Most movies aim to please. The “pop” in pop culture stands for “popular,” after all, and commercial and critical success, not to mention careers, are on the line with every film. So it’s no surprise that most movies court the largest audience possible. They don’t always succeed, but satisfaction is almost always the goal.
In some cases, though, a filmmaker may intentionally alienate certain audiences in order to make a point or provoke a reaction. Some filmmakers intentionally alienate their audience with extreme or offensive humor, unconventional techniques, or stupefying storytelling methods to create a more immersive or challenging experience. And while it can make the movie less accessible to general audiences, there’s something to be said for movies that aren’t for everyone.
Updated on August 17th, 2023 by Nikole Finger: This article has been updated with additional content to keep the discussion fresh and relevant with even more information and new entries.
10 American Beauty (1999)
Nothing says "alienation" like a film that not even the filmmakers say they can understand. This is the case with the cult classic, American Beauty. Fans, critics, and film scholars alike have all tried to discern what the real meaning is behind the film.
However, it just doesn't seem to want to commit to one interpretation. It asks the audience to directly examine several uncomfortable relationships, but instead of just summarizing the failures of the characters, it offers up a hopeful feeling after the torment the audience witnesses.
9 The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Godfather was a wildly popular film, as it still is today. It rocked audiences with the moral descent of the protagonist as he goes from seeming to be the only innocent and nonviolent member of his mobster family to the leader of the most feared family. Afterward, The Godfather Part II took a further look at how the Corleone family came to be and the start of its demise.
Like many movies that alienate the audience, the protagonists are not easy to root for. However, it is especially frustrating for the audience of this film because it is both a prequel and a sequel. They must watch an innocent child become the mobster from the first movie, and they must see the values of the family that he cared for so long be ripped apart.
8 Joker (2019)
While fans may have loved it, there's no doubt that Joker was meant to challenge the notion that the protagonist needs to be a lovable and relatable character. In a way, this iteration of the iconic Batman villain is very relatable, but in the darkest form possible. He is constantly disrespected and rejected, which is what pushes him to become a villain. Unfortunately, it's all too common for people to relate to that feeling.
Joker was meant to force the audience to confront their inner darkness. Everyone may be able to relate to his sense of anger with the disrespect, but it's a feeling that isn't socially acceptable to show. Of course, the Joker is hardly a role model for how to cope, and the audience and movie know this. It puts the audience in an uncomfortable position to see someone act out their revenge fantasy, losing themselves to the all too normal fear of rejection.
7 American Psycho (2000)
It's not common to find a slasher film that is also a social parody, but American Psycho was intended to be just that. The film has gathered quite a loyal following, but it has been heavily critiqued for the extreme violence put on screen.
It was intended to make the audience question what they were seeing. Was there a serial killer marching merrily across the high-profile business world, or were all of the horrible killings just delusions in his mind? Either way, the audience is faced with an uncomfortable sense of confusion and no way to confirm exactly which way this man lost his mind.
6 Un Chien Andalou (1929)
In 1929, Golden Age Hollywood was in full swing. The Hays Code, restricting films to morally upright and uplifting content was still five years away, and audiences were treated to hit films from enduring stars like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow alongside the early Alfred Hitchco*ck thriller Blackmail and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s scandalous Pandora’s Box. Even in these more adventurous times, though, audiences were not prepared for director Luis Buñuel.
It was his collaboration with fellow Spaniard Salvador Dalí that set the template for pushing viewers away. Plotless and drenched in surrealism, Un Chein Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, a title with seemingly no connection to the film itself), makes no effort to meet its audience halfway. Its most famous shot, a woman's eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade in a graphic close-up, remains one of the most startling shots in film history. Talk with any film student, and odds are they'll have a story of watching this clip in class while everyone collectively freaked out.
Related: The Longest Movies: Some of the Best Over 5 Hours
5 Dogville (2003)
Like Buñuel, Danish director Lars von Trier has made a career of seeing how much he can subject his audience to. A key figure in the hugely influential Dogme 95 movement, which focused on highly restrictive filmmaking, von Trier has always made the audience’s reaction a key element of his films. Nowhere is this more evident than in Dogville. Filmed on a soundstage with no sets, the streets and buildings of the fictional town of Dogville are demarked with chalk and actors mime any interactions with their surroundings.
