10 Great Movies With Plots That Make Your Head Hurt

9. Stalker

Any film which sets out to explore the classical Aristotelian unity - of action, location and time - is likely to be one which leaves your head hurting. In the hands of master Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky such a result is all but guaranteed - Tarkovsky, after all, is one of the most rigorously challenging and intelligent directors of all time. You can take your pick from Tarkovsky's films when it comes to movies which make your head hurt, but Stalker is as good a choice as any. The eponymous stalker leads two men - a writer and a professor - into the Zone so that they might track down the Room, a place said to grant the wishes of anyone who steps inside. Inside the Zone the laws of physics no longer apply, and the intrepid travelers are at the mercy of the Stalker, who guides them through the many invisible traps. Tarkovsky evades simplicity throughout, and Stalker's ambiguity is matched by its unsettling tone and air of mystery - alienation, false hopes and the perils of our desires are the themes explored, but there's no easy reading on offer and viewers are left to interpret the Zone without any kind of map to help them.