Recently I started watching a new series on Netflix called Brand New Cherry Flavor. It’s weird. I’m only a couple of episodes in and I can honestly say I have no real idea what is going on. It could all be a hallucination or there is some bizarre and dark magical stuff going on. Assuming I finish the series (a big if honestly), I’ll certainly post a review. But, as I was watching it, I started thinking about other strange shows and movies I have watched in the past few years. So, I thought I would toss out a short list of 4 movies that came to mind as mind-bending films, all of which you can check out on various streaming platforms right now.
Just to set expectations, I enjoy an offbeat or strange movie, as long as it is actually well-written, acted, etc. Basically, I’m not a fan of just making something bizarre for its own sake. At their best, these types of movies can be entertaining and thought-provoking. At their worst, they can be incredibly frustrating and even unpleasant to watch. Sometimes they can be all of the above. So, on to the list!
Tenet - HBO Max
This is the most recent film on the list, coming out in 2020. It is a science fiction action thriller written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception). The film involves time travel, of a sort. With a secretive organization called Tenet, and their newest recruit (The Protagonist). There are scenes and portions of the movie that effectively take place backward in time. It starts with bullets with ‘inverted’ entropy, meaning they move backward in time. Why are backward firing bullets useful or dangerous? Honestly, I struggle to explain it.
The action scenes are visually impressive, with some big set pieces, plenty of explosions, and lots of backward-in-time fighting. There is also the required amount of time paradox content around the main character and his real role in everything. When we meet him, he is a new recruit, but by the end, we learn he is actually the creator of Tenet.
I have to say it simply didn’t grab me. I got hung up on why would these backward-in-time bullets be remotely useful to anyone and couldn’t find a good answer. The plot is also hard to follow, with all the time paradoxes. I generally really like Nolan’s movies, but this one went too far into the mind-bending to me. I may try to watch it again and see if a second viewing helps it click for me. But, it's worth a watch if you enjoy unique takes on time travel.
Annihilation - Paramount Plus
This science fiction film, based on the book of the same name, came out in 2018. The story is set in a near-future where an alien ‘something’ came to earth on a meteorite and quickly infected the area around the impact (on the coast somewhere in the Southern U.S.). That area, now called The Shimmer, is quarantined and access is highly restricted by the government. We learn it is slowly growing and is clearly a threat to the world if it continues. The government begins sending in military and scientific teams to figure out what is happening in the Shimmer.
But all that is just the setup as a new group of researchers is sent into the Shimmer. They are searching for what happened to the members of a previous mission, only one of whom came back, suddenly appearing after a year’s absence with no recollection of what happened. In fact, he is the only member of any mission to ever return. The new group is beset by a mutant bear, which kills two of them. Eventually, only one member remains to face off against the alien entity who mirrors her every movement and then takes on her identity. The film ends with the likelihood that the alien entity has infected both the last remaining member of the new mission and the only survivor of the old one and we assume they may help it infect the world.
It’s a very odd film, hard to follow at times, and with characters that make strange decisions. I felt ambivalent about it after watching the movie. I felt much the same after reading the book. There were two other books that followed in the series and that may have made things clearer in retrospect, but I haven't read them at this point.
Midsommar - Amazon Prime
We leave the realm of science fiction for a more traditional horror film in Midsommar, directed by Ari Aster (Hereditary). This is a smaller film in many ways, focusing on a young woman (Dani), traumatized by the death of her family who decides to take a trip to Europe with her clearly uninterested boyfriend (Christian) and his grad student friends to visit a remote village and attend its midsummer festival. Christian has been looking for a way to break up with her for months and didn’t even want her to know about the trip, setting up an odd dynamic from the start.
The group arrives in the village and immediately starts tripping on mushrooms. The trip is particularly bad for Dani, who hallucinates seeing her dead family. But, it only gets more bizarre from there when they witness a ceremony in the village where two elder members of the community commit ritual suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff onto a stone platform where the village watches. Dani wisely wants to leave, while Christian wants to write his thesis on this strange community’s belief system. The friends start disappearing as the villagers tell the remaining visitors that the others left for the train station, but pretty obviously that isn’t what is happening.
There are more hallucinations, increasingly strange rituals, discoveries about what really happened to the people who wanted to leave (they never made it out) and eventually culminates in a ritual of human sacrifice, where Dani, who has been chosen as May Queen, must select the final victim. She fittingly chooses Christian, who by now we know is a pretty awful human being. It is a totally messed up movie, in a good way. It's disturbing and quite an experience to watch. Definitely recommended if you like your horror with a focus on weird cults.
Mother - Paramount Plus
I saved the "best" for last. Mother came out in 2017, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. The director is Darren Aronofsky, who has made a career of making very strange psychological films (Black Swan, and numerous others). This is a movie where the viewer spends a good amount of time just trying to figure out what on earth is going on because the film doesn’t tell us. It’s an odd one to even try to explain and have it make any sense.
We meet a young woman (Mother, played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her husband? (Him, played by Javier Bardem) living in a house they are renovating. Him is an acclaimed author, struggling with writer’s block. Over the course of the movie, people begin visiting (Man and Woman), and later their two sons. A fight occurs between the sons and the older one leaves after injuring his brother, who later dies. More people begin arriving, which clearly upsets Mother, while Him seems to accept them all into the home. Soon, Mother is pregnant and prepares for the arrival of their child. Him has recovered from his writer’s block and writes a new poem for the soon-to-be arriving child. More people arrive at the house to celebrate Him and his new poem. They begin to wreak havoc on the house, and everything devolves into chaos. An I do mean chaos. There is a military battle among cult followers of Him, mass executions, and a who lot of WHAT ON EARTH AM I WATCHING scenes, which culminate in Mother’s giving birth and then the child being murdered and eaten by the mob. Mother kills everyone other than herself and Him. Him removes Mother’s heart, revealing a crystal which he places on a pedestal (as he did a the beginning of the film, but we didn’t know what it meant at the time). The house is transformed back into its state from the first scenes of the film and a new Mother wakens to being the cycle all over again.
If you can follow that paragraph, I applaud you! I saw Mother in the theater and when the movie ended, one viewer said out loud “What the **** did I just watch?” I realized I couldn’t begin to answer him if I wanted to. This is maybe the strangest, and unsettling movie I’ve ever seen. It is definitely well-made and the actors are all very talented. But, I still have a hard time explaining what this movie is about. Metaphor? Maybe. But, whatever it is, it’s the strangest movie-going experience of my life. It will make you think, but it is also pretty disturbing. So, just be aware what you're in for.
