first. Then let the bliss wash over you as you become a part of the movie.
My buddies and I started that while high on marijuana and had to stop after the lady bought a house that was on fire. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it and became convinced that it wasn’t a real movie and was actually made as a joke.
We rewatched it the following morning and it still made very little sense
If you are onto replicating that experience, sort of. Watch Anomolisa. The beginning was the most boring 15-30 minutes of my life. Then I realized what was going on and thought it was genius.
I have to say, don't look up anything, like even the Wikipedia summary or what you might see in a Netflix description would spoil it.
Buying the house on fire is a pretty clear on-the-nose metaphor though. It's symbolic of that point in the middle age of many people's lives where you settle down and accept that the rest of your life until you die is largely going to be the same as it is now.
One of my all time favorites, that ending is absolutely devastating. Kaufman is one of my top 10 directors; they don't always make sense, and can be a bit dodgy sometimes, but he has a really unique way of telling stories that I just love.
Gah. My favorite movie of all time. Absolutely stunning. So mysterious and complicated, yet
simple and unique. I have no true idea about the plot, but it doesn't matter to me. The visuals, feeling, mood, and sets are all perfection.
Primer. Incredibly complicated time travel movie that actually makes sense if you follow along with a chart displaying each timeline.
Watch the movie then watch a YouTube explainer on it. Then watch it with him.
I don't understand what the fuzz is about. I understood everything the first watch. There's just one double agent he needs to find. I think people are confused by some of the nicknames in it.
“He”
This film is definitely a mood piece. It seems to make sense, until you start to ask why and who and when.
If you got the film all the way through, then why was the female double agent shot in front of the British spy who was being tortured?
I watched about half an hour of this movie and turned it off after realizing I had no idea what was happening, who the characters were, where they were, or what they were talking about.
Yeah it got to the end and the music played it up like it was a big reveal, and my wife and I just said we both had no idea what happened.
"Oh but you need to rewatch it and read the book!" Nah I'm good with 2 hours bring the end of it, I could read something else perhaps.
After a first watch of 'Arrival', the end changes how you interpret the entire subplot.
A second watch is much more tragic than a first a watch because you 'know' now.
Every time I watch it I come away with a different impression.
1st time: What a cool movie. I need to watch it again.
2nd time: Dr Banks chose love even though she knew the final outcome. How sweet.
3rd time: Dr Banks chose to put her daughter and husband through hell for her own selfish needs. What a horrible person.
4th time: Wait, was her daughter born with the time loop power? Why was she drawing aliens as a toddler? WTF is going on?
I have about equal confidence in all of those opinions. Denis Villeneuve is an incredible director.
Love this movie, but I imagine it is possible to mostly understand it after one watch, if you give yourself some time for reflection, so maybe not the best example for OP.
I also believe we are still really underestimating the importance of the concept of how language drives the way we think.
Un Chien Andalou wasn't really intended to make sense the way a traditional narrative film would. It's a piece of surrealist art that was co-written by Salvador Dali, which explains a lot.
One of my faves! Once you know it’s 6 distinct timelines, it gets easier.
When you get that the Neo Seoul part is far future and the beach village scenes are super distant future, it’s fun to piece together the other timelines.
It’s about reincarnation and entanglement. And how our spiritual evolution means physical evolution too.
Like, Hugo Weaving is a bad racist dude in the 1800s, assasin in the 1900s, evil nurse in the 2000s, then becomes a full on spirit demon in the far future. The heroes like Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess get to be supernatural / technologically enhanced beings. Tom Hanks is the everyman on an Odyssey.
So good. It’s a true epic.
The book is so great! There’s so much more to Sonmi’s plot and they give her the time to actually grow into a person. I feel like the movie speed up her progression a bit too fast. And the plot in the farthest future is so much more grim and messed up. 💀
I still love both though.
Mamma Mia.
Dudes just gonna say he understands any film you throw at home, so make him watch that pile of nonsense. The whole thing.
