Entertainment
10 Worst Movies With Non-Linear Plots, Ranked
Movies with non-linear plots are relatively rare. After all, it’s typically easiest for filmmakers to tell stories that follow a single chronological thread from start to finish, and it’s definitely easiest for audiences to understand such traditional stories. When done right, though, non-linear films like Pulp Fiction and The Godfather Part II can be among the greatest ever made. But when done poorly, non-linear films can be absolutely insufferable.
There aren’t many examples of a non-linear narrative going south, but the ones that do exist range from lackluster-though-watchable to insufferably abysmal. These movies are proof that it takes a tremendous amount of effort to pull off a non-linear narrative that audiences can follow and care about, and when that effort isn’t enough, the result can be utterly incomprehensible.
10
‘The Last Five Years’ (2014)
Richard LaGravenese‘s The Last Five Years is based on Jason Robert Brown‘s beloved stage musical of the same name. It stars Anna Kendrick as Cathy, a struggling actress, and Jeremy Jordan as Jamie, her novelist lover. The story of their romance is told out of chronological order, and the result is one of the weakest movie musicals of the last 25 years.
In all fairness, The Last Five Years is by no means awful. The casting is great (Kendrick in particular delivers a strong performance, as per usual), and the tunes are catchy enough. However, the lyrics can sometimes be a bit on-the-nose, and no matter how creative, the structure makes it difficult to truly connect with these characters or care what happens to their bland relationship.
9
‘Vantage Point’ (2008)
Directed by Pete Travis, Vantage Point is proof that a star-studded cast doesn’t necessarily equal a great movie. Travis wastes actors of the stature of Oscar winners Forest Whitaker and Zoe Saldaña in this political thriller that follows the attempted assassination of a fictional President of the United States from different perspectives.
The premise is interesting, but Travis mostly squanders it. As if the wooden acting and mindless action weren’t reason enough to look away from the screen, the non-linear structure of the narrative makes matters worse. Vantage Point never fully commits to it, constantly talking down to its viewers—and coming across as painfully predictable and needlessly chaotic as a result.
8
‘The Grudge’ (2004)
In 2002, Takashi Shimizu made one of the best Japanese horror films of the 21st century, Ju-On: The Grudge. Two years later, he took it upon himself to helm the Hollywood remake The Grudge, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as an American nurse living and working in Tokyo who’s exposed to a mysterious supernatural curse.
The fact that the gap in quality between these two versions of this film is so abysmal is made all-the-more astonishing by the fact that they were both directed by the same man. One of the scariest Japanese horror movies ever made turned into one of the least scary Hollywood horror flicks of the 2000s. Non-linear plots are a common characteristic of the Grudge series, but here, it simply doesn’t work. The story feels disjointed and mismatched, and as a result, it’s hard to care about any of it.
7
‘The Number 23’ (2007)
The Number 23 is proof that Jim Carrey is one of those actors used to starring in both perfect and terrible movies. This one’s easily one of the comedian’s worst, a thriller about a man who becomes obsessed with a novel that he believes was written about him, as similarities between him and his alter ego seem to keep mounting on top of each other.
The only attraction here is the fact that it’s Carrey playing one of his precious few dramatic roles, though, talented as he may be, he’s not even particularly good in it. Virtually everything about The Number 23 is a hot mess, a clumsy disaster that believes its non-linear approach to its story is really clever. Instead, it’s mostly just confusing and frustrating.
6
‘Premonition’ (2007)
A year before she starred in her Oscar-winning role on The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock starred in the supernatural horror thriller Premonition. In it, she plays a woman who’s experiencing precognitive visions of her husband’s death in a non-chronological order and attempting to save him from his impending doom.
Premonition is an absolutely ridiculous film that takes itself way too seriously for its own good, a dreary, poorly-written thriller that somehow manages to be both clichéd and unprecedentedly silly. Its excess of flashbacks is meant to be mind-bending, but instead, it’s as dull as it is muddled. Twisty and chaotic in every negative sense imaginable, this mess of a film can’t even say it has a redeemable Sandra Bullock performance, as the actress seems to be just phoning it in for a paycheck throughout the entire runtime. Can anyone blame her?
