20 best movies like Inland Empire (2006)

Determined to pull in the Pulitzer Prize, reporter Johnny Barrett will go to any length necessary to win the coveted award. When he learns of an unsolved murder committed at a mental institution, Barrett devises a scheme to solve it and earn himself recognition. With the assistance of a psychiatrist and his girlfriend, Barrett convinces the doctors at the institution to commit him. Once inside, he begins his investigation -- and gradually loses his mind.

A journalist and his girlfriend get pulled in while they investigate a cult whose leader claims to be from the future.

Kafka, an insurance worker gets embroiled in an underground group after a co-worker is murdered. The underground group is responsible for bombings all over town, attempting to thwart a secret organization that controls the major events in society. He eventually penetrates the secret organization and must confront them.

Pawel, a Polish man in his early 30s, makes a living with his father Zygmunt importing second-hand clothing from the North of France to Southern Poland. On his way back from one of regular "business trips", Pawel is shocked to discover his father's picture on the cover of a Polish tabloid newspaper. The headline "traitor" is written next to his name. Zygmunt is a genuine hero of the struggle against totalitarianism and a recognized member of the "Solidarnosc" labor movement of the 80s. But now, Zygmunt is suddenly accused by the paper of having acted as a secret informer called THE MOLE by the communist regime.

Lee Blanchard and Bucky Bleichert are former boxers-turned-cops in 1940s Los Angeles and, when an aspiring young actress turns up dead, Blanchard and Bleichert must grapple with corruption, narcissism, stag films and family madness as they pursue the killer.

Two aging film actresses live as virtual recluses in an old Hollywood mansion. Jane Hudson, a successful child star, cares for her crippled sister Blanche, whose career in later years eclipsed that of Jane. Now the two live together, their relationship affected by simmering subconscious thoughts of mutual envy, hate and revenge.

A hopeful young starlet uncovers the ominous origins of the Hollywood elite and enters into a deadly agreement in exchange for fame and fortune.

Mourning the accidental death of his wife and having just moved to New York with his young son, laconic police psychologist Cal Jamison is reluctantly drawn into a series of grisly, ritualistic murders involving the immolation of two youths.

An alcoholic writer begins having visions apparently warning him of impending danger. After he delivers a lecture, he begins an affair with a woman from the audience. The visions intensify, however, and begin to threaten his relationship with the woman, since it may be her the visions are warning against.

After losing an acting role and his girlfriend, Jake Scully finally catches a break: he gets offered a gig house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. While peering through the beautiful home's telescope one night, he spies a gorgeous blonde dancing in her window. But when he witnesses the girl's murder, it leads Scully through the netherworld of the adult entertainment industry on a search for answers -- with porn actress Holly Body as his guide.

Mike Max is a Hollywood producer who became powerful and rich thanks to brutal and bloody action films. His ignored wife Paige is close to leaving him. Suddenly Mike is kidnapped by two bandits, but escapes and hides out with his Mexican gardener's family for a while. At the same time, surveillance expert Ray Bering is looking for what happens in the city, but it is not clear what he wants. The police investigation for Max's disappearance is led by detective Doc Block, who falls in love with actress Cat who is playing in ongoing Max's production.

1921 New York. An immigrant woman is tricked into a life of burlesque and vaudeville until a dazzling magician tries to save her and reunite her with her sister who is being held in the confines of Ellis Island.

On the night a comet is passing near Earth, eight friends at a dinner party experience a troubling chain of reality bending events. When the power goes out, they discover that the only house on the street left with power also holds many secrets.

When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry.

Once a known counterculture figure, June E. Leigh now lives in self-imposed exile in her South Bronx apartment during the incendiary '77 Summer of Sam. When an unseen tormentor begins exploiting June's weaknesses, her insular universe begins to unravel.

In 1949 composer Roman Strauss is executed for the vicious murder of his wife Margaret with a pair of scissors. In 1990s Los Angeles a mute amnesiac woman shows up at an orphanage and private eye Mike Church is called in to investigate. Under hypnosis both the woman and Church seem to have a strange link back to the Strauss murder.

An aspiring actress begins to suspect that her temperamental boyfriend is a murderer.

Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.

Australian lawyer David Burton agrees with reluctance to defend a group of Aboriginal people charged with murdering one of their own. He suspects the victim was targeted for violating a tribal taboo, but the defendants deny any tribal association. Burton, plagued by apocalyptic visions of water, slowly realizes danger may come from his own involvement with the Aboriginal people and their prophecies.