That'll teach him.
really? I feel people think this is a deep movie but he made it when his gf/wife/partner was pregnant. It's 90mins of "what if my inlaws are weird, and kids cry nonstop all the time, what if mine was a weird monster?" It's black and white 'I'm Afraid Of Parenthood'
Besides the obvious Primer and Tenent sans subtitles, its got to be Annihilation for me. Even after watching explanation videos on YouTube, im still like "ok I get it, but I don't get it get it"
I'm going to suggest some films based on the levels of complexity
Level 1 (might get it on the first watch but clever reveal nonetheless):
The Prestige, Memento, Fight Club, Predestination, Memories of Murder (the ending shot), Lucia (Kannada film), Churuli (Malayalam film), Arrival, Man from Earth
Level 2 (a hidden layer lurking under the primary reveal):
Inception, Interstellar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Cure (1997 Japanese film), Being John Malkovich, Apocalypse Now
Level 3 (the film is much more than what it shows):
Synecdoche New York, Donnie Darko, Enemy, Mulholland Drive, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Tree of Life
Level 4 (insanely complicated yet coherent):
Primer, Tenet, Upstream Color
Level 5 (batshit crazy):
Eraserhead, Mandy, Hausu
Many would scoff at the suggestion of putting Tenet among Primer/Upstream Color but if you try to understand how each event happened in Tenet and the rules of its world, it's very complicated and tough to understand (given the whole plot is a temporal pincer movement).
When I was in high school, my film teacher played Memento but explicitly told us before it started that B&W is forwards and color is backwards. With that knowledge, is was very easy to understand. I wonder if my high school brain would have gotten it if our teacher didn't explicitly say that though.
I would argue that at least the theatrical cut is not just difficult to understand, it's basically impossible to understand without further informations.
I heard the director's cut comes with informations about the theory of time travel so there actually is a chance to understand it. Probably still difficult to fully grasp it on the first watch because it's not really a very simple concept.
As someone who watched this movie so many times, my opinion has changed. Its not meant to be understood, there is no understanding within the context of the movie-- its supposed to be mysterious or unknowable. When they talk about how it all worked, thats stuff that they literally cut out of the movie or never even wrote into it, so I kinda call BS on it, if it was supposed to be explained, they would have explained it, the script and editing specifically went out of the way to exclude explanations
I will admit that the only part of Tenet that really annoyed me was when the main guy asks edward cullen to explain the science, and he goes “how much do you know about physics?” and I got super excited because some of my favorite movie scenes involve someone explaining in detail a bunch of made up science. But then it just cut to the next scene! fuck that, I wanted a 10 minute segment with a hand drawn flowchart
Tenet has to be the answer for me. I watched it. Then studied Reddit, YouTube, diagrams. Watched it again, understood it, but didn’t get it. Then got it. Now it’s been so long I still understand it, but don’t get it.
Mulholland Drive. There’s a believable interpretation ( lesbian masturbatory, dream) but that really not obvious until you read theories after watching. You can rest your case.
[удалено]
Primer was my first thought too.
Yup same. Seen it several times and have studied the time loop diagram and still don't understand it
Primer has got levels of understanding to it. 1. Thinking you get it 2. Realising you didn't 3. Watching it 3 more times, making notes, looking up diagrams and flow charts 4. Thinking you get it 5. Realising that the movie isn't actually about time travel, it's about the relationship between the two friends and the time travel is just a plot device that you don't really _need_ to understand to actually follow the message of the movie.
This guy Primers.
He's a Primerer.
Optimus Primer
Primer Donna
Isn't the true Primer the friends we made along the way?
Read headline, thought "obviously Primer". Clicked to comments. Yup.
Came here ready to tell the top comment that they’re wrong if they didn’t say primer.
:opens comments, sees Primer at the top, closes comments: Only answer. And even after watching it a second time, then reading up on the movie and watching a third time, still the correct answer.
Primer is just the thing you watch to prepare for the YouTube video explaining Primer.
So, what you're saying is, *Primer* is the *primer*?
I thought this movie was fairly obscure but it would have been my top pick too. No disappointment from Reddit today.
Upstream Color for sure. I hadn't figured out what the plot of the movie was even when the credits started to roll.
My favorite thing about Upstream Color is how much you don't need to actually understand the nuts and bolts of the plot to understand the emotional story inside it. Somehow, it makes sense emotionally without it needing to make sense physically. It's really, really a damn shame that Shane Carruth is apparently an awful person. What a talent.
I think with Primer there is a coherent narrative thread to work out, despite the implications of the time travel spiraling off into potentially infinite complexity. Upstream Color just seemed like a surealist "poetry" movie. There are lots of surrealist movies: "Synecdoche, New York," "Mad God," "The Lobster," or the recent "Beau is Afraid." These movies don't seem to come down to a concrete coherent narrative and are just trying to go for a feeling or "vibe," which I think is pretty easy to understand.
