8 Most Confusing Movies Nobody Understands

The Wachowskis enjoy messing with people's minds, but with Cloud Atlas, that probably wasn't intentional. A movie that attempts to intertwine six unrelated stories was always going to struggle to find coherency, and it doesn't help that people are forever searching for things that aren't there when it comes to this film.

Film fans make the mistake of attempting to figure out how this sextet of tales connects together and get frustrated when they can't find a common thread. But here's the thing: they aren't supposed to link in purely narrative terms.

Cloud Atlas is a tapestry of stories which explore the human condition. When combined, they do this in a deeper way, making them greater than the sum of their parts, but most viewers are too busy trying to figure out who's been reincarnated as whom and which story is supposed to be fiction in the in-movie world to appreciate what the film is trying to do.

Unless you're armed with this knowledge in advance - and most people weren't unless they'd read the book - the chances of making sense of its six narratives were slim.