Mystery is probably one of the most popular genres of film, and also one of the oldest - the first true 'mystery' movie can be dated all the way back to 1903 with "The Great Train Robbery." Being a fairly established genre, a mystery movie follows a general set of rules, but the most imperative one of all is that something which is at first hidden or unknown must be revealed. The timing of this revelation is a matter of dramatic choice; typically it serves as the climax of the movie, the point where suspense breaks and the audience can breathe a sigh of relief. It's the thrill of discovery that makes these movies so much fun - we all want to think we're smarter than everyone else, and whether we do it consciously or not, we all like to search for covered truths, especially in film. So what do we do with the movies that don't play by the rules? Leaving a mystery unsolved or incomplete is probably considered one of the greatest narrative faux pas ever, and the idea of neglecting closure on a mystery is so out of touch with popular mindset that Hollywood has all but ruled out the idea. Still, that mindset didn't stop some renegade directors from crafting these sinister movies that boggle the mind and leave it boggling long after the credits roll. This isn't some cheap trick - in almost every instance, for what we don't learn in the story, we learn something deeper on a fundamental human level - a truth about ourselves and the limits of what can even be known as truth. Woah man. So, here we go - my 10 favorite unsolved movie mysteries:
10.
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962) - Bunuel was well into middle age when he made
, and by that point he had left both Spain and America because of his controversial work. Having then lived in Mexico for 18 years, this film was is first that he had complete artistic control of during that entire period and he really relishes in that freedom. The basic outline of the story is that a group of wealthy friends gather for a dinner party in a decadent house and break etiquette by overstaying their welcome. However, when they finally find that they want to leave, they find themselves unable to. There is no physical barrier preventing them from crossing, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot will themselves to leave. In this scenario, Bunuel presents a situation with no rational explanation but with significant implications - as the days go by, the civility that coats these people's standard of living wanes and the characters find themselves venturing into witchcraft and brutality in their isolation. The story is a clear-cut satire of the upper class: when stripped of the privileges that keep them superior, they resort to the most savage of beasts. Suddenly, as if nothing had happened, the curse is broken and the guests finally are able to leave with no explanation. No explanation is needed, though, as the sinister truth about the characters has already been revealed. As his final sleight, Bunuel closes his film within a cathedral, where a mass is being dismissed and the churchgoers find themselves unable to leave. As always, none are spared from Bunuel's vision.
9.
L'Avventura (Michael Antonioni, 1960) - The 1960s opened up the decade with some groundbreaking films (
Psycho, Peeping Tom, Breathless, La Dolce Vita), and
L'Avventura is one of those that literally shook the grounds of cinema. The movie, set in Italy, begins with two friends, Anna and Claudia, going on a yacht trip to a volcanic island, with Anna's love Sandro coming along. Tension between Anna and Sandro are apparent right off the bat and references are drawn to a previous split they had. When they reach the island, the three of them take a nap together and upon waking up, Claudia and Sandro find that Anna is missing. Soon, a massive search is assembled, but she is nowhere to be found. Could she have committed suicide? Could she have been murdered by her boyfriend? Could she have just disappeared? And, as if her character had never existed, the movie moves on - a love affair forms between Claudia and Sandro. There is no time for atonement or moral development; the characters simply act for themselves. Anna is never mentioned again. There is no weight behind the actions in the film - Sandro soon betrays Claudia for a call-girl, and Claudia finds the two together. In the end scene, Sandro and Claudia are together, both staring into nothingness, each a brittle twig undergoing too much force. Thus is life.
8.
Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) - David Lynch has been called many things: an absurdist, the modern American surrealist, an unmethodical fraud, a pretentious asshole.
Lost Highway is an amalgamation of all those things - cryptic at best, absolute nonsense at worst and naturally it has slowly built itself up as a cult classic. Still, it's a hell of a watch that will leave you either wishing you could have your two hours of watching it back or two more hours to fully digest it. The plot (if you can call it that) begins with a saxophonist named Fred who suspects his wife, Renee, of cheating. The movie is drenched in abstract and surreal loops and turns, including an ominous message that says "Dick Laurent is dead" and an androgynous Mystery Man who stalks Fred, but all that aside, Fred soon finds himself watching a videotape of him killing his wife and soon after is arrested for murder. In jail, he begins having headaches and hallucinations, and one day when the guards come to check on him, they don't find Fred but rather a teenage mechanic named Pete. The police have no choice but to let him go. Pete begins to fall for a girl named Alice who has suspicious similarities to Renee, and Pete soon falls into lustful desires. However, later in the film, Pete undergoes a retrometamorphosis back into Fred. A full analysis would probably fill up this entire blog post, but I'll just leave it at that and say that there is something to be gained from the confusion.
