10 Movies You Have To Watch AGAIN To Fully Understand

Before 2020's I'm Thinking Of Ending Things had the emperor scrambling for his clothes, Charlie Kaufman brought us the sublime monolith of meta cinema that is Synecdoche, New York.

Despondent theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) finds himself alone and out of touch with his own life in Schenectady. Thus, like any God-fearing regular Joe, he opts to move to the Big Apple and put on a piece of life-meets-reality theatre in a gigantic Manhattan warehouse.

The ever-expanding cast act out their own lives and wackiness ensues, as actors play the cast and crew of Caden's play, including himself, and other actors play those actors, acting out their recruitment and their arguments and every other aspect of the real world, in a set that is continuously expanding while it regresses from reality in a series of diminishing dramatic echoes.

That it is so difficult to sum up, and more challenging to do justice to in words, is a testament to the complexity of Synecdoche, New York - and, naturally, the need to explore it several times.

To fully understand this work, it may be necessary to delve into postmodern theory, semiotics, 20th Century psychology and the relationship of metafiction to reality. Nonetheless, watching the film without this academic grounding is rewarding, if challenging, and will eventually provide a clear-eyed view of the plot, characters, metaphors and themes that Kaufman worked so hard to embed in this baffling but ultimately genius piece of cinema.