10 Most Disturbing Details Implied In Movies
4. Looper - The Amputation Sequence
A classic trope of time-travel epics is that if your past self is altered in any way, your future self will feel the repercussions. Examples of this have been shown in many ways previously, but audiences have never been stunned to a sickening silence until Rian Johnson came along with his 2012 hit Looper.
The sequence in question shows Seth (Paul Dano) fail to close his loop and kill his future self, and Old Seth goes on the run while past/present Seth is abducted by his employers. What follows is a disturbing explanation as to how far gangsters will go to lure the Old Seth back.
It starts off with an address carved into Young Seth's arm, which shows up as a scar on Old Seth. As time runs out for Old Seth to arrive at said address, the gangsters begin to surgically amputate parts of Young Seth's body. Audiences watch as an old man literally falls apart piece by piece; starting with fingers, then a nose, feet and hands, until he is eventually a husk.
The last we see of Young Seth, his remains are hooked up to hospital machines and we have to assume he is kept alive for the sake of his older self. The most unnerving thing about this scene is how precise it is, and audiences have no doubt that this is the norm for the life of a looper. Heck, there could be a hundred torsos like Seth on life-support, and we only got a glimpse of one.