7.
Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) - This is a movie that has polarized critics for years, some claiming it to be one of the
greatest philosophical movies ever made, while others
pinpointing it as the worst. I can't say I'm a fan of the film, but if anything can be said about the movie, it's that Resnais is completely successful at what he set out to do: as a director, he completely blurs the lines between truth and fiction, reality and dream. Taking place at a château, the film revolves around one man trying to convince a woman that they met the previous year at Marienbad, while another man (we interpret to be the woman's husband) tries to resist his temptations. In fact, as a viewer, we are given the option of whether to submit to the film's nonsensical allure or to resist, saying to ourselves that it makes no sense. And it really doesn't - we see parallel conversations throughout the film, a soft-spoken narrator speaks the same phrases over and over again, the setting feels like it is constantly shifting. Time itself could be stacking on top of itself. Suffice to say, the wandering never stops and we never find out whether woman A ever met man X last year. The film is madness - hypnotic, dreamy madness.
6.
Reversal of Fortune (Barbet Schroeder, 1990) - I find this movie fascinating simply because every American court room drama I have ever seen is focused on one thing and one thing only: the truth.
Reversal of Fortune throws out any notion of what truth even is, and instead uses this ambiguity to turn itself on the justice system: when there is no certainty of truth, how is a system supposed to judge? In the movie, Claus von Bülow is accused of putting his wife in an irreversible coma by giving her an insulin overdose, but he makes an appeal and hires Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz for his case. Dershowitz puts together a team of pragmatic law school students to lead the appeal and review evidence. An interesting narrative twist in the movie is that the whole thing is narrated from the comatose Sunny von Bülow who gives flashbacks of the married couple to shed some light on what actually happened. The more we see, the more we realize that Sunny was actually leading her own path to self-destruction through drug use and idleness, but Claus was just as neglectful of her as she was of herself - we never discover whether it was Sunny or Claus who dealt the final blow. We also discover that the original murder case that convicted Claus was full of holes and did not hold up in the appeal. Despite this victory, Dershowitz gives Claus his final farewell: "One thing, Claus. Legally, this was an important victory. Morally - you're on your own. "
5.
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) - Hitchcock may be the most iconic mystery director of all time, and for good reason - he pretty much invented the formula. What I love most about Hitchcock is the fact that he was a director who cared just as much about form and technique as he did about storytelling, and a movie is never really complete without either.
The Birds is a movie that falls fairly late in his career, and it was at this point in his career that Hitchcock really started playing around with the formula that he himself created. Take
Vertigo, which is more a psychoanalytical piece on obsession rather than a mystery, and
Psycho, which kills off the protagonist halfway through.
However, The Birds was probably his biggest narrative risk as there is no answer to the mystery: nothing can explain the deranged action of killer birds over the course of three days in any literal context. It plays as a strange and prophetic view of a temporary apocalypse and suddenly reverting back to reality at the cusp of insanity - if that's not terrifying, I don't know what is.
4.
Picnic At Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) - I hate to admit it, but there really aren't that many worthwhile films from Australia, but
Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those movies that everyone should watch at some point. For one, it was Weir's breakthrough movie (
The Truman Show, Dead Poet's Society) and a shining achievement of the Australian New Wave cinema movement, and for another the whole movie is drenched in a magical aura that is sure to keep your head wrapped around it for days. The movie tells the story of an all-girls boarding school that takes a trip to Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day in 1900. Despite of the headmistresses' commands, four girls climb up the rock to explore it's plateau, and at the top all but one of them (Edith) fall under some sort of spell and advance into a crevice in the rock. Edith runs back to the group while another teacher heads up the rock on her own. Though a search party is assembled, no one is able to find the missing girls (similar to
L'Avventura). Suffice it to say,
Picnic at Hanging Rock is as much an allegory of sexual repression as it is of mystery. The movie captures an age group that is at the height of sexual exploration overrun by the towering and oppressive authorities of the boarding school - the girls' escape into the rock is an expression of sexual freedom, and the teacher who follows (whom Edith sees running without a skirt) joins in that freedom. This act of unbridled resistance to repression stirs the entire school and town - especially since the girls were never seen again.
3.
