17 Movies That Aren't About What You Think

Subtext is a wonderful thing, and though many movies have other things bubbling up beneath

the surface of a seemingly simple, straightforward story, occasionally the subtext is sly enough

that you might end up missing it entirely. And that's absolutely possible with the following movies, each of which could easily be taken

at mere face value as crowd-pleasing genre films where what you see is pretty much what

you get. However, each have a wealth of other meanings that might only become apparent on repeat

viewings, if at all. So with that being said, these are 10 movies that aren't about what you think

Chef Jon Favreau's Chef may seem like a pretty surface-level movie about an elite chef

Carl Casper, played by Favreau, who builds his own food truck business

after growing frustrated with cynical restaurant owners and obnoxious critics. But look beyond the admittedly gorgeous food

and Favreau's film is really a thinly-veiled reflection of his own time directing 2010's superhero blockbuster Iron Man 2

The sequel to the hit superhero flick received middling notices from critics and reportedly suffered from serious executive interference behind the scenes, in turn dulling Favreau's creative vision for the project

And so, Chef was a pure reaction to this, using food as a tight symbol of Favreau's attempts to cook in Hollywood

The food truck is really a metaphor for Chef. The movie itself, a comparatively inexpensive enterprise full of heart

following on from a soulless, big money exercise that left the creative in question feeling burnt out

The Wolf of Snow Hollow If you were a police officer and everyone was trying to tell you that the local murders in your town

were actually being carried out by a werewolf, well, you'd probably think you were the only sane person left

Luckily for you, though, you're probably not this police officer, and when you're watching a horror movie literally called The Wolf of Snow Hollow

and gory murders are being attributed to a lycanthrope, you're probably not going to hesitate in assuming that the case has been cracked

no matter how daft it may sound, especially when a big bad wolfy figure is seen lurking in the shadows

Consequently, you spend most of the runtime of The Wolf of Snow Hollow assuming you're watching a pretty effective modern werewolf flick

but the final act reveals that this isn't the case at all. It turns out that the murders aren't supernatural

but they're still technically kinda caused by a werewolf. Confused? Well, bear with me

It turns out that the very human serial killer committing the crimes does so while dressing up in a gigantic werewolf costume

ripping his victims' bodies apart while indulging in his cosplaying hobby every full moon

Drag Me to Hell Sam Raimi's unhinged horror comedy Drag Me to Hell

is actually about far more than a woman trying to shake off a curse

which threatens to drag her into the fiery below in three days. It's about eating disorders

Within days of the film's 2009 release, fans began to speculate that Raimi had actually crafted it

as a symbol for protagonist Christine's struggles with food. For one, we learn early on that Christine was an overweight child

and given that so many of the film's hallucination scenes revolved around food or vomit

they've been interpreted as a result of her eating disorder rather than having a genuine supernatural origin

While Raimi himself hasn't ever confirmed this reading of the film, it's so perfectly spot on that it becomes tough to consider the movie any other way on subsequent viewings

And even if Raimi went ahead and refuted it, we'd invoke some death of the author here and say that Drag Me to Hell doesn't belong to him anymore

The theory has firmly taken root, and that's that. It Comes at Night It Comes at Night was a victim of misjudged expectations when it first released

It was marketed as something of a creature feature, and as such, fans took the title quite literally

It was presumed that this movie would be about something haunting a cast of heroes in the night

as a result of a virus that had otherwise eliminated humanity. When it came out though and fans finally got to the bottom of this mystery established in the marketing

the film revealed that the something wasn't actually a monster or a creature at all

It was actually just the paranoia of the human characters. Ultimately, It Comes at Night is as much of a family drama as it is a horror movie

It follows a small family who survived the virus by keeping isolated, coming into contact with another family in need

and the stresses of the two living together, each thinking that the other is a threat

What comes at night, then, is the worry for each character. The worry that putting their trust in other people will result in the death of the people that they're supposed to protect

Ultimately, it's a great film, but not quite the straight creature feature some fans wanted

