9 Best Trippy Movies Like Spike Jonze’s Adaptation

Spike Jonze’s second feature-length film, Adaptation, won numerous large awards, including nominations and wins at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and British Academy Film Awards.

What set this movie apart was the liberty it took with its characters and story as a metafiction when commenting on themes such as Hollywood, ego, masculinity, and creativity. A must-watch for all film buffs and artists, it continued to influence and inspire groundbreaking movies after it as well as taking inspiration from mind-bending movies preceding it.

9 Sunset Blvd. – Available to Watch on Amazon Prime

Sunset Blvd., directed by the genre-bending Billy Wilder in 1950, is also about a screenwriter, much like Charlie and Donald Kaufman in Adaptation. In their journeys and issues with being writers, they use their observations to reflect on the human condition and the nature of Hollywood. Joe Gillis, the writer, is sucked into an incredible story that represents much of the falsities about the entertainment business and how it uses people through the perspective of the mentally disturbed, lonely, and iconic former silent-film-star Norma Desmond.

8 Being John Malkovich – Available to Watch on SHOWTIME

Charlie Kaufman also wrote Spike Jonze’s first feature film, and just like Adaptation, puts its characters in surreal situations to test how they would react due to their egos, insecurities, trauma, or general boredom getting in the way of their progress of character and self-reflection. The plot device, in this case, is when the small ensemble of characters finds a portal that allows them to see and live as real-life John Malkovich and follows them in how they decide to interpret or exploit the discovery.

7 Black Bear – Available to Watch on Amazon Prime

A recent 2020 release directed by Lawrence Michael Levine, Black Bear stars Aubrey Plaza as a director and actress trying to develop ideas for her next feature while she takes a holiday at a lodge in the woods. Her neighbors are a couple, played by Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbot. Upon observing their relationship, Aubrey’s character, Allison, continues to search for inspiration for a film as she meditates on the dock. This film involves incredible twists that indicate metafiction, like Adaptation, and can be as much of a black comedy as well as a psychological drama.

6 Punch Drunk Love – Available to Watch on Cinemax

P.T. Anderson’s fourth film Punch Drunk Love was released the same year as Adaptation–seems that year was a win for psychological dramas. Both protagonists are neurotic men struggling with loneliness and feelings of creative or emotional entrapment.

The film is about Barry, a plunger salesman who deals with mental illness and trauma as he considers falling in love with Lena, a friend of his sister’s played by Emily Watson.

5 Mullholland Dr. – Available to Watch on HBO Max

A mind-bending mystery-drama directed by David Lynch and released in 2001 is like Sunset Boulevard and Adaptation on drugs. Following the dream space of a distressed actress played by Naomi Watts as she starts her career in Hollywood and meets a beautiful amnesiac actress whose life appears to be in danger. The film leaves major pieces of a puzzle for the audience to try and put together to understand the troubled psyche behind a scattered narrative.

4 The Shining – Available to Watch on HBO Max

If Adaptation is about a writer trying to figure out how to adapt a story with absolute purity, The Shining may serve as the absolute antithesis to that. When under the stress of taking care of a haunted resort surrounded by implications of familicide and genocide, Jack Torrance takes on the role of terrifying abuser and face of murderous toxic masculinity. He’s shut himself off from any productive thought and makes for an interesting character study as opposed to the very introverted, insecure, and thoughtful Charlie Kaufman.

3 Naked Lunch

A film based on the book and life of the groundbreaking author and Beat Generation figurehead William Burroughs, Naked Lunch was directed by David Cronenburg and released in 1991.

Like how Charlie Kaufman is a fictionalized version of the real Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, the lead character William Lee, portrayed by Peter Weller, is very much a fictionalized version of Burroughs as he writes through a bizarre and surreal existence catalyzed by the death of his wife. The movie is quite rare on streaming but it can be found as part of the Criterion Collection.

2 I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Available to Watch on Netflix

The 2020 directorial release by Adaptation’s screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is based on the novel by Iain Reid, this film follows the mental descent of a janitor as he considers ending his own life. This disorienting psychological drama follows a character made to literally observe and experience a man named Jake’s life experiences and opinions in a dream-like journey that includes elements of comedy and horror to represent best what it is like to live with dementia.

1 Synecdoche, New York – Available to Watch on Amazon Prime

Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 directorial debut follows a famous and successful playwright named Caden, played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who struggles to make the greatest play of all time using grant money in the face of his inevitable death. Like Adaptation, Synecdoche, New York is yet another sincere and existential work that explores the paradoxes and emotional baggage that comes with art, creativity, creation, and overall, being alive.

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