Hidden (Cache) (Michael Haneke, 2005) - Few films demand as much focus and interpretation as Haneke's
Cache, but almost no films offer as much reward for what you put in. The movie begins innocently enough: a long still-shot of a Parisian street showing a typical day as the credits roll out. Soon after, though, this peaceful shot is twisted into a shocking revelation of voyeurism: we find out that the shot is actually a videotape of a couples' house (Georges and Anne), and the tape was anonymously sent to them for them to see. Somebody is watching them. More tapes arrive, shot in the same format, sent to the couple. Is it a warning? A joke? Whatever it is, both Georges and Anne become shaken by the tapes, and Georges begins searching for answers. As he does so, he finds his past haunting him, revealing a secret that he has kept from everyone else. The videos reveal a lot about Georges character, but nothing about their existence. It might be the director himself tormenting his flawed character. It might be the fact that we are actually watching the movie that the characters feel unease about being watched. We will never know.
2.
Blow-Up (Michael Antonioni, 1966) - Being the second entry here from Antonioni, you can probably guess that the director gets his kicks out of being elusive, but hey, at least he made some great movies along the way.
Blow-Up is a movie that is divided down the middle: one half is the cool, hip protrayal of London mod culture at its finest (
including a famous cameo by The Yardbirds) and the other half is a compelling murder mystery in which the main character, Thomas, a fashion photographer, ventures into voyeurism by taking pictures of a random couple in a park and upon deeper inspection of the developed photo discovers a dead body in the background. The films obvious metaphor is brilliant: with a single picture, the closer you try to look for details, the more blurry things become. Upon blowing-up the photo, we see what could be a gunman in the photo, but it could just as well be a patch of bushes. There may have never even been a murder; Thomas goes back to the same spot and finds a body, but when he returns later with a camera, the body is gone. In the famous last scene, we even see the main character, Thomas, disappear into a sea of grass. Nothing is certain and what we do know is skewed. This is a film of deep artistic edge, a thrilling conception of pop-art and Zeitgeist - unfortunately, at this point, people only know it as the film that
Austin Powers is making fun of.
1.
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) - There are those movies that leave such an impression on genre and film-making that it would be impossible to look at modern cinema without considering their influence;
Rashomon is one of those movies, and was really the movie that introduced the world to Japanese cinema and Kurosawa. It is also probably the most elusive film ever made - supposedly during production the assistant directors came up to Kurosawa and had to say "we don't understand it at all" (a sentiment that is paralleled in the first line of the film: "I just don't understand.")
Rashomon is the retelling of the murder of a samurai by four eyewitnesses to the crime: the bandit, the wife, the murdered samurai (by way of a medium) and a passing woodcutter. The majority of the film is composed of flashbacks, albeit flashbacks that don't add up to a sum. Instead, we are left with a sea of discrepancies - each storyteller bends reality to their own truths, and most confusing of all is how they all accept the blame for the murder. Even the woodcutter's story, which reveals the supposed 'truth,' covers up the fact that he stole the dagger after the murder.
Rashomon is scary in what it reveals in humanity: the only thing that we care about is self-preservation, and we will go as far as to create our own realities to save ourselves from our own shame. The mystery remains unsolved but the meaning is crystal clear.
10. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962) - Bunuel was well into middle age when he made El ángel exterminador, and by that point he had left both Spain and America because of his controversial work. Having then lived in Mexico for 18 years, this film was is first that he had complete artistic control of during that entire period and he really relishes in that freedom. The basic outline of the story is that a group of wealthy friends gather for a dinner party in a decadent house and break etiquette by overstaying their welcome. However, when they finally find that they want to leave, they find themselves unable to. There is no physical barrier preventing them from crossing, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot will themselves to leave. In this scenario, Bunuel presents a situation with no rational explanation but with significant implications - as the days go by, the civility that coats these people's standard of living wanes and the characters find themselves venturing into witchcraft and brutality in their isolation. The story is a clear-cut satire of the upper class: when stripped of the privileges that keep them superior, they resort to the most savage of beasts. Suddenly, as if nothing had happened, the curse is broken and the guests finally are able to leave with no explanation. No explanation is needed, though, as the sinister truth about the characters has already been revealed. As his final sleight, Bunuel closes his film within a cathedral, where a mass is being dismissed and the churchgoers find themselves unable to leave. As always, none are spared from Bunuel's vision.