On the Waterfront. The masterful best picture drama on the waterfront follows boxer Terry Malloy played by Marlon Brando as he compelled to expose the crimes of a local mob boss in order to put a stop to the rising tide of violence

Though it's easily missed if watching the film today without its full historical context

On the Waterfront was actually the director's response to those who criticised him for his 1952 testimony for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Activities

Director Elia Kazan identified eight communists in the film industry, in turn contributing to the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, which saw named communists denied work throughout Hollywood

This led Kazan to become a pariah in many industry circles, and ensured he remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life

Kazan defiantly defended his decision to testify for years afterward, and On the Waterfront is largely accepted to be his attempt to explain or even celebrate the very act of informing

While it doesn't make Elia Kazan's film any less brilliant, it does cast a strange, uneasy shadow over its accomplishments

especially given that history hasn't been remotely kind to Kazan's decision to turn in his colleagues

Come to Daddy Come to Daddy is one of the most delightfully surprising horror movies in recent years

Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood has always been drawn to weird, eccentric genre picks since hanging up his hairy feet as Frodo Baggins

but this 2020 effort is easily his strangest project yet. Ostensibly, it's about a young man, played by Wood, who attempts to reconnect with his father after not seeing him for decades

The thing is, even this whole setup is steeped in mystery, as it's unclear why Wood's character was contacted out of the blue

and why his father, who constantly berates him when he arrives, is so hostile towards his son

You expect, then, the movie to explore this dynamic, and have some kind of sinister reveal explaining why the two needed to reconnect

or why the father was missing in the first place. However, the father actually dies from a heart attack before the end of the first act

It then becomes a film about the son having to live with the body of his dead dad as the morgue is too busy to pick it up

all the while strange noises keep him up at night. Is the father haunting the house or is something else supernatural afoot

Well, no. It turns out that his real father is actually alive and being held hostage in the basement

and consequently is in a bit of a predicament. Come to Daddy then has twists within twists, and the movie that you think you're in for at the beginning resembles nothing of the one you're stuck with at the end, The Stranger's Prayer Night

Fans waited a decade for a sequel to The Strangers, and when it finally arrived, it was far from what they expected, but not in a bad way

Initially, the second movie seems like the natural continuation of the first, with the titular family of strangers hunting down a series of victims in a trailer park

Though not a home invasion in the regular sense, all the beats are still hit here

Phones are destroyed, people are stalked, and characters are killed in brutal ways

After this, though, the sequel shifts focus entirely and becomes less a movie about the villains killing a band of hapless victims

but rather the victims fighting back and taking out each member of the murderous family

It inverts the slasher trope completely, as the remaining heroes kill off their tormentors one by one

I mean, that's one way to get fans from spending years begging for another sequel, I suppose

Jurassic World. Much as the fourth Jurassic Park movie is in many respects emblematic of Hollywood's tireless need to keep creatively bankrupt IP going

a subversive throughline is nevertheless suffused within its script. The film's most interesting idea is that the titular theme park is now successful enough that mere cloned dinosaurs have become something of a bore to the general public

prompting Park Bigwig to create the Indominus Rex, a genetic hybrid dinosaur which predictably turns out to be incredibly volatile

This need for the park to keep one up in itself holds a mirror up to Hollywood itself, where, in an era of blockbuster excess, the thrills made possible by CGI-soaked $200 million temples have become ordinary, even expected, and in turn, actually less thrilling

It's fitting to insert this commentary into a movie franchise, which itself toyed with the notion of introducing gun-wielding dinosaurs at one point

surmising that few spectacles are ever grand enough to truly please audiences

And almost a decade later, where tentpole budgets are skyrocketing wildly out of control and regularly struggling to turn a profit

this thematic has aged exceptionally well. Piercing. For the first act of piercing, you think you can pretty much sketch out where the story is going