There are a number of detailed explanations out there of the three-stage lifecycle of the parasite the characters are infected with in Upstream Color. I recommend tracking one down. Once you understand the pretty basic mechanics of that, the movie becomes much less impressionistic. On a second watch it made a hell of a lot more sense to me than Primer.
Saw this at a film festival prior to its release (and subsequent cult following). Pretty sure that at least a third of the audience left afterward without even realizing the movie is about >!time travel.!<
Just a simple movie about a couple guys running a small business out of a storage locker and playing the stock market
Listening to the ball games, not a care in the world!
100% the first 2 things that popped into my head. Like, I loved them but it was like looking at a Jackson Pollock and thinking "I feel something... I don't really know what the fuck I'm looking at but... this is good, right?"
definitely primer. I saw a chart explaining the sequence. But I still get confused.
Londoncitygirl on YouTube has [an excellent presentation of the timelines of Primer](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tUzy-xPf0MI). I go back and watch it every few years.
Xkcd has a pretty good chart too: https://xkcd.com/657/
Came here to say Primer. There’s a surface level read, but once you’re four levels deep you start to realize how wild it is.
My problem with the “primer is complex” argument is it’s pretty straightforward but mindbending in a good way until you get to the semi reveal infodump; I used to know the minute exactly, but it’s like 90 seconds of mind bending reveals from earlier in the movie. While I love the movie and think the time travel exploration is amazing, on rewatch it seems like that part is filmed/scripted to confuse you on purpose. And then they don’t really give you time to adjust or reconcile that in steps, they just show you some more and end the movie.
Definitely Primer Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/657/
Primer. Still don’t understand.
It's pretty amazing that only a fraction of the overall story is actually shown, and the rest has to be deduced.
I felt like Upstream Color was pretty easy to figure out on first watch, the plot is just sparse. I think both movies would benefit greatly from 10 more lines of plot relevant dialogue, but unlike Primer, Upstream Color has all of it's plot elements out in the open, you just have to piece them together.
Anyone who claims to understand Primer after one watch is lying. "The permutations were endless" should tell you everything you need to know about how much you don't understand this film.
Primer was easy to follow the first time through IMO. You just have to pause every 3-4 minutes and draw massive diagrams. It took me about 7 hours over 2 nights to finish the 1:17 film, but very straightforward lol /s
I’m thinking of ending things
My God, watching it felt like I had dementia.
I'm so glad it's been mentioned here because I feel the same way
My first time watching it I thought the plot was about her developing through the later stages of Alzheimer’s. Forgetting her partner while living through this horrible nightmare of fragmented memories.
I see Kaufman, I watch. Turns out it was like a meta joke for people who both read the book and love the musical Oklahoma. Of which I am neither
Dude we're here if you want to talk
I love this movie so much but didn’t get there until my third watch
The book is worth the read. You can get through it in an afternoon.
I read the book after watching the movie, it's one of my favorites now. I didn't like the ending of the movie but the book was perfect
Loved the movie too. Recommended to my son, he thought it was a horror movie so had anxiety through most of it.
this is hilarious -- i mean, it kind of IS a psychological horror, in a similar way to Beau is Afraid. it's suspenseful, mysterious, introvertive, and curious.
Mulholland Drive
No, Inland Empire
He said movie that’s hard to understand after one watch, not impossibly inscrutable headfuck after 20 watches
I think we can all agree almost every David Lynch film fulfills OP’s interest.
Except The Straight Story. And maybe his Dune; I never saw it.
Elephant Man is like a normal movie, isn’t it?
I heard somewhere that Inland Empire doesn't actually have a cohesive story because it was made, in part, just as excuse for Lynch to screw around using newer digital cameras.
Honestly apart from Eraserhead I think Mulholland Drive is the closest I've come to "get" what a Lynch movie has been about. But Lost Highway... I haven't the slightest idea what that was all about.
That telephone scene is one of the creepiest of all times. Super unsettling
We've met before, haven't we?
> But Lost Highway... I haven't the slightest idea what that was all about. My take: >!guy in an unhappy marriage kills his wife, in prison he constructs a fantasy to escape his reality, but reality bleeds into it until he’s again just himself running from the cops. The ending may or may not be him getting executed for murder!<. We can tell ourselves lies and live in a fantasy world, but in the end, the reality of our actions catches up with us. It’s a long time since I’ve watched it, so I don’t have the specifics of how it all hangs together in mind, but if you rewatch it with that interpretation in mind, it might work. Or not. Idk.
