12 Sci-Fi Movies That Purposefully Mess With Your Head

12. Primer

Shane Carruth’s debut is infamous for its twisty, almost impossible to unravel timeline, and the flick went on to inspire everything from British Bermuda Triangle set chiller Triangle to Spanish thriller Timecrimes, an equally impressive microbudget effort from a fellow emerging genre auteur.

The film follows a pair of scientists as they attempt to understand and experiment with perfecting their accidental discovery of a time travel method, and it leaves the process frustratingly impossible to decipher for mainstream audiences thanks in large part to Carruth’s own real life background in advanced mathematics and engineering.

By the time the film reaches its enigmatic close, the audience is left certain that they can make sense of the storyline and its many versions of the protagonists who exist across various timelines within a stable time loop—we’ll just need a pen, some paper, and a few years to work it all out.