15 Best Mind-Bending Movies Of All Time, Ranked

While there's plenty to love about a good, old-fashioned formulaic popcorn flick, some of the best movies are those mightily cerebral films that force viewers to focus up on topsy-turvy, mindbending storytelling devices and cinematic sleight-of-hand interwoven throughout surrealist narratives. They're the kind of films that challenge traditional tropes and use experimental formats to take a swing at viewers'  worldviews or even their sense of reality. Elements like nonlinear storytelling, sonic disorientation, brain-warping visuals, and unreliable narrators come together beautifully to tell stories that are best understood through multiple viewings and offer layers upon layers of insight with each novel watch. 

From complicated time travel tales and altered realities to existential terror and psychological thrillers, these films drive home how subjective reality truly is. While there are loads of honorable mentions out there like "12 Monkeys" and "Fight Club" that almost made the list, here are the top 15 mind-bending films of all time, according to IMDb and Reddit. 

"Memento" is the second full-length film by Christopher Nolan, the director whose long list of acclaimed films would one day include "The Dark Knight," "Inception," "Interstellar," and "Oppenheimer," just to name a few. It deals with Leonard Shelby (Pearce), a man suffering from debilitating anterograde amnesia, a type of short-term memory loss so profound that he can begin to lose his memories of a long conversation halfway through it. Told through a non-linear narrative in alternating black-and-white and color scenes, the story follows Shelby as he wakes up over and over again in a motel room to learn about his condition and follow a convoluted rabbit trail of notes, clues, Polaroids, and tattoos on his own body directing him to hunt for the person who assaulted and killed his wife. 

The seemingly disordered storytelling does a good job of presenting Shelby's perspective as his condition makes him an unreliable narrator even to himself. Guy Pearce's intensity and the innovative structure help make this neo-noir film one of the best in its genre.

• Starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano
• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Year: 2000
• Runtime: 113 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

While "The Butterfly Effect" might not be a cinematic masterpiece, it is one of the most influential pop culture presentations of the eponymous chaos theory concept that explains how a tiny change in something even as minute as the flap velocity of a butterfly's wing could create a ripple of increasingly larger events that profoundly change reality on some level. Despite its abysmal critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a popularity index of 81% and is one of those must-see time travel movies you shouldn't skip. 

The film follows Evan Treborn (Kutcher), a young man who, having experienced stranged neurological spells since youth, realizes in his twenties that they come with the ability to travel back and forth along his personal timeline using only the power of his mind and actually change events, rearranging the outcomes of his life. But with every effort to make his life better, that pesky butterfly effect causes unintended consequences both for himself and for everyone he loves. 

• Starring: Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Eric Stoltz
• Director: Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber
• Year: 2014
• Runtime: 114 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 34%

"Triangle" is a dark psychological science-fiction horror film written and directed by Christopher Smith, the writer behind the well-received 2010 period horror film "Black Death." A modern interpretation of Sisyphus, the Greek mythological figure forced to fruitlessly roll a boulder up a hill for all of eternity, as well as a vision of purgatory, "Triangle" is a trippy time loop metaphor for the agony of guilt and grief experienced by troubled parents who feel they have failed their children in some way, whether through outright abuse or just through their own perceived inadequacies.  

The tale centers around Jess (Melissa George), a young mother of an autistic son. After a difficult morning with her child, Jess heads out on a sailboat trip with her friend Greg and several others, explaining that her son is at school for the day. While at sea, a strange storm hits, capsizing their boat. In the disaster's wake, the group find and board a seemingly deserted ocean liner where Jess is almost immediately struck by strong déjà vu as a deadly masked attacker appears to pick them off one by one. 

Jess soon finds events repeating, realizing she is caught in an endless loop of overlapping timelines where each trip through adds a duplicate of herself that in turn multiplies the ship's ever-growing body count as she desperately tries to claw her way out of the hell she created with a split-second decision.

• Starring: Melissa George, Michael Dorman, Liam Hemsworth 
• Director: Christopher Smith 
• Year: 2009 
• Runtime: 99 minutes 
• Rating: R 
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 78%

It's difficult to overstate how jarring it was at the time to see Robin Wiliams, the late great genius comedian known for roles like Mork from Ork and Aladdin's genie, play the creepy lead in "One Hour Photo" back in 2002. While he'd long proven his dramatic acting chops in films like "Good Will Hunting" and "What Dreams May Come," Williams' performance as Sy Parrish, the friendless and mentally unstable big box store photo tech whose interest in one family takes a dark turn, is disturbing almost to the point of betrayal — and it's part of what makes this film so strong. 

The film plays with perception to show Parrish's sense of entitlement from his point of view in a way that is as disorienting as it is highly effective with an ending that viewers still struggle to explain decades later. Its central message is even more relevant today in the hyper-voyeuristic world of influencers, incels, and malleable truth we find ourselves enmeshed within.

