10 Movies Directors Didn't Want You To Understand
8. Inherent Vice
If audiences struggled to make complete sense of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, his follow-up Inherent Vice proved even more averse to conventional narrativity.
Adapted from Thomas Pynchon's impenetrable 2009 detective novel, the movie is similarly intentionally non-committal to plot, full of wilfully convoluted narrative threads which mostly end up going nowhere.
Ultimately, it's best viewed as a mood piece in which the audience follows around stoner hippie P.I. Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) for two-and-a-half hours.
Trying to recount its A-to-Z plot is a thankless task, and one which both Pynchon and Anderson would likely discourage.
Unsurprisingly, the film sparked mass walkouts upon release, given that the marketing sold the film as a more typical detective yarn than the acid-tinged ellipsis that it actually was.
When prodded about the film being labelled "incoherent" by the press, Anderson did add that he felt it made perfect sense, but even then, it's clear he made a film to be bathed in rather than one to be merely consumed.