As the decade comes to an end, critics and movie lovers everywhere are spending a hell of a lot of time writing their lists of the best and worst of the past ten years. The arguments will continue well into 2020, but for now its time to take a look back at some of the weirder and more WTF movie moments of the decade.
The 2010s certainly werent short of strange films or moments that made you go wide-eyed with confusion, be it in esoteric indie films or some of the eras biggest blockbusters. Even as moviemaking got super safe on the big-budget studio level, risks were taken and some directors werent afraid to get super weird.
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We could have filled out this list entirely with experimental indie movies that truly push the boundaries but didnt find a massive audience, but we also wanted to account for some of themost bizarremoments that somehow made it into the mainstream. These are the weirdest movie moments of the 2010s.
Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Jos Saramago's novel The Double featured Jake Gyllenhaal in the dual role of two men with personalities as different as their appearances are similar. Adam, a history professor in Toronto, lives a relatively mundane life until he spots an actor in a rental movie who looks just like him, sending him on an obsessive journey to find out more about him. His doppelganger, Anthony, seems to have his life together in a way Adam doesn't and it drives him mad. Spiders are a recurring motif throughout Enemy, primarily inspired by the Maman sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Even if you get what the metaphor is hinting at, nothing prepares you for the film's climax and the room-sized tarantula that Adam encounters. You instinctively jump out of your seat at the sight before wondering what the hell just happened. It's a suitably unnerving ending to a mind-bender of a movie.
Venom wasnt exactly a hotly hyped movie when it premiered in theaters in 2018. The marketing campaign had been confusing and messy, the PG-13 rating disappointed fans who were promised a more adult movie, and not a single person alive saw the trailer with Venom saying the line like a turd in the wind and didnt laugh. It seemed like a flop-in-waiting for Sony Pictures, but then people saw it and many were surprisingly won over by its bizarre tone that veered between self-serious drama, romantic comedy, and Chaplin-style slapstick. Tom Hardy gives a fully committed performance that drags the movie forward through sheer effort, and Eddie Brock and Venoms weird semi-flirtatious chemistry made for a remarkably enjoyable experience. Shockingly, the like a turd in the wind moment works better in context once you remember Venom is a self-confessed loser and youve already seen Brock take a dip in a restaurants lobster tank. Heres hoping that director Andy Serkis increases the mayhem for Venom 2.
The 2010s certainly werent short of a weird movie or two if you knew where to look for them, and this decade Poland gifted us with one of especially trippy quality. The Lure, the 2015 debut of director Agnieszka Smoczyska is a feminist horror synth-musical featuring killer mermaids. What more could you ask for? Loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's iconic fairy-tale The Little Mermaid, The Lure couldn't be any more different from the Disney version. This one is violent, sexy, gross, and deeply aware of how misogynist the source material is, depicting two mermaid sisters who are taken in by a shoddy Polish nightclub act and become objects of curiosity and lust for the humans who pay to watch them sing. One man falls in love with one of the sisters, but her lack of human genitalia proves to be a slight problem, and the journey the film takes with this narrative reveals the brutality of sexism at its most primal level. The end result is one of the weirdest and most recommended movies of the decade.
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When Guillermo del Toro won the Oscar for Best Picture with The Shape of Water, many critics decried the movie as a safe choice from Academy voters. That seems like such a strange dismissal to make about a Cold War-era fantasy romance where a mute woman gets it on with a fish-man. Del Toro loves his monsters and he frequently makes sure his human characters do too, in more ways than one. While the movie doesnt show the sex, it has no qualms about letting the audience know that the fish-man and Sally Hawkinss Eliza had a very satisfying time. In one moment, Eliza shows her best friend how a fish-man even has the equipment to copulate successfully with a human woman, and its a candid moment of such unexpected delight that even the most open-minded viewers were a little shocked.
Director Darren Aronofsky has never been one to take the easy way with his films. His work is often deliberately difficult to sit through, whether its the protagonists descent into spiritual madness in Pi or the brutal effects of drug addiction as seen through the protagonists of Requiem for a Dream. From the curious grammar of the title to the evocative but highly cryptic ad campaigns, it seemed that mother! would be more of the same. Audiences either loved the film or loathed it, with the movie famously receiving the notorious F rating from Cinemascore. Even for those who loved the subtle-as-a-brick allegorical drama, it wasnt hard to see why. In its rather full-on retelling of the Book of Genesis, coupled with a no-holds-barred fable for the abuse humanity has inflicted upon Mother Earth, mother! climaxes with a crowd ripping apart and consuming Jennifer Lawrences baby. Its not the most delicately constructed metaphor but it certainly got the job done for those who could stomach it.