A reclusive surveillance expert is hired to spy on a mysterious blackmailer, who just may be a serial killer.

Richard spots a man dumping a body, and decides to expose the man he thinks is the culprit with his friend Alex Cutter.

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds… and remembers.

Gumshoe Philip Marlowe is hired by the oafish Moose Malloy to track down his former girlfriend. He's also hired to accompany an effeminate playboy buy back some jewels. When the exchange results in the playboy's murder, Marlowe can't leave the case alone, and soon discovers it's related to Malloy's. As he gets drawn deeper into a complex web of intrigue by a mysterious blonde, the detective finds his own life in increasing jeopardy.

Suspecting that people around him are turning into evil creatures, a troubled man questions whether to protect his only friend from an impending war, or from himself.

A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgangers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.

Walter Sparrow is an animal control officer that becomes obsessed with a mysterious book that seems to be based on his own life. As soon as he opens the book, he notices strange parallels between what he reads and what he's experienced. But now he's worried that a fictional murder might materialize.

An aging, reclusive Southern belle plagued by a horrifying family secret descends into madness after the arrival of a lost relative.

When a dead newborn is found, wrapped in bloody sheets, in the bedroom wastebasket of a young novice, psychiatrist Martha Livingston is called in to determine if the seemingly innocent novice, who knows nothing of sex or birth, is competent enough to stand trial for the murder of the baby.

Leona Stevenson is confined to bed and uses her telephone to keep in contact with the outside world. One day she overhears a murder plot on the telephone and is desperate to find out who is the intended victim.

A single mother is swept into a dark underworld, while her teenage son discovers a road that leads him to a secret underwater town.

A look inside an offbeat boarding school for young girls.

This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather — without snow. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus tent, which is put up in the main square, to see — as the outcome of their wait — the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighboring settlings, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs — the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost — disturbs the order of the small town. Ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose destructive emotions...

In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.

Two young men strangle their "inferior" classmate, hide his body in their apartment, and invite his friends and family to a dinner party as a means to challenge the "perfection" of their crime.

Sixteen year old Jude discovers each and every one of his fears is true.

An insurance investigator begins discovering that the impact a horror writer's books have on his fans is more than inspirational.

A quiet and inconspicuous man rents an apartment in France where the previous tenant committed suicide, and begins to suspect his landlord and neighbors are trying to subtly change him into the last tenant so that he too will kill himself.

In 1922, a young novelist goes to the countryside to write her latest book and falls victim to terrifying hallucinations and nightmares.

Kat Connors is 17 years old when her perfect homemaker mother, Eve, disappears. Having lived for so long in an emotionally repressed household, she barely registers her mother's absence and certainly doesn't blame her doormat of a father, Brock, for the loss. But as time passes, Kat begins to come to grips with how deeply Eve's disappearance has affected her. Returning home on a break from college, she finds herself confronted with the truth about her mother's departure, and her own denial about the events surrounding it...

A woman who survived the brutal killing of her family as a child is forced to confront the events of that day.

A young journalist goes deep undercover within a mountain commune and becomes manipulated by a duplicitous cult leader.

Based on the true events of the only case in US History where a spirit caused the death of a man.

A man descends into paranoia after trapping what he believes to be the devil in his basement, but things take a dark turn when his family unexpectedly arrive for Christmas.

Following a terrible car crash, a woman (Christina Ricci) awakes to find an enigmatic mortician (Liam Neeson) preparing her for burial.

A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational axe murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness.

Christine Collins is overjoyed when her kidnapped son is brought back home. But when Christine suspects that the boy returned to her isn't her child, the police captain has her committed to an asylum.

The complicated life and controversial suicide of George Reeves is investigated by a fictional private detective who finds that there are reasons to suspect that Reeves may not have killed himself after all. The detective also finds that there is a little of George Reeves in himself, and maybe, each of us.

A personal shopper in Paris refuses to leave the city until she makes contact with her twin brother who previously died there. Her life becomes more complicated when a mysterious person contacts her via text message.

A man with the ability to enter peoples' memories takes on the case of a brilliant, troubled sixteen-year-old girl to determine whether she is a sociopath or a victim of trauma.

After the death of his boss's wife, a young engineer faces the sudden psychological metamorphosis of his own wife, seemingly possessed by the soul of the deceased...