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There aren’t very many movies like Vivarium, an unsettling and mind-bending horror film; those that do have similar characteristics share the same uncanny, destabilizing, and creeping sensations of that 2019 Lorcan Finnegan movie. One of the more underrated sci-fi movies of 2020, Vivarium stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as Gemma and Tom, a young couple who have recently moved to a new development known as “Yonder”, where every house looks the same and every road takes them right back to where they started.
What begins as a strange, lonely existence becomes even more unhinged when a child in a box is dropped on their doorstep. The child grows rapidly, and not exactly like a human, and Gemma and Tom begin to wonder if they will ever escape this unending horror. Even after Vivarium ends, it’s not quite clear what it all meant, and that empty feeling of psychological terror will rattle around in your brain as you try to grasp the meaning of the unknown. There are a handful of similar movies like Vivarium for those who haven’t had enough of mind-bending horror.
8
Old (2021)
M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan has had few true winners in his filmography since his heyday in the early 2000s, yet his original ideas, and the adaptations he’s attracted to are so unique and unexpected, that you just have to watch them, even if you know the end of the film may not be as satisfying as you hope. Old is an adaptation of the Swiss graphic novel, The Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and is set on a mysterious beach, attended by families and couples who have only just met.
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Once on the beach, they slowly discover that not only are they incapable of escaping, time appears to work differently here. It’s sped up and everyone feels the effects, which range from suddenly going through puberty, to instant healing of injuries, to rapid onset hypocalcemia. There’s a good amount of body horror in Old, but the fear of trying to decide what to do with your life when the clock is running, is the real relatable terror.
7
The Endless (2017)
Justin Benson And Aaron Moorhead
- Release Date
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April 6, 2018
- Runtime
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111 Minutes
- Director
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Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
- Writers
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Justin Benson
A mind-bending horror with an actually somewhat hopeful ending, a rarity in the genre, The Endless follows brothers Justin (Justin Benson) and Aaron Smith (Aaron Moorhead). The Smith brothers receive a videotape from Camp Arcadia, a camp they belonged to as children that they have since forgotten about, and can’t remember the details of. Frustrated with their menial lives, the pair decides to return to Camp Arcadia and see what has happened to it since.
What they find is that no one at the camp has aged since they left, and they experience several inexplicable events that are intriguing and frightening. The pair come to realize there’s an entity controlling the lives of those at Camp Arcadia and must make a decision to give up their determination or return to a difficult existence that’s at least wholly their own.
6
Triangle (2009)
Christopher Smith
In Triangle, a British psychological horror, Melissa George stars as Jess, who, along with her friends, goes for a boat ride. While at sea, they wind up in a storm that blows them into a seemingly abandoned ocean liner. Despite thinking they’re the only ones on board, the group begins to suspect that they are being stalked. Jess soon realizes that she and her friends are trapped in a time loop, and if she wishes to save her son, she’ll need to do some ghastly things.
It takes a while for all the bits and pieces of Triangle to come together, but once they do, the puzzle lays out into a relatively clear story, at least compared to other mind-bending horror movies. Part-slasher, part-survival horror, and part-time travel science fiction film, Triangle is great for anyone who likes to search every scene for clues and hints.
5
Men (2022)
Alex Garland
Alex Garland’s third feature film, after Ex Machina and Annihilation, Men, still has the same questions of identity and grief that those first two films contend with. However, Men is even more surreal than those two films, with an even more ambiguous ending. Men stars Jessie Buckley as Harper Marlowe, a woman who decides to go on holiday to a secluded village after witnessing a terrible event involving an emotionally manipulative husband.
Rory Kinnear plays every man Harper runs into once she is on vacation.
There, she encounters a series of different male neighbors, who all strangely have the same face (Rory Kinnear). These men run the gamut from rude to cruel to dangerous, as they slowly wind themselves close to Harper. It’s never clearly explained who these men are or if they do all actually share the same face, but the terror Harper feels is oppressive. The climactic body horror at the end will stick with you for a while.
4
Coherence (2013)
James Ward Byrkit
- Release Date
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August 6, 2013
- Runtime
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89 Minutes
- Director
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James Ward Byrkit
- Writers
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James Ward Byrkit, Alex Manugian
Coherence is about as classic a mind-bending horror as you can find with multiple twists and inexplicable plot points that aren’t uncovered until the final moments of the film. In the film, a group of eight friends attend a dinner party when a comet passes overhead. The comet causes a power outage, and when the lights come back on, the friends realize that there’s something weird going on. It doesn’t take long until they figure out their reality has been split into multiple parallel universes.
Coherence succeeds thanks to how it presents a grounded version of events that are almost impossible to comprehend.
Trippy and mysterious, the reasons behind the reality split are never fully explained, but they don’t need to be. Coherence succeeds thanks to how it presents a grounded version of events that are almost impossible to comprehend. Everyone is out for themselves, and the idea of a better universe intrigues them rather than terrifies them.
3
Existenz (1999)
David Cronenberg
A lesser-known David Cronenberg movie is still one of the best mind-bending horror movies you can watch. Existenz is a 1999 science fiction horror set in the year 2030. In this future, biotechnological devices have replaced electronic ones, and virtual reality games have essentially replaced real life. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, a famed game designer who is targeted by assassins from a rival game company and a resistance movement who abhor the erasure of real life.
Existenz goes far down the rabbit hole as Allegra and her guardian, Ted Pikul (Jude Law), go deeper into virtual reality, to worlds within worlds, and by the time they come out, they and the audience are unsure of what’s real and what’s not. The film does have some of the body horror of Cronenberg, but it’s the psychological questions about reality and free will that contain the real horror.
2
Mother! (2017)
Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky’s seventh feature film is perhaps his most surreal, no small feat considering the rest of his filmography. Mother! opens in media res, with Him (Javier Bardem) planting a crystal in the ruins of a burned-down house. The building morphs into a beautiful, pastoral home, and mother (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up inside, not nearly as confused as you might imagine. That’s about when things start getting crazy. An adaptation of the Bible, an allegory of humanity’s treatment of the Earth, both, or something else, Mother! is happy to leave much unexplained.
The symbolism is often so on the nose that it’s impossible to miss an allusion, but it also makes for a hauntingly direct depiction of the horrific way humans have treated one another and the planet they live on over the millennia. Mother! can be watched again and again, drawing something new out each time, but no matter how many times you view it, you’ll never get comfortable with the sounds of people wailing and dying.
1
The Stepford Wives (1975)
Bryan Forbes
- Release Date
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February 12, 1975
- Runtime
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115 Minutes
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Katharine Ross
Joanna Eberhart
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Paula Prentiss
Bobbie Markowe
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Peter Masterson
Carol Van Sant
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Nanette Newman
Patricia Cornell
The Stepford Wives (1975) is the first adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1972 novel of the same name. The book is more satirical in bent, while the film deals more with the mind-bending horror side. The Stepford Wives stars Katharine Ross as Joanna Eberhart, a young mother and aspiring photographer who moves with her family to the town of Stepford, Connecticut. There, Joanna finds all the other wives in the neighborhood to be unusually subservient to their husbands, to the point of having no individuality.
The title “The Stepford Wives” has become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to spoil the film, but that stereotype does not explain the full breadth and horror of the film. There are more twists and turns than you might expect from the horror classic, and the questions it raises about faculty, obedience, and conformity are disturbing but frighteningly resonant, and reminiscent of the themes of Vivarium.
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