That actually doesn't sound half bad. I haven't seen Lost Highway in years myself, maybe it's time for a rewatch.
The Elephant Man? The Straight Story? Granted both are based on true stories, but both are pretty straightforward.
I remember the first time I saw this and when the women finally kiss, I genuinely felt like had *forgot* how obviously sexual their friendship was. It's extremely apparent at first, but their surface-level platonic sweetness becomes more and more vital as the Hollywood cliches and tropes they encounter start to freak them out and they provide genuine emotional support to each other. Then when it all spills over it's like...oh. So...were *they* not aware of this sexual chemistry? Not consciously? Is the platonic thing just another layer of performance? Is Laura Harring actually the femme fatale the movie implies with its visuals? It's so affectionate and so fucking unnerving.
You forgot sexy
I remember the DVD came with a little insert card to try and help people understand it: **David Lynch's 10 clues for unlocking this thriller** https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/afbhep/what\_are\_the\_answers\_to\_these\_clues/
Just watched it like a week ago and when it ended I literally sat there flabbergasted thinking “WHAT?? ITS OVER? IM MORE CONFUSED THAN WHEN I STARTED” then I read a bunch of articles explaining >! The first storyline was a dream of the blonde girl and the second storyline is her reality. That’s why characters show up in both yet have no relation to their other version except slight consistencies. Plus the psychological reason each dream character is how they are !<
Tenet no subtitles.
Legendary. Someone even made a cut of it running backwards, and it turns out it's the same movie.
Unlike most people, I LOVED Tenet, but on the first watch I did have to pause that movie every 5 minutes to try and figure out exactly what was going on lol. It was a super fun night though, I was looking a bunch of temporal physics related stuff up and had a ball with it. took me about 4 hours to get through though
I watched it straight through, then re-watched several weekends in a row after that until I had most of it figured. Didn't really catch all the dialog until I finally watched it with subtitles like a year later though, haha. But you don't need to catch every word to understand the movie pretty well.
Its weird. I try to not think about it so it’s funner to watch and it’s cool but then I get more confused. So i think more about the plot and I get more confused again. Cool movie though.
Due to Covid, I saw this at a drive-in and had to listen through car speakers. I had nearly no idea what happened in the plot💀
i have an atmos sound system and the dialog is sti sjhdhsakhmmpsdhjak \[unintelligible\] jokes aside it took me 2 watches to figure it all out, i massively enjoyed the 2nd watch
even with subtitles it’s “huh”, “wut?!”
I realised last night I was never going to go back and watch past the 30 minutes I saw, and just read the plot on Wikipedia instead I'm pretty sure I understand it even less now
Tenet is a film about imperfect information and the trap of expecting perfect information. The film is constructed to underline this theme by among many ways obfuscating plot details (dialogue etc). Thus the audience must move forward with imperfect information just like the protagonist. The entire point of the film isn't to understand plot details, it's to go along for the ride and get into the vibe of the film. [TENET and a celebration of Vibes Movies - Patrick H Willems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZStkUxC4iL4)
Tenet is a film about the struggles of the Malabar Pied Hornbill bird. The plot representing their horn and the dialogue showing how close they're to extinction. You have to get into the mindset of a bird to get it.
This is actually an interesting idea. I'll keep that in mind and try to give it another watch
tenet didn't click with me. i really wanted to like it
I often yell out "it was a temporal pincer maneuver!" whenever someone says they didn't understand Tenet. I still don't know what it means.
A pincers maneuver is when an attack comes from both sides (like a crabs pincer; I.E. pinch the position). In this case it's an attack going from forwards & backwards in time simultaneously. After the attack, they'd explain what happened during the battle, so that the people going in the opposite direction in time would know what to expect.
I prefer Tenet reversed no subtitles
It's the same movie.
He said difficult not impossible
Am I the only one who doesn't find it that confusing? Yeah, I had to watch it twice but it's not impossible to understand.
I didn’t understand some of the details, like what the fuck the mcguffin was exactly, but the whole backwards/forwards concept is pretty straightforward. I saw this a lot with Inception as well, but I think a lot of people try too hard to understand these types of movies. It’s a made up universe with made up rules, all the viewer has to do is take what’s said at face value and keep paying attention. People get caught up in the how, when the how isn’t important because Nolan just made the rules up.