We may never get a proper Lovecraft adaptation from a major American studio but Paramount and director Alex Garland certainly came the closest to capturing the horror icon's cosmic terror with Annihilation. Loosely adapted from the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, the sci-fi drama follows five women, led by Natalie Portman, as they cross over into "the Shimmer", a quarantined zone of southern Florida immersed in the metamorphosing thrall of an unknown alien force. The Shimmer mutates every living thing in its path, from plants to wildlife to humans, and as the women get closer to its center, the more disturbing sights they see. The one that unnerved us the most was the bear, which had mutated partly with the dying geomorphologist Cassie "Cass" Sheppard. Hearing pained Casss cries for help from the body of a mutating bear is a noise that haunted many of our nightmares.
Some directors are just not built for the mainstream. There are some filmmakers who are exceptionally talented and deserve the limelight but seem designed to remain strictly independent. Nobody expected the Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos to break out as he did, becoming an Oscar nominee for Best Director after making the switch to English language dramas. The one-two-three punch of The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite revealed Lanthimos to be a committed visionary who could make his highly specific style - bone-dry humor, confounding in plotting, heavily reliant on a blend of mundane and eccentric palatable for wider audiences without ever diluting his intent. This is the director who made a satire about relationships wherein people who arent in one get turned into the animal of their choice, and general audiences went to see it! Its thanks to directors like Lanthimos that the industry seems ever-so-slightly more willing to take risks on seemingly unsafe stories.
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Boots Riley made one hell of a splash with his directorial debut, giving the satirical drama Sorry To Bother You an unabashed political force that spoke loudly against the kind of issues that Hollywood typically tries to avoid. The absurdist dark comedy took on the crushing realities of modern capitalism and the inescapable dread of this system we are all forced to work under, but instead of making a dreary drama about it, Sorry To Bother You is delightfully bonkers and uses fantastical jumps to fully convey the horror of being crushed under an ideology that is constantly positioned as the dream. Basically everything about Sorry To Bother You is delightfully weird, from the use of "white voice" from the black actors to the surreal ways telemarketing is visualized to the sheer amount of cocaine Armie Hammer's character snorts. For sheer WTF power, however, we have to go with the moment the film reveals how its central evil corporation plans to further degrade its workers. A half-man half-horse creature is unveiled and explained as the new evolution for keeping workers docile and stronger for perpetual labor. It's silly but terrifyingly real in its message, which only makes its weirdness even more unnerving.
The Cloverfield Paradox wasnt as interesting or well-remembered as its predecessors and will probably be recognized more in the future for its unconventional release, as Netflix picked up the film from Paramount then dropped it after the Super Bowl. There were still a few body horror moments that made us wonder what the filmmakers were going from. The sci-fi horror followed an international group of astronauts aboard a space station who, after using a particle accelerator to try and solve Earth's energy crisis, are accidentally sent to an alternate dimension. In one scene, a character's eyeballs begin moving of their own accord and he starts talking to himself in the mirror. Another character loses his arm and it then starts moving around and trying to communicate with them. This could have been done in a scary way - check out The Thing for the ultimate depiction of body horror - but The Cloverfield Paradox is oddly slapdash in its efforts and it mostly comes across as weak attempts at comedy without any laughs. The rest of the film is also sadly not weird enough to warrant such a strange moment. Chalk this one up as a failed experiment that Netflix rightly dumped in a blaze of publicity, never to be heard from again.
In 2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, known colloquially as Joe, became the first Thai filmmaker to win the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with the deeply unique drama Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The film centers on the last days in the life of its title character as he explores his past lives with his loved ones, including the spirit of his late wife and his lost son who has returned in spirit form. Sukhdev Sandhu of The Daily Telegraph described Uncle Boonmee as "barely a film; more a floating world", which is highly apt. Its combination of cinematic styles and genres makes for one of the 2010s' most enigmatic and beautiful explorations of death committed to the big screen. Long live the weird.
We could simply write the plot description for Rubber here and that would be enough to explain its placement on our list. Yes, this is a movie about a killer tire. French director Quentin Dupieux, also known as the DJ and musician Mr. Oizo, committed to this bonkers plot wherein a tire named Robert suddenly comes to life somewhere in the California desert. After learning to roll forward and crush items, Robert discovers he has psychokinetic powers and can make things - and living beings - explode. Rubber is halfway between a trashy B-movie and an introspective art piece, but for sheer creativity alone, it's worth your time.
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Kayleigh Donaldson is a full-time pop culture and film writer from Scotland. A features contributor to Screen Rant, her work can also be found regularly on Pajiba and SYFY FANGRRLS. She also co-hosts The Hollywood Read podcast. Her favorite topics include star studies, classic Hollywood, box office analysis, industry gossip, and caring way too much about the Oscars. She can mostly be found on Twitter at @Ceilidhann.
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