10 Great Movies With Plots That Make Your Head Hurt

8. Enemy

Anyone who's seen Denis Villeneuve's film Incendies will be aware of the director's propensity for enigmatic storytelling in which the evidence is precisely drip fed to the audience, slowly but inexorably building up the bigger picture. But while Incendies ultimately makes sense by the conclusion, his recent film Enemy takes the ambiguity through to the final shot. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a listless historian by the name of Adam Bell, Enemy explores the dynamic between him and his doppelganger Anthony Claire, an actor Adam spots while watching a video on the recommendation of a colleague. Movies about doubles have been done before (the recent film The Double takes the subject and approaches it from a completely different angle) but Villeneuve's tact is one in which surrealism and confusion abound, with hidden meanings lying beneath the surface narrative of sexual tension and fidelity. Perhaps it's the amber filter which grades each scene in a hazy light, or maybe it's the unsettling dream-like sequences featuring gigantic spiders lurking over the city - either way, Enemy offers up a cinematic puzzle which makes his previous film Prisoners look like a walk in the park.