🔴10 Best Non-Linear Movies That Play With Time💥

10 Best Non-Linear Movies That Play With Time

Non-linear movies can play with time in ways beyond a character traveling to the past or future. A select number of directors and writers can expertly weave together the past, present, and future into intriguing non-linear narratives. Their options include narratives that work backward or are completely scattered, comprising several different timelines.

While flashbacks are the most straightforward way to form a non-linear narrative, this is not where the concept ends. Some movies compare seemingly unrelated events to demonstrate the significance of recurring patterns and themes throughout history. Intentional ambiguity about the separation of the past and present creates an intriguing mystery. A character hunting for answers after a case of amnesia is also common in non-linear movies. Overall, the non-linear category includes some of cinema's most innovative movies that defy all expectations.

The Wachowski sisters' Cloud Atlas encompasses many characters, places, and times. Cloud Atlas' story is split among five narratives: a lawyer who is slowly poisoned by his doctor during a voyage across the Pacific in the mid-19th century; an aspiring composer writing letters to his lover in Britain in the early 20th century; a reporter investigating a corrupt power plant in 1970s San Francisco; a failing British publisher trapped in a nursing home in 2012; a clone rebelling again the system in 2144 Seoul; and a tribesman investigating mysterious ruins in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

Cloud Atlas cuts between narratives, showing moments of action centuries apart as though they are happening at the same time. The lives of all the characters are intertwined: The composer reads the lawyer's journal; the journalist finds the love letters that belonged to her informant's ancestor; the fugitive clone becomes a deity to the future tribesmen. Noteworthy actors, including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Jim Broadbent, take on various roles across different periods. Ultimately, Cloud Atlas is based on the theme that the entire cast is bound by their love for and dependence upon other people.

Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise "Ellie" Turner, an aspiring fashion designer who moves to London for school and finds her life affected by the ghost of Anya Taylor-Joy's Sandie, an aspiring singer of 1960s London. Eloise is initially thrilled by her dreams of Sandie's life, making Sandie her fashion muse. Yet the tragic events of Sandie's life start to intrude upon Eloise in the form of violent visions, leading up to Last Night in Soho's shocking ending. While Eloise and Sandie's narratives overlap, Matt Smith and Diana Rigg play memorable supporting roles.