History MindScrew / Film

* After it runs out of material and stops being a comedy, ''Art School Confidential'' wants ''desperately'' to be a MindScrew, it tries ''so hard!'' But somewhere along the line someone missed the point of what a MindScrew actually is and the movie doesn't even really bother to actually try to confuse you with anything, because it's so proud of how it's got a grown up plot about a guy who commits murders and makes paintings out of them, only he dies and someone else gets arrested for it, instead of some silly story about ''art students''.

* If you don't know the twist in [[TheSixthSense The Sixth Sense,]] you will experience the most thorough fucking of your mind ever. [[spoiler: The protagonist died five minutes in. The other protagonist knew the whole time and kept it a secret. The wife has been grieving this entire time.]] It's not so much that the twist in question happened, but that the audience realizes immediately how much sense it makes.

** One of Lynch's more coherent but still mind-screwey films is BlueVelvet, which has a straight forward plot, but gets pretty dang weird (for those of you who don't know, it starts with a guy finding ''a severed ear'' and goes into a lot of stuff involving a sex-crazed gas breathing Dennis Hopper).

* My God, FelixTheCatTheMovie. Just...just watch it. Reptilian creatures, a magic bag, a half-robot evil overlord, a sentient tear, a dimensional transporter, mice-lizard hybrids, YellowSubmarine-like sea creatures, a CircusOfFear, 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 movie π (''{{Pi}}'') has a paranoid mathemathical genius, Hebrew numerology, conspiracies, neurological headaches, [[CosmicHorror the secret name of God]], and [[spoiler:the protagonist taking [[ThisIsADrill 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.

* ''What Is It?'' CrispinGlover's...creation. There's a reason [[BrowsHeldHigh Oancitizen]] [[GoMadFromTheRevelation went crazy]] after seeing it.

*** There's [[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp another reason]] why you might not have heard of it...

* ''Music/TheMonkees'' movie ''Film/{{Head}}''. A {{Deconstruction}} of the TV Show, plus an anti-establishment acid trip.

** The movie was such a mind screw that the film adaptation of ''[[TwoThousandTen 2010: The Year We Made Contact]]'' was largely devoted to ''[[MindScrewdriver trying to explain what the hell had happened in the last movie]].'' You may not have heard of this sequel. There's an excellent reason for that.

* ''Film/BlackSwan''. 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.

* In ''CemeteryMan'', Francesco Dellamorte [[CantGetAwayWithNuthin 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]].

** In the DVD commentary, the [[WordOfGod director]] pretty much owns up to the fact that even he doesn't really know what's going on and that the plot probably can't be explained without resorting to [[AWizardDidIt divine intervention]].

* The pretty much the entire point of the CRS company in the DavidFincher flick ''Film/TheGame''.

* The StarWarsHolidaySpecial 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.

* ''TheButterflyEffect'' is a sort-of mind screw. Is he traveling through time? Moving across alternate universes and adapting to the memories of the version of himself in the new universe? Is he just totally nuts and then one day finally gets the help he needs? Is the end really just another delusion? These last two possibilities are subverted in the DVD release alternate ending in which he [[spoiler:goes back to when he was in his mother's womb and commits suicide with his own umbilical cord before even being born. Which is impossible, by the way.]]

* The ending of ''Film/TimeBandits'' as well as just about every other Creator/TerryGilliam film ever made.

** Don't forget the scene with Sean Connery in a wedding dress, or several scenes which have random images projected onto various characters' skins, or the ending, which has Sean Connery and his love interest having a baby and then watching as all three, get old, and die, or the beginning, which has a floating head of a man with a beard painted onto his chin and a towel on his head attempting to explain the plot of the movie about to be watched, which just ends up confusing everyone else more.

* Most films directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, including Solaris, Stalker, and The Sacrifice. but most notably The Mirror, to which Tarkovsky commented that even he himself didn't understand the full meaning behind some of the scenes.

* Paranoia 1.0 (often known only as ''One Point O'') is as mind-screwy as it gets. A man (Jeremy Sisto, no less) receives empty packages while constantly dozing off in front of his computer: he's trying to write a program to meet a deadline, but he's constantly falling asleep and receiving empty packages... and developing an increasingly unhealthy craving for "Nature Fresh Milk". The apartment complex is full of people who have cravings for equally irrelevant things and there is a landlord that watches everything. Everything in the movie (e.g. what the empty packages are, why the landlord has an equivalent craving for packed meat, etc.) is explained in a logical and sensical manner - that is, until the movie decides to crank up the mind-screw-gears [[UpToEleven to twelve hundred]] and then flat out breaks the gauge and lets the whole thing explode. Thus, you just face an ending that leaves you wondering what the hell you just watched.

