When you watch movies, you want to be immersed and get a break from reality, so sometimes that means a good sci-fi fantasy, action comedy, or even a horror movie. But maybe you prefer critical thinking when you watch movies, ones that are filled with more mind-bending and confusing storylines that make you question everything that’s going on.
Psychological thrillers represent the best genre for that experience. Great psychological thrillers have plenty of twists and turns, make excellent use of unreliable narrators, and even introduce sci-fi elements to throw things for a bigger loop. Below are some of the best movies guaranteed to mess with your mind.
Where To Stream
Lorcan Finnegan
Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots, Jonathan Aris, Éanna Hardwicke, Senan Jennings, Danielle Ryan, Olga Wehrly, and Molly McCann
2019
73%
5.9
Plex, The Roku Channel
With Vivarium, you’re in for a trippy suburban experience about a couple, Tom and Gemma, who are searching for a new home in a neighborhood of identical green houses, soon finding themselves unable to get out ofthe maze of homes. They always find themselves back at the house they were just being shown, but now with a baby dropped off at their front doorstep.
Tom and Gemma are forced into raising the child on the condition that they can leave, but the boy grows really fast and seems unnatural, even mimicking them. The entire situation is very surreal, bizarre, and weird, and through all the mind-bending and confusing story beats also lies a message about settling down and parenthood.
David Cronenberg
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Christopher Eccleston, Sarah Polley, and Robert A. Silverman
1999
76%
6.8
VOD
David Cronenberg is known for dark and disturbing body horror movies, and Existenz is a highly underrated one where body horror and mind-bending sci-fi meet. Here,the main protagonist is a game designernamed Allegra Geller, who made the futuristic VR game Existenz, which is activated by connecting an organic fleshy console through a port in your spine.
Existenz does a great job of never allowing you to know what’s real and what is still the game world until the very end, while at the same time introducing some unique organic weapons and interesting ideas about the future of virtual reality games. The visuals are classic Cronenberg, and you have a fantastic lead duo of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law.
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods
Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East, Topher Grace, and Elle Young
2024
91%
7
HBO Max
Heretic was one of thebest horror movies of 2024, thanks to Hugh Grant’s shocking performance as a manipulative, religion-disproving serial killer. Grant’s Mr. Reed will mess with your mind throughout the film, and you’ll start to feel as helpless and confused as the main protagonists, two female Mormon missionaries trapped in his twisted mind games.
The movie devotes some of its runtime to well-researched discussion and critique of religion with some clever analogies, but overall, Heretic is creepy and disturbing and throws in so many plot twists that have you believing one odd thing after another. The movie is also written and directed by the writers behind A Quiet Place, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.
Ari Aster
Joaquin Phoenix, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Amy Ryan, Patti LuPone, Kylie Rogers, Denis Ménochet, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, Julia Antonelli, Richard Kind, and Michael Gandolfini
2023
68%
6.6
HBO Max, Paramount+ with Showtime
Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraidis also from A24, and it stars Joaquin Phoenix as an anxiety-ridden man literally terrified and paranoid of everything. Seeing as it’s from the director behind Hereditary and Midsommar, the sound design and camerawork are the film’s strongest aspects, masterfully keeping you on edge and making you feel the same anxiety and tension as Beau.
The movie is about Beau’s struggle to get home to see his mother, with whom he has a troubled relationship. You might start to suspect that everything Beau sees playing out in front of him is a manifestation of his anxieties and paranoid thoughts, and all of it runs for three hours.
Brad Anderson
Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, John Sharian, Michael Ironside, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Reg E. Cathey, Anna Massey, and Matthew Romero Moore
2004
77%
7.6
Paramount+
Christian Bale isthe thinnest he’s ever had to be in The Machinist, having a skeletal-like build to really commit to the character of an emaciated man with insomnia. This film puts you inside the world of paranoia and confusion of Bale’s Trevor Reznik, a factory machine worker who eventually causes an accident where a co-worker loses an arm.
Trevor keeps seeing a man he calls Ivan, who apparently exists only to him, and experiences lapses in his memory. He also frequently visits a sex worker named Stevie, who’s more like a friend to him, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. If you thought Bale’s unreliable narrator Patrick Bateman in American Psycho was well-crafted, just wait for the twist in The Machinist.
