10 Movie Openings You're Not Supposed To Understand

If you came away from the elliptical opening of the Coen brothers' Oscar-nominated drama A Serious Man thinking, "What the f**k did that even mean?", that was precisely the point.

The film's mesmerising eight-minute opening scene is set in 19th-century Eastern European, where a man invites another man who helped him over for dinner, only for his wife to claim that the man died three years prior. As such, the "man" he encountered must in fact be a dybbuk - an evil spirit.

And so, the scene ends with the wife impaling the man with an ice pick, after which he disappears into the snowy night, and the couple argue over whether they're now ruined or saved.

Even for seasoned Coen fans, this was a tough one to parse, especially on an initial viewing.

In retrospect it certainly serves as a primer for the film's overall themes - faith in God, the pursuit of life's meaning, existential uncertainty - yet the Coens have rejected any direct link between this prologue and the main 1960s story involving Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg).

Given that the film itself revolves around a protagonist desperate to figure out a seemingly senseless series of tragic events, it's apt that A Serious Man's opening scene cannot be directly, intimately tethered to what follows.