In the very first scene the movie introduces you to Reed a family man with a wife and newborn child The thing is the guy is a total psycho and in this first scene he shown standing over his kid crib with an ice pick From here the audience is quickly informed that

he's a wannabe serial killer, and is using the cover of a business trip to rent a hotel room and

indulge in his bloodlust by inviting over a sex worker. If you've seen American Psycho, it seems

pretty cut and dry where this one's going. However, if you've ever read a book by Ryu Murakami

the author who provided the source material for this movie, then you know to never expect a

straightforward story. Consequently, things take a turn when Jackie, the sex worker, turns up and

understands exactly what this dude plans to do. It turns out that she's a little twisted as well

and the power dynamic is then inverted, resulting in one of the strangest psychosexual horrors in

recent memory. Reed turns from the predator into the prey, and things only get stranger from there

an out. Henry, portrait of a serial killer? This is not. Antebellum. Now, a lot of you might already

understand exactly what Antebellum is about, but that's because the trailers for it, for whatever

reason, decided to just outright spoil the big twist that the entire movie is built around

Which is a huge shame, because the film itself does so much work to hide the big mid-movie reveal

and only really has any suspense at all if you don't know it's coming. But I'm getting ahead of

myself, let me first explain. Antebellum opens on Eden, a Civil War Eva slave who recently attempted

to escape a plantation in Louisiana, resulting in a bunch of her fellow slaves being murdered

The first act essentially follows her daily life, as she's forced to work, is routinely assaulted

by confederate soldiers, and slowly hatches a plot to escape. Well, that is until one night when

she suddenly hears a modern phone ringing outside, and then the flick flashes back a few weeks prior

Here, it turns out that Antebellum isn't a period piece at all, but rather takes place in the present day

Eden, really a beloved author called Veronica, has been kidnapped along with a bunch of other black people by the white owners of a Civil War reenactment centre

It is absolutely bonkers and doesn't totally work, but it's certainly not what you expect from the first half an hour

Enemy. Denis Villeneuve's 2013 psychological thriller Enemy follows a college professor, Adam Bell

who learns that he has a doppelganger, an actor named Anthony. What follows is a deeply bizarre and intoxicating mystery thriller

largely concerned with identity and sense of self, but it's also secretly about something else entirely

male fear of commitment. Spiders are a recurring visual motive throughout the film

culminating, of course, in the terrifying final view of Adam staring down at a gantic tarantula

which has suddenly replaced his wife, Helen. Rather than recalling fear, though

Adam simply stares at the spider, with disinterest, even boredom. Of the many fascinating interpretations of the film and its

ending, the most widely accepted reading is that the spiders represent a fear of intimacy and

romantic commitment. After all, it's clear that both Adam and Anthony aren't entirely happy in

their relationships, indicated by their eventual pursuit of each other's partners with fatal

consequences. A film's end when Adam has assumed Anthony's life, including living with an unknowing

Helen, a sudden transformation into a spider indicates his innate revulsion to domesticity

that he already views her as a mere obstacle to him living a free life

The Empty Man. The Empty Man has received a whole bunch of buzz with writers and fans alike

praising it as an overlooked gem from 2020. However, after watching it, it is pretty clear why this didn't make much of a demo

and that's because it's impossible to market. A horror movie that runs an epic two and a half hours is already a tough sell

But it doesn't help when it also blends completely different subgenres and tells a story that's intentionally designed to keep you in the dark

So if you read the synopsis, you might go into it expecting something like The Bye Bye Man

where a bunch of kids are being haunted by a supernatural entity who only grows stronger the more you think about them

And that is what the movie is about for around 20 minutes

See, the thing about The Empty Man is that it's essentially three movies in one

The prologue essentially acts as its own short horror film set in the snowy mountains

then we get the teen slasher and finally we stumble into a cult conspiracy and doomsday prophecy

Consequently, as soon as you start thinking you know what the movie is going to be about, it switches gears and turns into something else

One Cut of the Dead. Just when you think the zombie subgenre has no new ideas to offer

something like One Cut of the Dead comes along. Now, this movie is a regular on the WhatCultureHorror channel

but it simply couldn't be left off a list about movies that aren't about what you think