* No mention of this: [[Film/TheRockyHorrorPictureShow 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 frankenstein monster only for a zombified Meat Loaf to ride a motorcycle out of a giant freezer to sing a song while dry humping his girlfriend only for Tim Curry to slaughter him and then apparently marry the frankenstein only for a narrator with no F***ing neck to introduce Tim Curry having sex with the asshole and the slut followed by the musical sex scene of the slut seducing the frankenstein when the paraplegic, nazi kool-aid man crashes through the wall and announces that meat loaf is his nephew and things about how much of a disappointment Meat Loaf was and this introduces musical attempted rape followed by a musical orgy in a pool and-wouldn't you know it- a musical dance where the servants reveal that they are aliens and kill transvestite Tim Curry, Meat Loaf's girlfriend, and frankenstein and then fly the castle off into space.]] I am obviously talking about Thelma and Louise.

* ''Film/MontyPythonsTheMeaningOfLife''. Figuring out the meaning of life is ''easy'' compared with figuring out the meaning of this movie.
** And in fact they were so busy mind screwing the viewer [[spoiler: that they totally forgot to actually convey the meaning of life, having to hastily throw together a bunch of cliched platitudes at the end. Perhaps the only part of the movie that made an ounce of sense, and it was given the least thought.]]

* In ''Film/TotalRecall'', Quaid describes the real plot of the BigBad as "the best mindfuck yet." [[spoiler: And then Hauser shows up on video chummy with Cohaagen... The real mindfuck--for the audience that is--is the ending, which forces the audience to ask themselves if the entire movie did or didn't take place in Quaid's mind. On second viewings... it's still not clear. Fairly well done for what is otherwise a fairly standard action movie.]]
** WordOfGod is no help on the matter. In fact the director has said both interpretations are consistent with the facts, and it was set up that way on purpose.

* After a certain point in the film version of ''{{Hedwig and the Angry Inch}}'', the opening shot is redone, starting off a long medley featuring the three central characters merging into one and walking naked down an alleyway.

* ''{{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.

* DavidLynch's ''{{Mulholland Drive}}'' Or, to an even greater degree, ''{{Eraserhead}}''.

* ''Film/{{Westworld}}'' is an odd case in that it ''almost'' makes sense, and keeps setting itself up as if for TheReveal. By the end, we've still got a [[AmusementParkOfDoom decadent amusement park]] where a bunch of {{Ridiculously Human Robots}} [[RobotWar 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.

* ''MontyPythonsTheMeaningOfLife''. Figuring out the meaning of life is ''easy'' compared with figuring out the meaning of this movie.

* ''{{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.

* ''JacobsLadder'' is a Mind Screw from start to finish.

* ''{{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....

* The beginning of ''TheCityOfLostChildren''. Most, not all of it, make sense by the end.

* ''TheMatrix''. The sequels have a mild case of it, anyway; in the first movie, Morpheus took the time to explain what was going on.

* ''{{Videodrome}}''

* In ''TotalRecall'', Quaid describes the real plot of the BigBad as "the best mindfuck yet." [[spoiler: And then Hauser shows up on video chummy with Cohaagen... The real mindfuck--for the audience that is--is the ending, which forces the audience to ask themselves if the entire movie did or didn't take place in Quaid's mind. On second viewings... it's still not clear. Fairly well done for what is otherwise a fairly standard action movie.]]

* ''{{Westworld}}'' is an odd case in that it ''almost'' makes sense, and keeps setting itself up as if for TheReveal. By the end, we've still got a [[AmusementParkOfDoom decadent amusement park]] where a bunch of {{Ridiculously Human Robots}} [[RobotWar 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.