David Lynch
Karolina Gruszka, Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Grace Zabriskie, Harry Dean Stanton, Jan Hencz, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Ian Abercrombie, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Peter J. Lucas, Terryn Westbrook, Julia Ormond, William H. Macy, Diane Ladd, and Scott Coffey
2006
72%
Legendary filmmaker David Lynchmakes the most mind-boggling original films that deal with intense psychological material, and we’re thankful to him for that. Inland Empire is even more confusing and experimental than Mulholland Drive. It’s a movie that runs for three hours about an actress losing her grip on reality while also caught in a time paradox.
Laura Dern’s Nikki is filming a project with Justin Theroux’s Devon, where she learns their movie was previously unfinished in Poland due to the lead actors being murdered. You follow Nikki as she goes through a surreal, distorted, reality-altering odyssey, while also cutting back to a Polish sex worker watching TV, including a show about a family of anthropomorphic rabbits.
Adrian Lyne
Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello, Matt Craven, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jason Alexander, Ving Rhames, Eriq La Salle, Patricia Kalember, Brian Tarantina, Anthony Alessandro, Brent Hinkley, and Macaulay Culkin
1990
7.4
Pluto TV
The film Jacob’s Ladder is a genre-bending film of psychological horror, thriller, romance, and war. The main protagonist is Tim Robbins' Jacob Singer, a Vietnam War veteran seemingly suffering from PTSD and receiving troubling hallucinations of monsters that threaten him and his girlfriend. It’s an eerie trip of a movie with some truly immersive and masterful editing.
Jacob’s Ladder keeps you constantly guessing about what’s going on with Jacob and questioning whether he’s still in the war, in New York, or in some other dimension entirely, with the movie cutting between his near-death as a soldier and his present life. The creatures, story, and horror atmosphere were so influential that they even inspired Silent Hill.
Richard Kelly
Jake Gyllenhaal, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Daveigh Chase, Seth Rogen, Patrick Swayze, James Duval, Noah Wyle, and Katharine Ross
2001
88%
8
Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, Plex, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, The CW, Sling TV
Donnie Darko remains one of the trippiest and most mind-bending psychological thrillers to mess with you. The movie begins with a plane engine falling through the roof of a house, which happens to land in the bedroom of Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Donnie Darko. Meanwhile, a creepy bunny-costumed character named Frank tells Donnie the world will end.
Donnie soon begins dating, but also continues to be visited by the bunny, who influences him negatively. Donnie sees a therapist, and you’re led to believe these are hallucinations from schizophrenia or some other psychological condition, but then there’s a paradoxical twist that makes you question the reality of it all, so maybe Frank doesn’t seem so out of the ordinary.
James Ward Byrkit
Emily Baldoni, Nicholas Brendon, Maury Sterling, Lauren Maher, Alex Manugian, Hugo Armstrong, Elizabeth Gracen, and Lorene Scafaria
2013
89%
7.2
Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, Plex, Pluto TV, Xumo Play
Coherence puts a mind-bending spin on a dinner party evening with your friends. Everyone is gathered together with news of a comet passing over the Earth, but then things get very mysterious. After a power outage, the friends encounter a group of people who are identically matching their appearance, as though they are doubles, with only subtle differences in their glowstick colors.
What’s most significant about this movie is its extremely low budget of $50,000, but extremely high concept sci-fi of quantum coherence and alternate realities that manages to be as great an experience as any higher-budget film. The dialogue is mostly improvised, and the camera makes it feel like a lower-quality film, but Coherence is a noteworthy watch.
Celine Held and Logan George
Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Lauren Ambrose, Caroline Falk, Diana Hopper, Sam Hennings, Eric Lange, David Maldonado, Zedrick Tinsley, Jules Hilillo Fernandez, and Lance E. Nichols
Caddo Lake is a missing person mystery-thriller told through a twisty, mind-bending premise of a lake that has portal-like tears that displace you throughout time. It’s also produced by M. Night Shyamalan, so you should expect a very mind-blowing twist from Caddo Lake as well, which is what makes it the top contender in this category.
Caddo Lake follows the main characters, Ellie and Paris, as Ellie discovers the time-travel phenomenon of Caddo Lake and realizes that her little stepsister Anna got trapped in time and tries to find her and bring her back. Paris frequents that same lake but in a different timeline from Ellie, creating a brilliant and well-written paradox story.
