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.
Life of Pi
Life of Pi follows a boy stranded on a boat with a tiger. In the end, he manages to make it to shore, where he recounts his story to a fictional Yann Martel.
Although he first tells Martel the story we saw in the film, he then recounts a bloodier tale where he had to kill and eat the ship’s cook to stay alive. When asked which story is real, the young man only gives a vague answer. But the ending itself is about forcing you to question your own reality rather than worrying about the trials of the characters.
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.
Barton Fink
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.
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.