10 Insane Movies Way Deeper Than They Look

First impressions count for a lot where basically everything is concerned, and that’s certainly true of movies. We’ve only got so much time in our lives to watch them, sadly, and so we’ll typically base our viewing decisions off a trailer or, in a rush, a quick glimpse of a poster.

We all make assumptions about movies from their marketing, yet when you sit down and watch a film for yourself, it can turn out far more complex, mature, and downright fascinating than you ever expected.

Hell, perhaps you actually sat through the movie and didn’t even glean its true depth until you revisited it years later, its more subtle and intriguing context finally laid bare.

Whatever the reason, these films all offered up a superficial veneer of go-for-broke ridiculousness that seemingly denied them any wider depth, yet they’re ultimately all smart, perceptive, and shockingly thoughtful films, often riffing on a wide variety of themes and ideas.

While you’re certainly free to engage with these movies on a purely singular level, there are greater rewards to be found if you dare to look beyond…

Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of the year’s most buzzed-about films, and that’s not simply because it’s an indie take on the Multiverse Movie that’s fast becoming a subgenre in of itself.

If the marketing perhaps painted the film as a wacky-with-a-capital-W genre-bending sci-fi action flick, don’t let that fool you – this is also one of the most richly character-driven movies of the year so far.

At its core, the film is a nuanced study of a family in crisis, led by a wife and mother, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who stands as a monument to unfulfilled promise, and whose downtrodden life ironically ends up making her the perfect candidate to save the multiverse.

For all of its wild action sequences, googly eyes, and creative uses of butt plugs, it is a thoroughly existentialist piece of work which soundly rejects hopeless nihilism.

While Evelyn’s daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) feels that the existence of endless universes means that nothing matters, Evelyn’s husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) refutes this, encouraging them both to embrace kindness and optimistic nihilism, that the lack of intrinsic meaning in life need not be a bad thing.

It’s a profound and unexpected message for a multiverse movie to offer up, and a sound rebuke to anyone who feels that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s recent multiversal romps are, well, a bit soulless and empty.

Everything Everywhere All At Once being as smart and perceptive as it is shouldn’t be all that surprising, though, given that filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka Daniels), previously wrung profundity from Swiss Army Man – a film about Daniel Radcliffe’s farting corpse.