Seven films that get inside your head, from Matrix to Being John Malkovich
Cinema has a long history of mind-bending narratives. Steven Zeitchik and Oliver Gettell highlight seven of the most twisted
Whether you're talking about a film or a relationship, it's never easy getting inside someone's head. Sure, directors have tried many tactics to achieve the former (hello, cheesy voice-over). But actually making private thoughts and musings coherent on a screen is never a simple task. It's even doubly difficult if a movie looks to create tension and meaningful narrative there.
Yet over the years screenwriters have been drawn again and again to stories set in the mind, in genres that include science fiction ( Inception, The Matrix) and action-adventure ( Fantastic Voyage). They're trying again, this time in the realm of the animated family dramedy (the new Pixar release, Inside Out).
All of these entertainments offer the promise of action unfolding inside an unknowable mystery, while also presenting some unique challenges. How does one render visual what is so abstract? And how does a story move from action that is quite literally interior to the more navigable outside world?
We've collected seven notable mental movies and listed them in ascending order of quality - it's fun to mess with heads. Read and quibble, or just let the mind wander.
Movies should be about getting outside our own heads, but that doesn’t always mean we want to get inside someone else’s
Director Richard Fleischer's cold war thriller gets inside the head of one of its characters - quite literally - by way of a microscopic submarine. The film concerns a Czech scientist who has defected to the US but fallen into a coma after an assassination attempt. To save him, and the knowledge only he has, a crack medical team is zapped with a shrink ray and injected into his bloodstream so they can surgically remove a clot in his brain.