A Twitter thread started by IMDb this week on the most confusing movie threw up some common answers. Many responses agree that Christopher Nolan's time and mind-bending films are hard to follow; three in particular were named - Inception, Memento and Tenet. David Lynch appears to be a close second to Christopher Nolan with Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead invoked more than once. People were also perplexed by Jake Gyllenhaal's breakout film Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, Nicholas Cage's Adaptation, and Stanley Kubrick's film of A Clockwork Orange.
Inception and Memento were bad enough, Tenet was worse:
Psychological thriller Mulholland Drive is considered David Lynch's finest work but is clearly so confusing that the Internet abounds with several explainers attempting to demystify the events of the film. It was cited several times in the IMDb thread as was Mr Lynch's horror film Eraserhead.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and David Lynch's Blue Velvet also showed up on the thread:
Jake Gyllenhaal left viewers confused in two films - Donnie Darko, which features a monstrous rabbit predicting Doomsday, and Ebeny, in which Jake plays a double role.
Some were stumped by quite a few films and their lists included several of the aforementioned movies:
However, there was a clear winner for most confusing film watched - this one, which was cited in many, many responses:
Speaking for ourselves, Inception was great and Jake Gyllenhaal is a perennial favourite. What we would like someone to explain to us is the decades of super-cringe movies mass-produced by Bollywood through most of the Eighties, Nineties and much of the 2000s. Now those are explainers we'd sign up to read.