- HUMOR
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A niche film subgenre emblazoned with terror, twists, and crippling wonder, “mindfuck movies” embody all manifestations of psychological horror, thriller, and drama, their plotlines punctured with multiple, sudden U-turns.
Not much “entertainment” endeavours to perplex and dissolve its audience into delusion and despair, but mindfuck movies have a knack for unravelling the paranoid psyche of its fictional characters, before bleeding all conjured, fictional fear into their real-world audience. Mindfuck movies are crafted to shred all audience expectations, splitting apart all sense of reality and reason, set with a disruptive flair for mind-wrecking uncertainty.
Each movie handpicked for our list will doubtlessly wrack your brain for days; a futile attempt to make sense of unnatural events within all-too-realistic scenarios, and beckoning for a re-watch to grasp every foreshadowing detail you might have missed.
Needless to say, our collection of mindfuck movies is NOT for the faint of heart, and NONE of these movies are suitable for children.
15+ Mindfuck Movies: Exploring the Best Mind-Bending Movies
Triangle (2009)
The ocean’s aura is swallowing and unfathomable; an expanse of unnavigable confusion and a human fear masterfully exploited through the pure disorientation of Triangle. This semi-obscure Australian/British psychological thriller follows the single mother of a young autistic boy escaping seawards on what should be a single-day boatride. After capsizing in a freak storm, the luxury cruiseliner which saves them reeks not of safety, but of silence, paranoia and a spiderweb of fractured timelines.
Stalked through the labyrinthine vessel by a masked shooter, slaughter after slaughter summons the bleak abysses of true psychological torture, its characters’ mental disarray carved ever-deeper by doppelgängers, and peculiar repetitions of their past.
Perfect Sense (2011)
Perfect Sense hits different post-COVID. A film based on biological warfare and a virus which flatlines our senses (smell, taste, etc.) one by one, Perfect Sense follows a romance which begins at the end of humanity; an unlikely, nihilistic yet doomed-to-be connection between an epidemiologist and a chef.
This film is special for spreading its focus across humanity as a whole, sliced with global clips of culture as it is, as it descends and as it reforms in the wake of apparent societal collapse. How would a global population cope with sudden, worldwide deafness? How far can human comfort persist under the threat of impending catastrophe?
Perfect Sense presents value in our most basic human experiences, questioning how far into sensory oblivion a species can be pushed, without losing all sense of itself. This one will linger with you for a while, especially watching after our own, milder epidemic.
The Human Zoo (2020)
An intensely bleak movie keeping psychological torture at its core, The Human Zoo is artistically shot with the gritty aura of the illegal snuff films its plot is encompassed by. Rather than capitalise upon the racist history of real-world human zoos, John E Seymore’s creation instead follows a horde of competitors who sign up to be locked in solitary confinement with hopes of winning a life-changing cash prize.
What at first appears to be semi-professional B-movie acting soon catalyses the horrific realism of this film’s characters, their gradual degradation captured on CCTV (a unique, flick-through filming style in which the majority of The Human Zoo is shot) and live-streamed across the internet for sadistic, global entertainment.
The Butterfly Effect (2004)
The Butterfly Effect epitomises the horrors of childhood trauma. Following a college student, Evan, who learns how to unlock repressed memories and trigger flashbacks which alter the outcome of his life, The Butterfly Effect glitches between parallel timelines, Evan’s life story rewriting itself over to find its perfect conclusion; the only reality where his “girlfriend” (depending on the timeline) is happy.
This film’s mindfuckery spawns from the domino effect of inconsequential events which form great swathes of our lifestyles and personalities, specifically how reversing one’s trauma with positive intent could end in a worse reality than presently endured.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
A black-and-white sci-fi classic, The Incredible Shrinking Man takes a conceptual look at humanity as a persevering species, unravelling the worth of a man who becomes smaller than a house spider.
The premise is simple: after encountering a strange sea mist, a husband starts shrinking increasingly. When he goes missing inside his own home, he becomes a needle in a haystack.
Progressing from scenes of quotidan life to the most far-removed of human challenges, The Incredible Shrinking Man questions what it means to be both a “man” and “human” whilst exploring scientific consciousness: the unique benefits of logic, engineering and tactical ability to someone reduced to such a puny size that they can stand inside a match box.
This movie is perplexing in what it doesn’t show after the film has ended, just as much as what it does show, leaving you haunted with the possibilities of what happened next.
Eat (2014)
Eat is pure, psychological gore, twisted with the foul aura of anxiety in a cut-throat entertainment industry. Following a struggling actress crippling beneath her worsening self-destructive habits, Eat is entangled with delusional themes of female body dysmorphia, its story deciphering what beauty is and how deeply it lies beneath one’s edible skin, whilst exploring the impossibility of finding self-worth amongst younger industry competitors.
While most movies on our list are disturbing for their psychological plots, Eat will ruin your day for its nauseating depictions of anxiety-driven self-mutilation, unpicking the maddening extents one can be pushed after slipping out of control.
The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)
This mid-50s sci-fi / horror classic exhorts a dense atmosphere of paranoia and deep-rooted distrust, dissecting the instinct that a loved one’s life-long personality has been ruptured in ways which can’t be proven to those who never knew them.
Crafted with perplexing themes of global medical anomalies, extraterrestrial invasion, and emotionless human clones, Invasion of The Body Snatchers is a mindfuck film for its unorthodox scientific position on the importance of the soul within the human shell, matched with the fear of species-wide eradication whilst humans still, theoretically, walk the earth.
