What is it about?
Typical discourses around the puzzle film—a genre that typically eschews classic storytelling for more complex narrative techniques, such as entangled secondary/tertiary plotlines, and characters with mental or psychological instability—often privilege the manipulation of the film’s temporality and narratology. However, in this paper, I perform a close textual analysis of the mise-en-scène of Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) to demonstrate how these puzzle films privilege spatiality over time and plot to depict cognitive processes associated with mental and psychological instability, thereby bringing attention to an underrepresented attribute of the genre. I focus on the influence of surrealism on mise-en-scène, as surrealist art and cinema manipulate space to explore the psyche. I also draw on these films’ production history to show how the filmmakers, production crew, and actors understood approaches to space as a cognitive process.