Directed by the Coen Brothers, Barton Fink centers on a playwright hired to write scripts for a big studio in Hollywood and who soon becomes disillusioned with the entertainment lifestyle. While Fink deals with the trials and tribulations of screenwriting, he has a picture of a woman hanging in his hotel room as a decoration.
At the end of the film, Fink is sitting on a beach looking at a woman who looks exactly like his picture. It’s the final scene before the screen fades to black, and Joel Coen explained that it is representative of Fink’s psychological state at the time.
Enemy
Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this psychological thriller as a college history professor who switches places with his doppelgänger. While the two men weave a tangled web, the ending of the film provides more questions than answers.
While Gyllenhaal is living his doppelgänger’s life, he suddenly finds his wife transformed into a tarantula. The movie’s director, Denis Villeneuve, described the film as a “puzzle,” stating that it was supposed to provide more questions than answers. If that was the goal, he certainly accomplished it.
Shutter Island
Shutter Island follows U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels as he investigates a disappearance at an eerie mental hospital. The film first suggests that the doctors on the island are the real villains, only to reveal that Teddy himself is a patient who struggles with delusions to block out the memory of killing his wife.
While the movie leaves you scratching your head as to whether or not Teddy is really unstable, the logical conclusion is that he indeed killed his wife, but he chooses to go through with the lobotomy because he can no longer live with the memory.
Memento
Director Christopher Nolan loves a good twist, and Memento is no exception. Instead of following a successive timeline, the movie moves in a backward sequence to show Leonard trying to unravel the mystery of his wife’s killer, Sammy Jankis.
At the end of the film, which is really the beginning of Leonard’s journey, we find out that Leonard is Jankis and his memory loss issues allowed him to create a mystery in order to cope with his own guilt. He keeps solving the mystery, only to forget and start the process of working the case all over again.
American Psycho
While the American Psycho movie is a little confusing, the book offers a bit more clarity. In short, Patrick Bateman is going through a severe mental breakdown, so his entire narration of events is unreliable. That’s why Bateman eventually finds out that he never went on a killing spree, though he’s completely convinced that he did.
While the movie is meant to leave a little gray area that opens up the possibility that he did actually kill someone, the most logical conclusion is that Bateman’s mental breakdown is over and his narration is somewhat reliable again.