• Starring: Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Gary Cole 
• Director: Mark Romanek 
• Year: 2002 
• Runtime: 96 minutes 
• Rating: R 
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 82%

Like just about everything penned by Charlie Kaufman, "Adaptation" is a dazzlingly oddball piece of metafiction that functions as a commentary on existence, relationships, perception, and the rhetorical author-audience-subject triangle at the center of the writing process. The film imagines a fictionalized version of the screenwriter himself (Nicolas Cage) and dreams up a freeloading ne'er-do-well twin brother named Donald (also Cage) who lives a carefree life unburdened by Charlie's long list of mental health challenges that include self-doubt, crippling anxiety, and depression, among others. 

While Charlie is well past his deadline for adapting Susan Orleans' (Meryl Streep) "The Orchid Thief" — a real nonfiction book by a real author of the same name — into a screenplay due to his obsession with avoiding tired tropes and clichés, Donald goes into screenwriting on a lark only to immediately strike gold with a corny clichéd spec script. Together, they travel to Florida where they find their lives intertwined with their subjects as the lines between subject and author become blurred beyond all sense and logic. 

• Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper
• Director: Spike Jonze
• Year: 2002
• Runtime: 115 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 90%

"Interstellar" is an epic blockbuster sci-fi flick co-written by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, one of the pens behind HBO Max's reality-bending puzzle box adaptation of "Westworld." The film is set in a near future where the Earth's global ecosystems are now beyond redemption. The planet has become one big dust bowl, large-scale farming is unsustainable, and humanity's extinction is imminent. Publicly, the U.S. government has abandoned space travel, instead teaching schoolchildren that the moon landing was faked. But when the daughter of former NASA test pilot Joseph "Coop" Cooper discovers NASA's secret coordinates in dust patterns found in her "haunted" bedroom, Coop soon finds himself on a long interstellar journey in search of habitable planets surrounding a black hole. 

The film, which was widely praised for the scientific accuracy of its black hole and gravity representations, hinges on a mind-bending plot turn with an emotional twist underlined by Hans Zimmer's haunting score. In addition to its principals, the high-profile cast includes Matt Damon, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, and a very young Timothée Chalamet. 

• Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Year: 2014
• Runtime: 169 minutes
• Rating: PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 73%

"Pi" was the feature directorial debut for writer-director Darren Aronofsky, who later became known for his psychologically driven, surrealism-infused storytelling in films like "Requiem for a Dream," "The Wrestler," and "The Whale." Although functionally a stripped-down proof of concept pulled together on a $60,000 budget powered by donations from friends and family, "Pi" is a solid film that explores themes omnipresent in Aronofsky's later work like obsession, alienation, identity, and desperation. 

Beautifully filmed in black and white on 16mm, "Pi" follows the story of Maximillian "Max" Cohen (Sean Gullette), an isolated mathemetician residing in Chinatown, Manhattan, whose schizoid personality disorder impacts his ability to function. He perceives the world through numbers and equations, ultimately discovering that his calculations have somehow unlocked the power of precognition and possibly even the mind of God by way of a 216-digit number. 

• Starring: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman 
• Director: Darren Aronofsky
• Year: 1998
• Runtime: 84 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%

Like "Pi," "Black Swan" is a dark psychological horror film that plays with perception to bend viewers' sense of reality, evoking the sense of existential horror that follows a protagonist clearly losing their grasp on reality. But instead of viewing objectively from afar, Aronofsky brings the audience along for the ride, straight down the rabbit hole into the mouth of madness. 

The film stars Natalie Portman as Nina, an aspiring prima ballerina in the highly competitive New York City Ballet Company as they begin rehearsing Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." Cast to play the White Swan opposite Dark Swan Lily (Mila Kunis), a ballerina whose talent rivals her own, Nina soon finds herself threatened by Lily's wild, unpredictable nature. As the rehearsals progress, Nina's sense of reality begins to warp into a version of the doppelgänger tale of the Black and White Swan. 

• Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel Barbara 
• Director: Darren Aronofsky
• Year: 2010
• Runtime: 108 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 85%
  

Long before Sam Rockwell would dazzle "White Lotus" fans with his perplexing monologue about wanting to embody an Asian girl, he captivated viewers as an unfortunate lunar laborer in an unsettling drama about the way corporations commodify human lives and experiences without regard for the damage they leave in their wake. The film stars Rockwell as Samuel Bell, an isolated worker on a lunar mining facility with just two weeks remaining on his three-year contract, at the end of which he looks forward to returning home to his wife and children. 

After suffering hallucinations, he finds an identical version of himself on the lunar site, leading to the discovery that he is just one of many in a long line of clones implanted with memories of their original, an original whose life he will never live. A beautifully haunting score by Clint Mansell adds to the sense of isolation and futility imparted through Rockwell's powerful performance.

• Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Matt Berry 
• Director: Duncan Jones
• Year: 2009
• Runtime: 97 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 90%

Set in a version of 1988 suburbia amid the peak era of shoulder pads and big hair, "Donnie Darko" is a cult classic film about a troubled teenage boy either suffering from mental illness or a highly acute Cassandra complex. While sleepwalking one night, Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) encounters Frank the Rabbit (James Duval), a twisted rabbit mascot costume who makes Freddy Fazbear look like Santa, and gives Donnie an exact time for the world's end right down to the very second, and it's less than one month in the future. 