That because One Cut of the Dead is three different movies in one but it pulls each one off better than The Empty Man does Initially it starts out like a regular low budget zombie flick but it quickly revealed that this is actually a movie being filmed within the movie

The real story is about a zombie outbreak happening while this camera crew is recording their

fictional zombie movie, and the confusion and chaos that comes from that situation

However, the film pivots yet again halfway through to show that this story isn't real

either by flashing back and showing how this apparently realistic zombie outbreak is also part

of a fictional film. So we're actually watching a movie about how a bunch of fictional people made

a zombie movie about a group of people making a zombie movie. It sounds much more confusing

Talk to me. Breakout horror hit Talk to Me follows a group of teenagers who learn that they can

contact spirits by touching a severed, embalmed hand and saying, talk to me. It's a terrific

fiercely original concept, but with this being an A24 horror film, of course, there's more to it

than that. In the vein of all elevated horror, Talk To Me is really about something else

It's actually a veiled metaphor for drug abuse as a coping mechanism for grief

Teenage protagonist Mia, played by Sophie Wilde, effectively becomes addicted to the hand's

influence, using it as a source of comfort following the recent death of her mother

That the hand is passed around at parties only makes the drug parallel that much more apparent

While certainly not the most subtle thing on this list, Talk To Me is more than a mere wild horror film

It's a sad and potent examination of how people can lose their sense of self to outside forces while trying to deal with crippling loss

Crimson Peak. Marketing plays a huge role in setting audience expectations. And Crimson Peak is one of the best examples of a movie's advertising completely misrepresenting its actual content

Guillermo del Toro's gothic romance is certainly steeped in horror. There are supernatural creatures ready to deliver jump scares and plenty of gore to go around

but it's far from a conventional horror movie, which makes it so weird then that the trailers sold it as your regular multiplex fare

a horror closer to The Conjuring or Ouija. Now there's nothing wrong with those kinds of movies of course

but it meant that audiences going into Crimson Peak were expecting a straightforward ghost tale

and were left with few scares and mainly a family melodrama and a lengthy opening

that keeps the horror elements to the minimum. As one character makes clear, this isn't a ghost story, it's more a story with a ghost in it

The ghost is just a metaphor. The boy. After Annabelle reminded everyone that horror movies about killer dolls can bring in stacks and stacks of cash

it was unsurprising when similar films were quickly put into the works. One of these was the unimaginatively titled The Boy

a horror that swapped out the disheveled Annabelle for an eerily well-dressed doll called Brams

The trailers promised the kind of scares that act as this subgenre's bread and butter

You know the ones. The little doll kicking back in a rocking chair, very slowly turning his head when people aren't looking

and returning unharmed when his own is thrown away. And for the majority of the movie, this is exactly what it delivered

Audiences got to see the killer doll tropes played straight, as a family move into a house and become wary of Brahms

until a late reveal throws all that on its head. That's because, as it turns out, this isn't a killer doll movie at all

but rather a movie about a human killer who lives in the walls of the house

Brahms the doll had no supernatural properties at all. Well, not until he was given some via a sequel retcon

and the real Brahms was a disturbed man living in secret passageways the whole time

An Officer and a Spy Roman Polanski's 2019 film An Officer and a Spy is a dramatization of the Dreyfus Affair

an infamous miscarriage of justice in which French-Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus

was falsely convicted of treason and initially sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island

While in the hands of most other filmmakers, the movie would have been taken as a mere historical drama based on a fascinating true story

Given that Polanski has been an exile from the US government since 1977

when he fled the country after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor, it's impossible to view it this way

While the film depicts Dreyfus as an exile, numerous prominent critics drew parallels between this and Polanski's story

something Polanski himself even admitted as inspiration while making the movie. But while Polanski evidently sees kinship between himself and Dreyfus, it's worth noting that Dreyfus was innocent, while Polanski pleaded guilty, which only made the discourse surrounding the film's release that much more bitter

Though the films largely praised Polanski's filmmaking, they were less thrilled at the neon signposted implication that he too suffered a miscarriage of justice when the stated facts of his case suggest otherwise