10 Great Movies You Didn't Understand The First Time
9. Jacob's Ladder
If the first time through this movie your general reaction was. ah, what the hell is happening? Rest assured that you were not alone. In hindsight, the twist ending helps made sense of what was going on, but for that first go-around, there's no such clarity to be found.
Jacob Singer is a New York City postal working and a Vietnam veteran. Things in his life, however, are not as they seem, as his paranoia begins manifesting itself in visions of demons, his beliefs and fears contributing to a dream state he cannot escape from. We're engrossed, trying to figure out if he's deranged or if the government really is after him.
But even when we discover that he never made it back from Vietnam, its still pretty hard to digest everything. That hes been hallucinating everything doesn't exactly relieve that puzzling sensation throughout the entirety of the film.