I love movies that mess you up. Often in the horror, thriller, and sci-fi genres, I just can’t get enough of stories where the characters’ entire perceptions of reality, time, or their own selves get shifted. Body swap stories, time loop tales, reverse-chronology, or multiversal stories done right are the simplest way to get me on the edge of my seat. If you know Memento, Primer, or Looper, then you get what I’m talking about.
These are movies often best experienced with as little knowledge as possible, so here are a few vague recommendations for films that are likely to make you question just what exactly is going on.
One of my favorite movies in this genre is called Coherence, a 2013 sci-fi thriller about a group of friends who gather on the night of a comet passing by, when suddenly strange occurrences begin to take place. Another is called Time Lapse, a 2014 movie about a trio who discover a camera that can take pictures 24 hours into the future. What begins as a fun window into what will happen quickly spirals out of control. I recently discovered a 2009 horror movie that I found genuinely very scary called Triangle, about a pleasure sailing trip gone very wrong. After abandoning ship and finding refuge on a passing-by ocean liner, one woman quickly realizes her reality, and her sense of time, may not hold true on this excursion from hell.
And finally, there’s It’s What’s Inside, a clever little movie about college friends reuniting for a wedding who decide to play around with a machine that allows them to swap bodies. It’s meant as a game, but they’re quickly thrust them into a web of deceit where old grudges and crushes come out to play.
While these descriptions may be broad, all of these movies are sure to have you rewinding and reconsidering reality itself. And they’re all available to stream now – Coherence is on Peacock and Prime Video, Time Lapse is free with ads on Pluto TV, Triangle is on Peacock, and It’s What’s Inside is on Netflix.
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