9. L'Avventura (Michael Antonioni, 1960) - The 1960s opened up the decade with some groundbreaking films (Psycho, Peeping Tom, Breathless, La Dolce Vita), and L'Avventura is one of those that literally shook the grounds of cinema. The movie, set in Italy, begins with two friends, Anna and Claudia, going on a yacht trip to a volcanic island, with Anna's love Sandro coming along. Tension between Anna and Sandro are apparent right off the bat and references are drawn to a previous split they had. When they reach the island, the three of them take a nap together and upon waking up, Claudia and Sandro find that Anna is missing. Soon, a massive search is assembled, but she is nowhere to be found. Could she have committed suicide? Could she have been murdered by her boyfriend? Could she have just disappeared? And, as if her character had never existed, the movie moves on - a love affair forms between Claudia and Sandro. There is no time for atonement or moral development; the characters simply act for themselves. Anna is never mentioned again. There is no weight behind the actions in the film - Sandro soon betrays Claudia for a call-girl, and Claudia finds the two together. In the end scene, Sandro and Claudia are together, both staring into nothingness, each a brittle twig undergoing too much force. Thus is life.
8. Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) - David Lynch has been called many things: an absurdist, the modern American surrealist, an unmethodical fraud, a pretentious asshole. Lost Highway is an amalgamation of all those things - cryptic at best, absolute nonsense at worst and naturally it has slowly built itself up as a cult classic. Still, it's a hell of a watch that will leave you either wishing you could have your two hours of watching it back or two more hours to fully digest it. The plot (if you can call it that) begins with a saxophonist named Fred who suspects his wife, Renee, of cheating. The movie is drenched in abstract and surreal loops and turns, including an ominous message that says "Dick Laurent is dead" and an androgynous Mystery Man who stalks Fred, but all that aside, Fred soon finds himself watching a videotape of him killing his wife and soon after is arrested for murder. In jail, he begins having headaches and hallucinations, and one day when the guards come to check on him, they don't find Fred but rather a teenage mechanic named Pete. The police have no choice but to let him go. Pete begins to fall for a girl named Alice who has suspicious similarities to Renee, and Pete soon falls into lustful desires. However, later in the film, Pete undergoes a retrometamorphosis back into Fred. A full analysis would probably fill up this entire blog post, but I'll just leave it at that and say that there is something to be gained from the confusion.
7. Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) - This is a movie that has polarized critics for years, some claiming it to be one of the greatest philosophical movies ever made, while others pinpointing it as the worst. I can't say I'm a fan of the film, but if anything can be said about the movie, it's that Resnais is completely successful at what he set out to do: as a director, he completely blurs the lines between truth and fiction, reality and dream. Taking place at a château, the film revolves around one man trying to convince a woman that they met the previous year at Marienbad, while another man (we interpret to be the woman's husband) tries to resist his temptations. In fact, as a viewer, we are given the option of whether to submit to the film's nonsensical allure or to resist, saying to ourselves that it makes no sense. And it really doesn't - we see parallel conversations throughout the film, a soft-spoken narrator speaks the same phrases over and over again, the setting feels like it is constantly shifting. Time itself could be stacking on top of itself. Suffice to say, the wandering never stops and we never find out whether woman A ever met man X last year. The film is madness - hypnotic, dreamy madness.
6. Reversal of Fortune (Barbet Schroeder, 1990) - I find this movie fascinating simply because every American court room drama I have ever seen is focused on one thing and one thing only: the truth. Reversal of Fortune throws out any notion of what truth even is, and instead uses this ambiguity to turn itself on the justice system: when there is no certainty of truth, how is a system supposed to judge? In the movie, Claus von Bülow is accused of putting his wife in an irreversible coma by giving her an insulin overdose, but he makes an appeal and hires Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz for his case. Dershowitz puts together a team of pragmatic law school students to lead the appeal and review evidence. An interesting narrative twist in the movie is that the whole thing is narrated from the comatose Sunny von Bülow who gives flashbacks of the married couple to shed some light on what actually happened. The more we see, the more we realize that Sunny was actually leading her own path to self-destruction through drug use and idleness, but Claus was just as neglectful of her as she was of herself - we never discover whether it was Sunny or Claus who dealt the final blow. We also discover that the original murder case that convicted Claus was full of holes and did not hold up in the appeal. Despite this victory, Dershowitz gives Claus his final farewell: "One thing, Claus. Legally, this was an important victory. Morally - you're on your own. "
5. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) - Hitchcock may be the most iconic mystery director of all time, and for good reason - he pretty much invented the formula. What I love most about Hitchcock is the fact that he was a director who cared just as much about form and technique as he did about storytelling, and a movie is never really complete without either. The Birds is a movie that falls fairly late in his career, and it was at this point in his career that Hitchcock really started playing around with the formula that he himself created. Take Vertigo, which is more a psychoanalytical piece on obsession rather than a mystery, and Psycho, which kills off the protagonist halfway through. However, The Birds was probably his biggest narrative risk as there is no answer to the mystery: nothing can explain the deranged action of killer birds over the course of three days in any literal context. It plays as a strange and prophetic view of a temporary apocalypse and suddenly reverting back to reality at the cusp of insanity - if that's not terrifying, I don't know what is.