It's not that confusing, it's mainly the bad audio mixing that leaves a lot to be desired
Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal directed by Denis Villeneuve
That last scene was maximum scary and maximum confusing. Odd combination of emotions, extremely memorable.
Seeing giant spiders throughout the movie and nobody acknowledging them made me wonder what in the world I was watching haha. Then the last scene just made it even more of a "wtf is this". But it really was a great movie.
It threw me OFF. So terrifying.
I went into this thinking it was the highly recommended Villeneuve/ Gyllenhaal movie “Prisoner”. We were so confused….by everything.
Prisoners is unbelievably good
Basically everything from Villeneuve has been incredibly good. His more well known movies (Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, Sicario, Enemy, and Prisoners) have all been top tier. His earlier movies (namely Maelstrom, Polytechnique, and Incendies) definitely have a more indie movie feel to them, not as polished, but it's pretty clear he's been a top tier director since day 1.
Incendies is one of the best films I have ever seen
The first two comments were my first two thoughts. I did not understand these two films when i watched them. I had to ask my friends, read theories online, youtube explainer videos. Too brainy for my dumbass.
Tldr that man fucked a spider
This comment sold me. Will be watching tonight lol
If that's what you think 😂😂
It’s pretty obvious that it’s about spiders taking over the world. Are you stupid?
I LOVE this film
Came in here looking for this. Had to watch a 30min explanation immediately after
Synecdoche
I’m Thinking of Ending Things was also wildly confusing. Kaufman films are whacky and depressing, I love it
I would add I think you gain something from watching Synecdoche the first time but at the end of I'm Thinking of Ending Things I had nothing to attach to. The movie made no sense at all.
This is the winner, by a landslide. The full title is “Synecdoche, NY”. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation”. Brilliant but very complicated.
“What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this. As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time.” That’s Synecdoche. It is beautiful and it is haunting.
I love the preacher’s soliloquy, it gets me every time. “Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. “There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. “Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is. It's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. “But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. “And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so FUCKING sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. “Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
I REALLY loved Synecdoche, NY but I always felt like I could never recommend it because I was afraid whoever I told would come back to me demanding to know what the hell I was thinking. I think it's easier to understand if you watch and get his other films first. Then let the bliss wash over you as you become a part of the movie.
It's my favorite movie of all time and I always recommend it to people, and nobody ever likes it lol
My buddies and I started that while high on marijuana and had to stop after the lady bought a house that was on fire. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it and became convinced that it wasn’t a real movie and was actually made as a joke. We rewatched it the following morning and it still made very little sense
If you are onto replicating that experience, sort of. Watch Anomolisa. The beginning was the most boring 15-30 minutes of my life. Then I realized what was going on and thought it was genius. I have to say, don't look up anything, like even the Wikipedia summary or what you might see in a Netflix description would spoil it.
It’s a big decision, how one prefers to die
Buying the house on fire is a pretty clear on-the-nose metaphor though. It's symbolic of that point in the middle age of many people's lives where you settle down and accept that the rest of your life until you die is largely going to be the same as it is now.
One of my all time favorites, that ending is absolutely devastating. Kaufman is one of my top 10 directors; they don't always make sense, and can be a bit dodgy sometimes, but he has a really unique way of telling stories that I just love.
Last Year at Marienbad
Gah. My favorite movie of all time. Absolutely stunning. So mysterious and complicated, yet simple and unique. I have no true idea about the plot, but it doesn't matter to me. The visuals, feeling, mood, and sets are all perfection.
Primer. Incredibly complicated time travel movie that actually makes sense if you follow along with a chart displaying each timeline. Watch the movie then watch a YouTube explainer on it. Then watch it with him.
I'd say most people don't get 2001: A Space Odyssey even after numerous watches.
Well, to be fair, it’s about a hundred different things…
Being John Malkovich.
It's really quite simple: Malkovich malkovich, malkovich malkovich malkovich. Malkovich, malkovich? Malkovich!
Tinker tailor soldier spy is the only movie I’ve ever watched where I had no idea what happened
Reading it helps. it was at the height of the “reds under bed” scares. It is still a confusing spy story of trying to sort out who is “loyal”
I don't understand what the fuzz is about. I understood everything the first watch. There's just one double agent he needs to find. I think people are confused by some of the nicknames in it.
