NeMLA 2025 - The Mind-Game Film
"Mind-Game" is film theorist Thomas Elsaesser's name for the wide variety of films made since the 1990s that present puzzling, complex, and/or impossible narrative devices and structures that play games with spectators' expectations for how traditional narrative films work. For familiar Hollywood examples, think Christopher Nolan (Inception) and M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense), but perhaps more emblematic are the films of David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul and cult classics like Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.