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Best Amnesia Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of amnesia cinema — measured across 2,538 indexed frames from 29 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Amnesia films over-index on blonde hair, baseball cap and coat — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Before I Go to Sleep (2014)

    Rowan JofféDP Ben DavisIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Forty year old Christine Lucas wakes up in bed with a man she does not know, in an unfamiliar house. The man explains that he is her husband, Ben, and that she suffered brain damage from a car accident ten years earlier. Christine wakes up every morning with no memory of her life from her early twenties onwards. Christine receives treatment from Dr. Nasch, a neurologist at a local hospital who provides her a camera to record her thoughts and progress each day, and calls her every morning to remind her to watch the video in the camera. Soon, she starts to discover the truth around her.

  2. 2

    Mysterious Skin (2004)

    Gregg ArakiDP Steve GainerIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    A gay teenage prostitute and another teen, both from the same small town in Kansas, narrate separate stories from their childhoods. The prostitute's story is about a disturbing homosexual encounter with his pedophile baseball coach, and the other teen's story revolves around an amnesia blackout during which he thinks he may have been abducted by aliens. Later, the second teen finds clues linking the gay prostitute (now living in New York City) to his possible alien abduction, so he tracks him down to finally seek out the truth.

  3. 3

    Mulholland Drive (2001)

    David LynchDP Peter DemingIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Still untarnished by the false promises of the rapacious film industry, the wide-eyed actress, Betty, sets foot on bustling, sun-kissed Hollywood. Brimming with hope, and eager to spread her wings and prove her worth, Betty moves in Aunt Ruth's expensive apartment, unbeknownst to her, however, that fate has other plans in store for her, setting the stage for life-altering experiences with the unexpected, the indecipherable, and the unknown. Now, in the centre of an elaborate labyrinth of half-truths, faded memories, unrequited loves, and dangerous encounters with the city's ugly face lies a strange key to a mysterious keyhole, an even stranger indigo-blue cube, the young director, Adam, and one cryptic woman: the amnesiac brunette and devilishly seductive car-crash survivor, Rita. But, time flies and Rita's opaque past demands answers. After all, both women deserve the truth. What is the secret of the serpentine, dream-crushing Mulholland Drive?

  4. 4

    The Butterfly Effect (2004)

    Eric Bress, J. Mackye GruberDP Matthew F. LeonettiIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    As a child, Evan Treborn was afflicted with blackouts where he would be in one place one minute and then another the next, remembering absolutely nothing in-between. Now all grown up and in college, he decides to read from an old journal he wrote to remember stuff that might have happened in the in-between, and suddenly finds himself back at a certain point in his life. He realizes that those blackouts he had were actually empty spaces of time he had to fill up later in life. Attempting to use this ability to undo unpleasant past events, Evan starts to find that every time he goes back and tries to fix things, he ends up making everything worse. How can he prevent more tragedies from happening and save the one girl he ever loved, Kayleigh (Amy Smart)?

  5. 5

    50 First Dates (2004)

    Peter SegalDP Jack N. GreenIMDb 6.8TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    Henry Roth lives in a Hawaiian paradise with the company of endless women with no strings attached. This is until he meets Lucy Whitmore. Both Henry and Lucy enjoy the company of each other and feel the start of a serious relationship occurring. Approaching Lucy the next day, Henry is confused when Lucy fails to recognize him. This is the moment Henry discovers that Lucy actually suffers from short term memory loss and can't remember each individual day. Henry won't let this stop him and is prepared to make her fall in love with him all over again, each and every day.

  6. 6

    Paris, Texas (1984)

    Wim WendersDP Robby MüllerIMDb 8.1TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    A man wanders out of the desert after a four year absence. His brother finds him, and together they return to L.A. to reunite the man with his young son. Soon after, he and the boy set out to locate the mother of the child, who left shortly after the man disappeared.

  7. 7

    Overboard (2018)

    Rob GreenbergDP Michael BarrettIMDb 6.0TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Kate Sullivan is a single mom of three daughters who works two jobs while studying to be a nurse. She is assigned to clean carpets on a yacht owned by spoiled, arrogant playboy Leonardo 'Leo' Montenegro. Leo makes rude remarks towards Kate and fires her without pay when she refuses to bring him food. When Kate calls out his behavior, Leo pushes her off the boat along with her cleaning equipment. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Leo's sisters Magdalena and Sofia are tending to their ailing father. Furious when Leo is announced as his successor to run the family-owned company, Magda decides to visit him. That night, Leo slips off the yacht and falls into the ocean unnoticed. He wakes up on a beach with amnesia and no recollection of his identity. He wanders through town and eventually reaches the hospital. Magda finds him and leaves him there unclaimed after learning he has amnesia. She returns home and falsely reports that Leo has died. Sofia suspects Magda is lying..

  8. 8

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

    Michel GondryDP Ellen KurasIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Much to his surprise, timid Joel Barish is shocked to discover that the love of his life, sparky Clementine, has had him erased from her memory. To pay her back in the same coin, poor Joel summons up the courage to undergo a painless but intricate medical procedure to do the same, utterly unaware that darkness is an essential part of the light. Now, as hurt and angry Joel's ugly recollections of Clementine gradually fade away, giving way to a soulless black void, suddenly, he begins having second thoughts, toying with the idea of stopping the irreversible process. In the end, is ignorance really bliss?

  9. 9

    Dark City (1998)

    Alex ProyasDP Dariusz WolskiIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    John Murdoch awakens alone in a strange hotel to find that he has lost his memory and is wanted for a series of brutal and bizarre murders. While trying to piece together his past, he stumbles upon a fiendish underworld controlled by a group of beings known as The Strangers who possess the ability to put people to sleep and alter the city and its inhabitants. Now Murdoch must find a way to stop them before they take control of his mind and destroy him.

  10. 10

    Spellbound (1945)

    Alfred HitchcockDP George BarnesIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    When Dr. Anthony Edwardes arrives at a Vermont mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director, Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst, discovers Edwardes is actually an impostor. The man confesses that the real Dr. Edwardes is dead and fears he may have killed him, but cannot recall anything. Dr. Peterson, however is convinced his impostor is innocent of the man's murder, and joins him on a quest to unravel his amnesia through psychoanalysis.

What amnesia films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a amnesia frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — blonde hair is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • blonde hair2.5×
  • baseball cap2.2×
  • coat1.9×
  • pillow1.6×
  • neon sign1.6×

How amnesia films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate amnesia from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 86%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 2,538 frames from 29 films carrying the amnesia label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/amnesia

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used