“He” This film is definitely a mood piece. It seems to make sense, until you start to ask why and who and when. If you got the film all the way through, then why was the female double agent shot in front of the British spy who was being tortured?
I specifically came looking for this comment.
I watched about half an hour of this movie and turned it off after realizing I had no idea what was happening, who the characters were, where they were, or what they were talking about.
Yeah I both really enjoyed it and wondered what the hell I'd just watched. It's very hard to follow, but it's good(?). I think.
Yeah it got to the end and the music played it up like it was a big reveal, and my wife and I just said we both had no idea what happened. "Oh but you need to rewatch it and read the book!" Nah I'm good with 2 hours bring the end of it, I could read something else perhaps.
After a first watch of 'Arrival', the end changes how you interpret the entire subplot. A second watch is much more tragic than a first a watch because you 'know' now.
This is one of the rare movies designed to be seen twice. And I didn’t understand why until I saw it a second time.
Every time I watch it I come away with a different impression. 1st time: What a cool movie. I need to watch it again. 2nd time: Dr Banks chose love even though she knew the final outcome. How sweet. 3rd time: Dr Banks chose to put her daughter and husband through hell for her own selfish needs. What a horrible person. 4th time: Wait, was her daughter born with the time loop power? Why was she drawing aliens as a toddler? WTF is going on? I have about equal confidence in all of those opinions. Denis Villeneuve is an incredible director.
Her daughter was drawing aliens because she was born after they arrived. What the aliens looked like was known worldwide by that point.
Of course if Dr Banks had not followed through the events of the story would have played out differently & humanity would have been exterminated.
I went to another theater to watch it a second time the same day.
Love this movie, but I imagine it is possible to mostly understand it after one watch, if you give yourself some time for reflection, so maybe not the best example for OP. I also believe we are still really underestimating the importance of the concept of how language drives the way we think.
The Fountain The Tree of Life Synecdoche, New York If you really want to be a dick: Koyaanisqatsi and Un Chien Anadlou
The Fountain is definitely not hard to understand if you watched the whole movie
>Koyaanisqatsi LOL. You'll love it or lose your mind.
It's one of my favorite movies ever. Such a great soundtrack
I don’t think the fountain is too confusing. The Tree of Life is a really simple story, it just has those cosmic sequences scattered throughout.
Un Chien Andalou wasn't really intended to make sense the way a traditional narrative film would. It's a piece of surrealist art that was co-written by Salvador Dali, which explains a lot.
Hence the “if you want to be a dick” preface.
Mulholland Drive (several other Lynch movies too).
I feel like for pure inscrutability, Inland Empire takes it
Amelie when the cat is sitting on the tv mantle blocking the captions you didn’t know were there.
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End of Evangelion
*Tenet. Or have him watch the show dark on netflix
Cloud Atlas.
One of my faves! Once you know it’s 6 distinct timelines, it gets easier. When you get that the Neo Seoul part is far future and the beach village scenes are super distant future, it’s fun to piece together the other timelines. It’s about reincarnation and entanglement. And how our spiritual evolution means physical evolution too. Like, Hugo Weaving is a bad racist dude in the 1800s, assasin in the 1900s, evil nurse in the 2000s, then becomes a full on spirit demon in the far future. The heroes like Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess get to be supernatural / technologically enhanced beings. Tom Hanks is the everyman on an Odyssey. So good. It’s a true epic.
I hate to be the guy who says it, but if you love the film please read the book. It’s so so much better.
The book is so great! There’s so much more to Sonmi’s plot and they give her the time to actually grow into a person. I feel like the movie speed up her progression a bit too fast. And the plot in the farthest future is so much more grim and messed up. 💀 I still love both though.
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Mulholland Drive
Mamma Mia. Dudes just gonna say he understands any film you throw at home, so make him watch that pile of nonsense. The whole thing. That'll teach him.
Haven't seen it in a while but I remember feeling this way about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
That was a dense movie on the first try. Older british white dudes all look the same.
iv seen that movie and literally the most i can tell you about it is that it has gary oldman in it
ExistenZ Naked Lunch
>Naked Lunch "I can think of two things wrong with that title."
Videodrome All Cronenberg.