5
‘The Loft’ (2014)
2014’s The Loft is another instance of a director remaking his own movie. Erik Van Looy took his exceptional Dutch-language Belgian erotic thriller Loft and turned it into one of the laziest, least sexy Hollywood erotic thrillers of the 2010s. It has a stellar cast: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Eric Stonestreet, and Wentworth Miller, four of the biggest film and television stars available in 2014. They play men who share a penthouse loft where they can have secret affairs, but their fantasy becomes a nightmare when they find a dead woman in the loft. They’re all playing unpleasant characters that make the movie insufferable to sit through.
A ridiculous whodunnit whose non-linear narrative makes it all the easier for it to have enough plot holes to make its every scene ludicrous.
It’s one of those thrillers that are simply the worst from start to finish, a ridiculous whodunnit whose non-linear narrative makes it all the easier for it to have enough plot holes to make its every scene ludicrous. The acting is awful, the writing is dumb, Von Looy’s direction is lifeless, and the trashy tone doesn’t even have the decency to be trashy enough to make this a modern “so bad it’s good” classic.
4
‘Shorts’ (2009)
Robert Rodriguez is a legend and champion of low-budget filmmaking, but his filmography isn’t exactly stellar or consistent. He’s capable of delivering some truly excellent movies, but he’s also capable of delivering low-brow junk like the fantasy comedy Shorts. In it, a young boy discovers a colorful, wish-granting rock that causes chaos in his hometown.
It’s not even Rodriguez’s worst outing, though it’s certainly up (or down?) there. There was absolutely no reason at all to make this movie have a non-linear plot, and it suffers as a result. It’s chaotic, messy, overstimulating, and a pain for anyone over the age of 10 to try to keep up with. Hyperactive cinema can be really fun, but only when made with the ability to know when to exercise restraint. For Shorts, Rodriguez acted as though he had never heard the definition of the word.
3
‘9 Songs’ (2004)
Michael Winterbottom‘s British erotic art film 9 Songs follows an American college student and a British scientist who share intense sexual encounters in London. Upon release, The Guardian called it the most sexually explicit mainstream film up to that point, and that may still be the case. Hugely controversial due to its sexual content, which includes several unsimulated sexual activities between leads Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley, it’s one of those films that blur the line between experimental cinema and straight-up pornography.
The problem? 9 Songs just isn’t good to begin with. The non-linear jumps between the two main characters’ relationship aren’t confusing, but they aren’t exactly compelling, either. O’Brien and Stilley don’t really have the necessary chemistry to make the film feel erotic, and Winterbottom’s direction is more tedious than it is titillating.
2
‘The Snowman’ (2017)
Based on Jo Nesbø‘s 2007 novel of the same title, the Tomas Alfredson psychological thriller The Snowman is one of the worst movies of the last 50 years. It follows Michael Fassbender‘s Detective Harry Hole as he investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf was found wrapped around an ominous-looking snowman.
The premise sounds more than interesting enough, and the Hitchcockian source material is, indeed, fantastic. It’s just the film that fails to live up to those standards. Its non-linear approach to the story is incomprehensible at best, a scattered mess that goes downhill pretty soon into the runtime and never picks itself back up. A fine cast can’t exactly save this film, and justifiably, The Snowman became one of 2017’s most infamous flops.
1
‘Gotti’ (2018)
Gotti is one of the most iconic so-bad-they’re-good movies in recent memory, an absolute travesty of a film with a John Travolta lead performance that’s just as much of a travesty. It’s one of the worst-ever movies based on true stories, a biopic that gives biopics a bad name, a disaster that had been stuck in development hell since 2010, where it probably should have stayed.
Gotti tells its story non-linearly for… no good reason at all, really. Its 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes is well-earned, as it’s a laughably terrible cinematic tragedy that shows just how awful gangster films can be when placed in the wrong hands. No element of it works, and as one of the most terrible movies of the 21st century so far, it’s easily the worst non-linear-narrative movie ever made.