12 best psychological thrillers that will mess with your mind

Richard Kelly's directorial debut featured a talking six-foot rabbit, a falling jet engine, time travel and a cavalcade of different interpretations and online theories. The filmmaker continued with his movie mind-bending in Southland Tales and The Box, but neither were a match for Donnie Darko.

David Lynch's first feature-length film, a black-and-white surrealist horror apparently about parenthood, was a clear statement of intent from the American director, a signal that he will never be one to do things by the book. Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol were both inspirations for this wild trip into the human headspace, featuring a woman with giant cheeks who lives in the radiator. And sings.

Shane Carruth's microbudget debut about the creation of time travel is so densely-packed with detail and myriad complex timelines you need a flowchart to work it all out. Thankfully, there is one!

Ken Russell and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky teamed up to adapt the latter's novel Altered States in the early '80s. William Hurt took on the lead role as a scientist whose experiments with hallucinogenic drugs in an isolation chamber naturally lead to some crazy kaleidoscopic imagery.

A time-loop thriller that flew under the radar on its initial release, this Christopher Smith-directed film keeps you guessing as Melissa George's Jess ventures into an ocean liner carrying a future version of herself.

David Cronenberg's sci-fi body horror famously featured a hallucinatory sequence of James Woods inserting a VHS tape into his abdomen. The Canadian filmmaker has made many films since, but nothing quite as WTF as this.

This Tom Cruise-fronted remake of Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes closes with the A-lister plummeting from a skyscraper before awakening just before the final fade to black. There are several different interpretations – some highlighted by Cameron Crowe in the director's commentary – but part of the fun is letting your mind find its own conclusion.

Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's terrific blend of sci-fi and romance earns its place on the mindf**k list by virtue of the fact that protagonist Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) is having parts of his memories – notably his relationship with Kate Winslet's free sprit Clementine – zapped away.

Darren Aronofsky's low-budget breakthrough saw mathematician Max Cohen drive himself to the brink while trying to unravel the mystery of a 216-digit number his computer churns out. Plagued by crippling headaches and hallucinations, Max self-administers a self-trepanning with a power drill in the film's most literal mindf**k moment.

Charlie Kaufman sat behind the camera for this sprawling tale of a director mounting an ambitious stage show in a Manhattan warehouse where the characters of the film are characters in the show. The lines of reality and fiction become increasingly blurred in a film that's at times both bold, utterly confusing and full of recursion. Yes, recursion.