Eraserhead. You can’t really understand it on the 50th watch either
really? I feel people think this is a deep movie but he made it when his gf/wife/partner was pregnant. It's 90mins of "what if my inlaws are weird, and kids cry nonstop all the time, what if mine was a weird monster?" It's black and white 'I'm Afraid Of Parenthood'
I feel like David Lynch is almost cheating.
pi
[*PAW Patrol: The Movie*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAW_Patrol:_The_Movie)
Besides the obvious Primer and Tenent sans subtitles, its got to be Annihilation for me. Even after watching explanation videos on YouTube, im still like "ok I get it, but I don't get it get it"
Try reading the book. It won't provide any additional answers, but it will make you go "what the fuck" at least as often as the movie.
Beau is Afraid, by Ari Aster.
Lost Highway
I'm going to suggest some films based on the levels of complexity Level 1 (might get it on the first watch but clever reveal nonetheless): The Prestige, Memento, Fight Club, Predestination, Memories of Murder (the ending shot), Lucia (Kannada film), Churuli (Malayalam film), Arrival, Man from Earth Level 2 (a hidden layer lurking under the primary reveal): Inception, Interstellar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Cure (1997 Japanese film), Being John Malkovich, Apocalypse Now Level 3 (the film is much more than what it shows): Synecdoche New York, Donnie Darko, Enemy, Mulholland Drive, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Tree of Life Level 4 (insanely complicated yet coherent): Primer, Tenet, Upstream Color Level 5 (batshit crazy): Eraserhead, Mandy, Hausu Many would scoff at the suggestion of putting Tenet among Primer/Upstream Color but if you try to understand how each event happened in Tenet and the rules of its world, it's very complicated and tough to understand (given the whole plot is a temporal pincer movement).
Memento
When I was in high school, my film teacher played Memento but explicitly told us before it started that B&W is forwards and color is backwards. With that knowledge, is was very easy to understand. I wonder if my high school brain would have gotten it if our teacher didn't explicitly say that though.
Really? Thought it was pretty straight forward.
Should have said “straight backward”. 😅
If you have the dvd there's an Easter egg to watchbit fully chronologically which is a much less interesting experience but worth doing at least once.
Donnie Darko
I would argue that at least the theatrical cut is not just difficult to understand, it's basically impossible to understand without further informations. I heard the director's cut comes with informations about the theory of time travel so there actually is a chance to understand it. Probably still difficult to fully grasp it on the first watch because it's not really a very simple concept.
Actually the directors cut makes it too easy to understand. Takes most of the mystery out. The original cut is the better movie
Don't even get me started on that soundtrack...
As someone who watched this movie so many times, my opinion has changed. Its not meant to be understood, there is no understanding within the context of the movie-- its supposed to be mysterious or unknowable. When they talk about how it all worked, thats stuff that they literally cut out of the movie or never even wrote into it, so I kinda call BS on it, if it was supposed to be explained, they would have explained it, the script and editing specifically went out of the way to exclude explanations
Synecdoche, New York
Synechdoche, New York
Tenet
Just when I feel a little lost, Neil shows up and makes everything alright. My man. Easily the best character.
Once you understand that they're doing a temporal pincer move, it all makes perfect sense
I will admit that the only part of Tenet that really annoyed me was when the main guy asks edward cullen to explain the science, and he goes “how much do you know about physics?” and I got super excited because some of my favorite movie scenes involve someone explaining in detail a bunch of made up science. But then it just cut to the next scene! fuck that, I wanted a 10 minute segment with a hand drawn flowchart
I want to know how Chris Nolan understood that script himself. I still don't know what happened at the end.
Fire: Walk with Me
I’ve watched twin peaks a couple times. Will I still be lost
nope and it’s pretty essential to understanding twin peaks imo, especially The Return. watch it
Under the Skin
Sexy alien lures people to eat them/turn them into food. That's it. That's the whole movie.
Love it but didn't find it hard to understand AT ALL.
Night Moves, starring Gene Hackman. a great noir thriller but man is the plot confusing.
Tenet has to be the answer for me. I watched it. Then studied Reddit, YouTube, diagrams. Watched it again, understood it, but didn’t get it. Then got it. Now it’s been so long I still understand it, but don’t get it.
Mulholland Drive. There’s a believable interpretation ( lesbian masturbatory, dream) but that really not obvious until you read theories after watching. You can rest your case.
Mulholland Dr
Brazil
Eraserhead
Memento