10 Most Confusing Movie Endings People Don't Understand

5. No Country For Old Men

The Coen brothers' Best Picture-winning masterpiece ended in an elliptical fashion that just about nobody expected.

After Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) eludes capture, the final scene of the film sees Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) share two dreams he had with his wife.

In the first, he loses some money given to him by his father, and in the second, he's riding past a snowy mountain with his father, who rides ahead to start a fire and wait for his son. And with that, we cut to black.

This actually isn't too tough to parse if you've been paying attention to the movie and have seen it before, though it is a lot to take in on a first viewing.

The first dream quite clearly relates to the movie's money plot and Bell's own failure to recover the illicit cash, but the second is far more haunting and significant.

The second dream clearly relates to Bell's own advancing age and a death that probably isn't that far off. His father, who is presumably dead already, is "lighting the fire" in what's surely a reference to the afterlife.

There's not much shame in being a little bewildered by the wordy ending, but it's basically just a summation of the movie's title - Bell is an old man incapable of being effective against the violent younger men of the world like Chigurh.