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Chapter 2 focuses on a cognitive approach as a pertinent method to address complex narratives’ ‘difficult’ viewing experiences. As it argues, complexity does not only lie in a story’s formal composition itself, but is best understood in terms of how the narrative hinders viewers’ comprehension and meaning-making routines. Noticing that some films pose more conspicuous impediments to sense-making efforts than others, this chapter differentiates movies in regard to their relative complexity in cognitive terms – that is, their ability to cause various states of cognitive puzzlement and trigger diverse mental responses in their viewers. The cognitive approach will lead to reconsider the classificatory accuracy of existing concepts, such as the umbrella term of puzzle film. From there on, the chapter proposes more refined categories within the overarching division of narrative complexity, aiming to discern between different types of film that offer various degrees of complexity.

Chapter 3 describes how impossible puzzle films create paradoxical, incongruent or impossible narrative experiences. To understand the nature of the confusion these films create, this chapter adopts Leon Festinger’s original theory on the psychological state of cognitive dissonance (1957) and argues that the perplexing effects of impossible puzzle films can be understood as cognitive dissonances. These films strategically evoke and maintain dissonant cognitions in their viewers through internal incongruities (contradictions in their narration) and projected impossibilities (narrative structures or elements that disrupt the elementary knowledge, logic and schemas that viewers use to make sense of both real life and fiction). Along with more recent insights from embodied-cognitive sciences and narratology, cognitive dissonance theory offers us a tool to explain the effects that impossible puzzle films have on viewers.

Chapter 1 briefly introduces the trend of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. It concisely positions narrative complexity within broader shifts in the audiovisual media landscape, including the relation to recent developments in a techno-economical context, as well as this changing context’s impact on modes of viewing. This introductory chapter also briefly reviews existing studies on taxonomies that have so far offered formal-structural approaches to narrative complexity.

Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.

Chapter 4 addresses how effects of narrative cognitive dissonance incite in viewers an urge to make meaning, and therefore asks how viewers cope with dissonant experiences in narrative fiction. This chapter offers an overview of the different interpretive strategies and hermeneutic manoeuvres that viewers may utilise to ‘tame’ troubling or puzzling dissonances in narrative artworks. Regarding the reception and interpretation of highly complex stories, it aim to answer relevant questions such as ‘How do viewers usually make sense of or assign meaning to contradictory and impossible narrative elements?’, ‘What kinds of interpretive activity do these challenging films evoke in viewers?’ and ‘How do such interpretive activities shape our viewing experiences?’.

Starting from the illuminating example of Julio Cortázar’s 1956 mind-bending short story Continuidad de los parques (Continuity of Parks), this chapter offers an introductory outline of the aims and approaches of this study on narrative complexity in contemporary film. Cortázar’s intricate story generates various questions for its readers that are related to the topics explored in this book. What do such puzzling and enigmatic stories do in cinema? How do viewers make them work? What difficulties do they pose? What is engaging about these stories’ challenges, and what do audiences draw from these experiences?