Saw (2004)
Almost every Saw film will lacerate your brain with after-thought, but the original 2004 movie encapsulates the lethal dread of uncertainty, inhabiting the liminal space of dis-ease before the franchise’s now-infamous killer is revealed. A central story of two strangers held captive in a derelict bathroom is cut apart by intrusive flashbacks, piecing together what brought them to the room, and why.
With a focus on atoning for moral sins through self-sacrifice, the original Saw remains a hallmark movie of mindfuckery, studded with a time-bound decision of killing a stranger or saving one’s family, surgery under horrifically unhygienic circumstances, and life-saving puzzle solving whilst in psychological ruin.
The Loved Ones (2009)
The Loved Ones is mind-wrecking not for its storyline, but for the disturbing relationships shared between its core characters. A film about a highschooler who, with the help of her father, kidnaps and tortures the prom date who kindly rejected her, The Loved Ones drips with acrid suspense and unsettling underscorings of incest, lobotomy and undisguised family abuse.
This Australian horror balances sickly sweet, true love with cavernous resentment, unmasking parents who enable the breaking of a daughter’s sanity out of unconditional love, whilst using grotesquely artistic gore to carve deeper into the audience’s discomfort.
Requiem For A Dream (2000)
Requiem For A Dream embodies the grimy world of drug-fuelled escapism, the brutal disorientation of its screenplay progressively mirroring its characters’ descent beneath the delusional haze of drug addiction, crystallised with bleak flavours of anorexia, prostitution and gory bodily infections.
Its parallel narratives traversing the many manifestations of addictive behaviour, Requiem For A Dream explores the effects of being gradually coerced into a drug-fuelled society and, uniquely, how commercial, legal prescriptions can be as life-gutting as class A drugs to an unsuspecting user.
Palindromes (2004)
A mind-bending take on abusive families, age-gap romances and fleeting connections, Palindromes follows the life of Aviva, a 13 year old runaway, who decides at a young age that her life’s ambition is to mother a large family. Forced to abort her first child by her parents, and told by doctors she will never conceive again, Aviva naively navigates a world of paedophiles in attempt to fall pregnant again.
Palindromes is exceptionally disorienting for the vast cast of actresses switching place to portray the main character. Aviva takes the form of many distinct ages and races, despite the character remaining a young teenager; its older actresses employed to warp the audience’s perception, visually dulled from the fact Aviva is underage through all which transpires.
Dogtooth (2009)
Treading the murky waters of social isolation and experimental child abuse, Dogtooth is a Greek drama based in unnerving, Orwellian psychology.
A couple have raised their children to adulthood in complete disconnection from society. Healthy and groomed, with the impression of absolute normalcy, the children are hugely misled in their education and grasp of the world, guarded against all contact with the unseen society outside their white-washed confine.
A dysfunctional film from start to finish, Dogtooth presents a mind-warping take on indoctrination, alienation and developmental stagnation, bringing to light the mind control of nurture, the manipulation of innocence, and how truth will always seep into even the most watertight illusions.
Taxidermia (2006)
Taxidermia enters us into some bleakly abnormal territory. Split between three consecutive generations of a disturbed family, this film traces disgraced masculine instincts through wartime sex addiction, championship eating contest-caused obesity, and the hobbyist’s art of preserving corpses for decoration.
Each segment of Taxidermia is infested with near-unwatchable disgust, each interlinked story beckoning unfathomable rationale from the audience to grasp the horrors of willing self-degradation presented in its story. This intentionally grotesque movie taps vulgarity in all its forms, its nauseating graphics and obtuse plot lines endeavouring to break all limits of what one’s mind can consider “entertainment.”
Red Room (JAP) (1999)
One of the most thematically appalling yet gripping mindfuck movies on our list, the original, 1999 Japanese horror, Red Room, conjures a truly disturbing ambience with its budget appeal.
A game of dares between four contestants is televised as a reality show, the winning prize of ¥10,000,000 pushing them inescapably towards macabre, sadistic and torture-fuelled challenges in attempt to eliminate their competitors.
The film flushed with a disorienting, red haze separating its contestants from the laws of the daylight, Red Room unravels the hideous extents one might put an abuser through given the chance for all-is-legal revenge.
A Serbian Film (2010)
Doubtlessly amongst the most disturbing pieces of cinema ever released to a public audience, A Serbian Film follows a life-wrecking story of an ex-porn star coerced into making a final, career-topping film, blinded from insight into what he is filming, or who for, until his chance to back down is long-gone.
Riddled with obscene sexual violence towards women, corpses and children, this nefarious film tackles the upkeep of one’s morality whilst drugged into a staggering, hypersexualised state, blurring the lines of consent when contracted to perform, forcing its audience to draw their own line between taboo sex acts and true sexual torture.
More Mindfuck Movies Which Will Haunt You Forever
The Belko Experiment (2016)
A company office block goes into lockdown, and its 100+ workers are forced to kill each other Battle Royale-style until one single winner emerges.
The Killing Room (2009)
Based on the CIA’s declassified mind control experiments, this film follows the mental disintegration of four strangers who are locked together in a single room, after signing up to partake in a psychological study.
Circle (2015)
Fifty strangers are forced to play a morale-shattering game in which one contestant dies every few minutes, voted for by the other non-consenting players.
The Stamford Prison Experiment (2015)
Closely based on the genuine observations of Stamford University’s 1971 psychological research experiment, this film sees eighteen students divided into roles of prison guards and prisoners, uncovering the psychopathy which spawns after being handed full control of another human being.
Buried (2010)
An immensely claustrophobic film about a man buried alive with a phone on failing battery, blackmailed by his buriers and desperate for answers.
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Held hostage in an underground bunker, a woman is told by her two male captors that the world outside is uninhabitable. Does she have any way of proving their honesty?
