Was Michael Gondry the guy who did Safety Not Guaranteed?
[checks]
Nope, but that probably belongs on this list. I really enjoyed the way it didn’t matter if the guy actually was capable of time travel and the movie could be interpreted either way (spoiler: right up until the point when you find out).
There are some films that play with this a lot. I always cite Cloak & Dagger, where there is literally no way the plot can work unless Jack Flack is both fictional and real. That was fun.
I’ve also heard a lot about Gone Girl, but I’ve not seen it yet.
Swiss Army Man was goofy and weird and kind of sweet and pretty ambiguous in the sense that the film never directly addresses what was real, what was delusion and what it took to convince a studio to greenlight the thing.
John Sayles’ Limbo (1999) has, arguably, the most ambiguous ending of any film I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen a lot.
Limbo is an example of why I don’t take the advice of professional film critics; in dumping on the ending (they loved the performances and pretty much everything short of how things ended), they completely failed to consider the film’s tenet… its artistic conceit, if you will. Otherwise, careful consideration of what transpires in the film would have provided viewers with their veryown answers.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert: Also, we still have that pneumatic penis prop from when we made the music video for “Turn Down for What” and we figured that it could be, like, a kind of boner-based GPS…
Studio Execs: Guys, we just told you we’re on board with the film. And now we’re even more on board with the film. Now go out there and make some magic.
I think I’d say The Master was ambiguous, my read was that we see things from the point of view of an unreliable narrator so I think that qualifies. It just sort of gets increasingly surreal as the film goes on.
that movie was far better than it had any right to be.
I haven’t been keeping up with film this decade, but Cronenberg’s Spider was probably 2003-ish, and the interplay of ambiguity vs concrete reality really made it. Fantastic flick.
