10 Great Movies With Plots That Make Your Head Hurt

6. Jacob's Ladder

Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void is the most recent film in which the Tibetan Book of the Dead was used as a source of inspiration for a delirious evocation of the soul in transit from the earthly realm to whatever follows (in this case rebirth and reincarnation), but Bruce Joel Rubin got their first when he wrote the script for Jacob's Ladder, a story considered "too metaphysical" by most of the studios he approached to make it. Thankfully director Adrian Lyne took up the challenge and produced a film which does justice to Rubin's vision of a man (Tim Robbins) seemingly trapped in an inescapable nightmare of hallucinatory visions and death. As with so many movies with plots which make your head hurt, Jacob's Ladder flits between reality and fantasy, history and the present in such a manner as to leave you completely disoriented, and by the time the protagonist finds himself in a blood-soaked run-down hospital, beasts lurking in the shadows, the feeling of dislocation is embedded in your brain. For a film which explores the notion of near death experiences and the passage of consciousness on the brink of extinction, it has influenced a number of decidedly inferior movies, most notably the Silent Hill franchise.