10 Movies Directors Didn't Want You To Understand

Shane Carruth's low-fi sci-fi drama Primer is surely one of the most tough-to-decipher genre films of the last 20 years - a challenging, wordy puzzle of a film, and one which has infuriated as many as it has fascinated.

Produced for just $7,000, Primer sees Carruth telling a time travel tale that's as grounded and "realistic" as possible, with the focal characters - one played by himself - largely using obscure scientific jargon to relay ideas, rather than making concessions for the audience's sake.

Between this and the mumbly, low-quality dialogue recordings, Primer is quite the headache to unpack without subtitles, and even then, it's not much easier.

Pile on top of this a head-spinning time travel plot and you've got the recipe for a movie that requires players to put their phones away and pay the utmost attention.

Though there are entire fan sites devoted to unraveling the movie's jumbled timelines, many may simply be left too exhausted to consider diving even deeper into Carruth's headspace.

His follow-up, Upstream Colour, didn't do much more to foster audience understanding either.