10 Complex Movies You Really Weren't Prepared For

When you sit down to a movie written by Charlie Kaufman, you kind of know what you're getting into. And yet even the likes of Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could not have prepared anybody for this insane and frankly impenetrable work of mad genius.

At its core, Synecdoche, New York concerns the trouble life of a man named Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), whose job as a theatre director requires him to build a replica of New York City for a new play. Fine. Before long, though, reality and fantasy begin to rub shoulders, and things get big... really big.

Kaufman, of course, is saying a million things about life and the nature of the human experience. But here's a film that appears to thrive on its ability to madden audiences, though one expects that in Kaufman's head it all makes perfect sense... and yet even the title is unpronounceable if you've never heard it said out loud. It's a film you can't even recommend to a friend because you can't even say it!

This is a movie with so many layers, so many conceits, and so much narrative packed into its two-hour runtime, that you can watch it six or seven times and still find a new angle to the material. Which is why, upon its release back in 2008, the picture lost close to $15 million at the box office.

Of course it did.