9 Confusing Films Where Absolutely Nobody Knew What Was Going On

4. Southland Tales

Much like our omission of Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko has intentionally been left off this list because it's been dissected and picked apart so much that a clear meaning can be taken away from it these days (even if, on a first viewing, it is absolutely mind-melting). Kelly's follow-up feature, the highly anticipated Southland Tales, was infamous for its hugely divisive reception (especially the reviled near-3-hour cut premiered at Cannes), in large part because it didn't seem to make a lick of sense. The movie begins on July 4, 2005 with the Texan cities of Abilene and El Paso being nuked. Months later, the draft is reinstated, war breaks out against numerous Middle Eastern states, oil supplies begin to run out, Republicans win the next election, and the US becomes something of a police state. By 2008, another election looms, while an extremist liberal Neo-Marxist group grows, and Los Angeles is seen as the major voting battleground, in which most of the movie's events take place. The movie's various characters include actor Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), his lover Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a former porn star who now has her own reality TV show, Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), a shady scientist who uses so-called quantum entanglement to create "fluid karma" in order to battle the energy crisis, and Ronald and Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), two twins enduring an identity crisis of sorts. So, what happens? The Neo-Marxists try to frame Boxer for murder in order to ruin the Republican party, because Boxer's father-in-law is the Republican candidate. Throw in a sex tape, a murder tape, a very weird movie screenplay, glowing hands, injections of fluid karma, a Kevin Smith cameo as an old beardy guy, severed hands, Justin Timberlake singing The Killers' All The Things You€™ve Done, giant zeppelins and you've got the recipe for a crazy movie that's pretty damn difficult to follow. Baron's karma experiments then cause the world's rotation to slow, causing a rip in the space-time continuum, resulting in two Boxers, while it's revealed that Ronald and Roland are in fact duplicates rather than twins. The two touch and cause a catastrophic cosmic event, as the ice cream truck they're in floats up to the sky. The giant zeppelin carrying Krysta and Boxer then gets blown up as the ice cream truck continues to levitate. Theories: It's clear that the movie is a political and social satire first and foremost, what with its evident digs at the Republican party and mass media, but how can we actually make much sense of its absurd narrative? Some critics have suggested that the movie is Kelly's ultimate stand against the very idea of narrativity, and that he intended his movie to be as ridiculously over-the-top and even nonsensical as possible. Frustratingly, the movie begins with Chapter IV, as the first three chapters take place in the graphic novel, Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga, which much like Donnie Darko's The Philosophy of Time Travel, requires audiences to do some homework before being able to properly approach the film. One theory is that the movie is simply an abstract interpretation of the Book of Revelation, a prophecy of the end of the world. Then there are those who believe the movie adheres to the same universal logic as in Donnie Darko, but that's a whole other can of worms...