* ''OldBoy''

* No mention of this: [[RockyHorrorPictureShow 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 frankenstein monster only for a zombified Meat Loaf to ride a motorcycle out of a giant freezer to sing a song while dry humping his girlfriend only for Tim Curry to slaughter him and then apparently marry the frankenstein only for a narrator with no F***ing neck to introduce Tim Curry having sex with the asshole and the slut followed by the musical sex scene of the slut seducing the frankenstein when the paraplegic, nazi kool-aid man crashes through the wall and announces that meat loaf is his nephew and things about how much of a disappointment Meat Loaf was and this introduces musical attempted rape followed by a musical orgy in a pool and-wouldn't you know it- a musical dance where the servants reveal that they are aliens and kill transvestite Tim Curry, Meat Loaf's girlfriend, and frankenstein and then fly the castle off into space.]] I am obviously talking about Thelma and Louise.
* ''PsychoBeachParty'': What happened? How much of it was fake and who faked what?

** ''Inception'' uses InMediasRes openings. Not just at the start of the movie, but repeatedly, at multiple scenes, to intentionally evoke dreamlike logic. And the main plot is [[TheHeist a heist]] ''in reverse'', so it's necessarily a complicated story. [[spoiler: And the ending is [[AmbiguousSituation ambiguous]] between the best happy ending possible and one of the worst.]] Aside from all that, though, it's not mind-screwy at all!

* The ending of ''Film/TimeBandits'' as well as just about every other TerryGilliam film ever made.

**** What do you mean? The ending of ''Film/TimeBandits'' 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. [[SarcasmMode What part of any of this is the least bit mysterious?]]

*** [[TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot The depressing thing is that you could have made a quite good science fiction movie from the themes in]] ''Zardoz''. That movie would have had interesting things to say about the abuse of technology, colonial oppression, stagnation in advanced societies, and a bunch of other things.

** Bergman purposely put in a film break to [[BreatherEpisode give viewers a moment away from the surrealism.]]

* ''ArizonaDream'' by Emir Kusturica. [[CloudCuckoolander Insanely weird characters]]? Check. [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs Odd dreams]]? Check. [[MindScrew Flying fish]]?! You bet! So, what exactly happened in the movie? Well, it sort of varies, depending on [[YourMileageMayVary who you ask]].

** ''{{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.]] [[ExecutiveMeddling In the original ending, at least]].

* 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".

* ''Moonwalker'', a self-indulgent Michael Jackson movie, takes this to great extremes. This is a movie where the entire first twenty minutes is nothing but DerangedAnimation coupled with some of Jackson's most well-known dance moves, or moves that he popularized (such as crotch-grabbing ''outside'' your house), then devolves into his well-known "I'm Bad" video, except portrayed by children, who after making the video walk outside of the building through a cloud of smoke and emerge as adults. Jackson is then chased down the street by claymation people and then escapes by dressing up as a man-sized rabbit. That was the first half-hour. It gets much weirder from there.

* ''Clean, Shaven'' it about providing an objective look at schizophrenia, . The plot is straight forward, but it's a mind screw because uses a lot of unusual/disturbing images and sounds.

** ''Inception'' uses InMediaRes openings. Not just at the start of the movie, but repeatedly, at multiple scenes, to intentionally evoke dreamlike logic. And the main plot is [[TheHeist a heist]] ''in reverse'', so it's necessarily a complicated story. [[spoiler: And the ending is [[AmbiguousSituation ambiguous]] between the best happy ending possible and one of the worst.]] Aside from all that, though, it's not mind-screwy at all!

* ''DeadMan'' with Johnny Depp is a very otherworldly film, during which few things happen and most of the dialogues are just plain weird. It's even pointed out in frustration by the protagonist at one point.

* The StarWarsHolidaySpecial 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 (though, because the image that followed was a woman saying how much she would [[{{Squick}} desire to have sex with said wookie]], perhaps [[ThatGuyWithTheGlasses The Nostalgia Critic's]] claim that it was wookie sperm isn't very far from truth)

** [[NostalgiaCritic Ask me what it means! Ask me what it means!]]

* Several of the ''{{Hellraiser}}'' sequels have shades of this, especially ''Deader''.

* ''Clean, Shaven'' it about providing an objective look at schizophrenia, thus it uses a lot of unusual/disturbing images and sounds.

* Two words that have yet to be said despite being the name of one of the most famous incarnate of MindScrew to come out during the 1960s: [[spoiler:''' '' YellowSubmarine'' ''']]

* MirrorMask 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 SpiritualSuccessor to {{Labyrinth}}?