4. Picnic At Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) - I hate to admit it, but there really aren't that many worthwhile films from Australia, but Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those movies that everyone should watch at some point. For one, it was Weir's breakthrough movie (The Truman Show, Dead Poet's Society) and a shining achievement of the Australian New Wave cinema movement, and for another the whole movie is drenched in a magical aura that is sure to keep your head wrapped around it for days. The movie tells the story of an all-girls boarding school that takes a trip to Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day in 1900. Despite of the headmistresses' commands, four girls climb up the rock to explore it's plateau, and at the top all but one of them (Edith) fall under some sort of spell and advance into a crevice in the rock. Edith runs back to the group while another teacher heads up the rock on her own. Though a search party is assembled, no one is able to find the missing girls (similar to L'Avventura). Suffice it to say, Picnic at Hanging Rock is as much an allegory of sexual repression as it is of mystery. The movie captures an age group that is at the height of sexual exploration overrun by the towering and oppressive authorities of the boarding school - the girls' escape into the rock is an expression of sexual freedom, and the teacher who follows (whom Edith sees running without a skirt) joins in that freedom. This act of unbridled resistance to repression stirs the entire school and town - especially since the girls were never seen again.
3. Hidden (Cache) (Michael Haneke, 2005) - Few films demand as much focus and interpretation as Haneke's Cache, but almost no films offer as much reward for what you put in. The movie begins innocently enough: a long still-shot of a Parisian street showing a typical day as the credits roll out. Soon after, though, this peaceful shot is twisted into a shocking revelation of voyeurism: we find out that the shot is actually a videotape of a couples' house (Georges and Anne), and the tape was anonymously sent to them for them to see. Somebody is watching them. More tapes arrive, shot in the same format, sent to the couple. Is it a warning? A joke? Whatever it is, both Georges and Anne become shaken by the tapes, and Georges begins searching for answers. As he does so, he finds his past haunting him, revealing a secret that he has kept from everyone else. The videos reveal a lot about Georges character, but nothing about their existence. It might be the director himself tormenting his flawed character. It might be the fact that we are actually watching the movie that the characters feel unease about being watched. We will never know.
2. Blow-Up (Michael Antonioni, 1966) - Being the second entry here from Antonioni, you can probably guess that the director gets his kicks out of being elusive, but hey, at least he made some great movies along the way. Blow-Up is a movie that is divided down the middle: one half is the cool, hip protrayal of London mod culture at its finest (including a famous cameo by The Yardbirds) and the other half is a compelling murder mystery in which the main character, Thomas, a fashion photographer, ventures into voyeurism by taking pictures of a random couple in a park and upon deeper inspection of the developed photo discovers a dead body in the background. The films obvious metaphor is brilliant: with a single picture, the closer you try to look for details, the more blurry things become. Upon blowing-up the photo, we see what could be a gunman in the photo, but it could just as well be a patch of bushes. There may have never even been a murder; Thomas goes back to the same spot and finds a body, but when he returns later with a camera, the body is gone. In the famous last scene, we even see the main character, Thomas, disappear into a sea of grass. Nothing is certain and what we do know is skewed. This is a film of deep artistic edge, a thrilling conception of pop-art and Zeitgeist - unfortunately, at this point, people only know it as the film that Austin Powers is making fun of.
1. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) - There are those movies that leave such an impression on genre and film-making that it would be impossible to look at modern cinema without considering their influence; Rashomon is one of those movies, and was really the movie that introduced the world to Japanese cinema and Kurosawa. It is also probably the most elusive film ever made - supposedly during production the assistant directors came up to Kurosawa and had to say "we don't understand it at all" (a sentiment that is paralleled in the first line of the film: "I just don't understand.") Rashomon is the retelling of the murder of a samurai by four eyewitnesses to the crime: the bandit, the wife, the murdered samurai (by way of a medium) and a passing woodcutter. The majority of the film is composed of flashbacks, albeit flashbacks that don't add up to a sum. Instead, we are left with a sea of discrepancies - each storyteller bends reality to their own truths, and most confusing of all is how they all accept the blame for the murder. Even the woodcutter's story, which reveals the supposed 'truth,' covers up the fact that he stole the dagger after the murder. Rashomon is scary in what it reveals in humanity: the only thing that we care about is self-preservation, and we will go as far as to create our own realities to save ourselves from our own shame. The mystery remains unsolved but the meaning is crystal clear.