And that's just the beginning of the odd occurrences for Donnie, who comes home to find a jet engine has crashed through his bedroom. It's a weird movie that begs for interpretation. Whether it's a sci-fi about time travel, wormholes, telekinesis, and a tangent universe or just a freaky trip into one kid's psychosis, "Donnie Darko" is certainly a head trip told from an unreliable narrator. Look for Seth Rogen as Ricky Danforth in his first feature film role. 

• Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore 
• Director: Richard Kelly 
• Year: 2001
• Runtime: 113 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%

The premise of Charlie Kaufman's "Being John Malkovich" sounds like a fever dream that absolutely should not work as a full-length feature film. An out-of-work NYC puppeteer named Craig (John Cusack) lives a bleak life with his mousy wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz), a pet shop owner with little affection left over after pouring herself into her comically numerous pets, which include a chimp named Elijah. Craig takes a job working for Dr. Lester (Orson Bean) on the 7½th floor of his office building, a low-ceilinged office reachable only by prying the elevator door open at the halfway point between the 7th and 8th floor. 

It's while working on that half-floor that he discovers a small door functioning as a portal into the real-world actor John Malkovich's consciousness, accessible for a mere 15 minutes at a time, at the end of which visitors are unceremoniously spit out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. The film is a strange, absurd, and quietly hilarious exploration of optimism in the face of domestic ennui with an even stranger ending that leaves audiences with an embarassment of Malkoviches. 

• Starring: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener
• Director: Spike Jonze
• Year: 1999
• Runtime: 113 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

Ask a linguist, and they'll tell you that most of our thoughts are filtered through language, which in turn alters our perception of reality. This is the concept at the center of "Arrival," a beautiful sci-fi film that sees a dozen extraterrestrial vessels full of seven-limbed cephalopods (dubbed "heptapods") park themselves around the Earth, leaving the nations of humanity scrambling to come up with an appropriate response. Some want to attack, while others want to stand back and wait. 

With time ticking down until someone's itchy trigger finger rings a bell that can't be unrung, the United States calls in linguistics expert Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who work together to decode the heptapods' complex palindromic language system in an attempt to understand their intent. As they do, Louise experiences some pretty trippy side effects leading to one of the best twists in movie history — not to mention one of the best sci-fi movies of all time.  

• Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
• Director: Denis Villeneuve
• Year: 2016
• Runtime: 116 minutes
• Rating: PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

Easily one of the most analyzed films of all time, "2001: A Space Odyssey" is Stanley Kubrick's science fiction masterpiece produced from a screenplay written between Kubrick and classic sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. A large part of what makes the film such a mental funhouse is its lack of an overarching narrative structure, forcing the audience to fill in the blanks and draw thematic lines between its varied segments. Its first sees a group of early hominids devolve from peaceful coexistence into murderous mayhem after a mysterious monolith descends among the populace. 

The film follows the monolith to a lunar outpost and on the path to Jupiter, where strange, dark, and surreal qualities follow its path. The film's ability to create a dark and troubling vision of the future without telling viewers what to think about the most confusing moments in "2001: A Space Odyssey" is central to what makes this a great sci-fi flick.

• Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
• Director: Stanley Kubrick
• Year: 1968
• Runtime: 139 minutes
• Rating: G
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 90%
  

Easily Jim Carrey's best performance, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" delivers a mind-bending sci-fi concept as a vehicle for exploring the pain of love and regret expressed in Lord Alfred Tennyson's famous line, "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." The film stars Carrey as Joel Barish, the heartbroken boyfriend who elects to undergo selective memory erasure after learning his ex-lover Clementine Kruczynski has already undergone the procedure, wiping every trace of their two-year relationship from her mind. But while undergoing the procedure, Joel experiences a lucid state of consciousness in which he is forced to relive each memory moments before it is erased. Although the effect causes him to reflect and regret his decision, there is nothing he can do to stop it. 

In a world full of unrealistic Hallmark endings, "Eternal Sunshine" deals in the messy reality of love with a message of hope. It's a beautiful film that explores our own unreliability as narrators and the idea that love is a choice more than a feeling. 

• Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst
• Director: Michel Gondry
• Year: 2004
• Runtime: 108 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 92%

Another trippy Christopher Nolan sci-fi action film, "Inception" asks, "What if dreams within dreams within dreams, but make it a heist film?" And somehow, the result is a brilliant, action-packed mind game that still manages to be well-acted thanks in no small part to good old Leonardo DiCaprio. The film stars DiCaprio as extractor Don Cobb, a skilled information dealer who comes by his data through unusual means — that is, by infiltrating his targets' dreams via a form of elaborate corporate espionage and extracting it from within their subconscious by way of dreamscape architecture.

Hired by Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) to implant an idea in the subconscious of his competitor's son, Cobb and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) enlist architecture grad student Ariadne (Elliot Page) and set out on their dubious mission of hanging onto reality while lost in the depths of the human mind.

• Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Year: 2010
• Runtime: 148 minutes
• Rating: PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 87%