The artificiality of the film’s style is matched by the cruelty and brutality of its plot, which involves sexual assault and violent revenge. At its heart, Dogville is a commentary on the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the United States’ global “war on terror” that followed. Lars von Trier is following in the footsteps of legendary playwright and director Bertolt Brecht. It was Brecht who created the term Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) for the intentional alienation of the audience. Brecht argued that the immersive, almost hypnotic effects of stage and screen should be resisted, the better to communicate a social or political message to the audience, a notion that von Trier clearly took to heart.
4 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
This 1975 Italian film set during the final days of World War II and based on the work of the Marquise de Sade (from whom we get the word “sadism”) positively revels in the months-long sexualized torture of children under cover of condemning the Fascist characters perpetrating the acts onscreen.
Salò is genuinely repulsive, brutal, and almost impossible for many people to finish, and yet it’s proven hugely influential over the last four decades. Films like Saw, Hostel, The Human Centipede, and the entire horror sub-genre of torture p*rn all owe their existence to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, which Time Out's Film Guide named the "Most Controversial Film" of all time in 2006.
3 A Clockwork Orange (1971)
A Clockwork Orange is a film all about questioning how society treats criminals, so it had to alienate its audience to some degree due to the nature of the film. It follows a young man who finds joy in all sorts of horrendous behaviors. Upon being arrested, he volunteers for an experimental program that will torture him out of finding joy in violence, reducing his sentence and setting him out into the world "free."
In this film, no one is supposed to be the hero. The protagonist most certainly is not, as he was made to be atrocious, yet charming. It would be all too easy for the audience to pick a side on how to deal with criminals in society if the example given was a likable man, but his brutish behavior can make virtually anyone tempted to punish him harshly. The alienation of the audience was so successful that the film was banned in several countries for a time, as well as condemned by several churches. While it is widely regarded as a cult classic now, A Clockwork Orange pushed countless boundaries at the time of its release, and few films since have reached that same level.
2 Sátántangó (1994)
This 1994 drama film directed by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr is shot in black and white with a runtime exceeding seven hours. The film is shot entirely in long takes, and Tarr claims that there are only 150 or so shots in the entire film, several of which last more than ten minutes. To put that into context, according to James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University who has been studying the evolution of cinema over the past century, the average shot length in feature-length films today hovers around 2.5 seconds.
Long shots have become a bit of a fetish object among cinephiles, but Cutting uses shorter shots to better mesh with the natural fluctuations in human attention. The viewing experience becomes something of an endurance test, perhaps best exemplified by Andy Warhol’s art film Empire, whose 485-minute runtime consists solely of a static shot of the Empire State Building. As with Empire, Sátántangó makes the felt presence of time a key part of its experience, changing not only the way we watch and think about the film itself but films and filmgoing more generally.
1 Tim and Eric’s Billion-Dollar Movie (2012)
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Splitting the difference between the almost clinical artistic aims of directors like Tarr and Warhol and the visceral, disgust-driven shocks of torture p*rn are the cringe-inducing anti-comedies of Tim and Eric’s Billion-Dollar Movie’s Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim and Freddy Got Fingered’s Tom Green. More than any other genre, comedy is defined by its audience’s reaction. Action films, romances, and dramas all have some corollary to this, but only in comedy is a specific audience reaction tied intimately to success or failure; “killing” or “dying” in the parlance of stand-up comedy.
Films like Tim and Eric’s Billion-Dollar Movie, though, beg to differ. It has a kind of humor that actively alienates its audience with jokes that defy common structure and embrace off-putting material, driving a deep wedge between those who get it and those who don’t. The humor comes not so much from the material itself as the reaction its creators and fans know it elicits from mainstream audiences; in some respects, it's pure troll behavior, elevated to the level of art, and it's hard to imagine Buñuel wouldn't approve.
