Flashback (2021)

Flashback is the kind of thriller that doesn’t just ask you to solve a mystery—it invites you to feel what it’s like when your own mind becomes the crime scene. Christopher MacBride builds a fantasy-tinged puzzle box where memory, regret, and paranoia slide over each other with a woozy elegance, carried by Dylan O’Brien’s committed, increasingly unmoored performance. The film’s visuals and pulsing music work like a second nervous system, turning ordinary spaces into places that seem to breathe with menace and possibility. It won’t be for viewers who want clean answers and a straight line from A to B, but if you enjoy ambitious, mood-forward mysteries that linger like a half-remembered dream, this one is easy to recommend.

Flashback is clearly aiming for a trippy, memory-as-a-maze thriller where trauma, drugs, and regret blur into one uneasy puzzle, and it commits hard to that vibe. The problem is the storytelling is so intentionally scrambled and chaotic that it can feel less like a clever mystery and more like being trapped in someone else’s confusing dream, waiting for clarity that doesn’t always arrive. If you need a grounded plot, a protagonist you can really latch onto, or a mystery that plays fair and pays off cleanly, this may test your patience. That said, Dylan O’Brien sells the spiraling paranoia well, and if you enjoy surreal, style-forward mind-benders that prioritize mood over answers, you might be more forgiving than most.