The Rock, Justin Timberlake, And Others Were In This Insane 2006 Movie
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales might be one of the strangest movies ever made.
Richard Kelly, the director and writer of Donnie Darko, released Southland Tales in 2006, five years after Donnie Darko. It’s one of the strangest movies ever made; so strange, that it hardly feels like a movie. It feels like a chaotic fever dream with a purely incomprehensible plot.
Yet what makes the film even more provocative—and fun to revisit—is that Kelly somehow secured a cast of Hollywood A-listers and a massive budget to bring it to life. Now, Richard Kelly is actively shopping a sequel, Southland Tales 2, but the question remains: will anyone finance it, given how badly the first one flopped?
I, for one, would love Southland Tales 2, and here I present you with a few glorious gems and facts about the first one.
The A-list cast is absolutely bonkers.
Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) plays an amnesiac action star who’s married to Mandy Moore.
Justin Timberlake appears as an Iraq War veteran addicted to a fictional drug called Liquid Karma. Sarah Michelle Gellar stars as Krysta Lynn Kapowski (aka Krysta Now), a porn star-turned-influencer.
Amy Poehler is a punk neo-Marxist, while Seann William Scott plays a cop struggling with a Donnie Darko-esque mental condition that allows him to see the future.
Even Cheri Oteri shows up as a media manipulator obsessed with energy drinks and nail polish. The cast list alone feels like a surreal joke.
The movie is really a bunch of TikTok clips, even though it was made way before TikTok.
Southland Tales isn’t really a movie—it’s a postmodern collage of surreal skits, conspiratorial rants, choreographed stunts, and political commentary. It’s a movie that feels like a scrapbook of fragmented ideas, and its chaotic nature mirrors the scrolling, content-heavy world of social media. If it had been released as a series of TikTok clips, it might have been a viral sensation. But it was released as a Hollywood blockbuster, and bombed obviously.
Economically, ekk! Look at these box office numbers.
The film earned less than $300,000 at the box office on a $17 million budget. Kelly later followed this movie with The Box, which grossed just over $30 million worldwide on a $25 million budget, better, but still nothing like Donnie Darko.
Justin Timberlake lip-synched to The Killers in the film while covered in blood.
In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, and TikTok-esque scenes, Justin Timberlake lip-syncs to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” while high on Liquid Karma. The scene features Timberlake wandering through an arcade surrounded by dancing women and surreal visuals. It’s as absurd as it sounds and perfectly encapsulates the film’s tone.
It’s an uncannily prophetic film.
Here is just one easy example of the prophecy of the film. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character, Krysta Now — a porn star turned influencer and business mogul — embodies the convergence of personal branding and media sensationalism that would explode in the 2010s and 2020s.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the film touches on many aspects of critical issues in 2025: surveillance, conspiracy theories run rampant, synthetic drugs, the time-warping effects of social media; oh and Word War III…
It’s hard to find Southland Tales streaming on any major platform, but you can rent it on Amazon, or even buy the blu-ray. You can also buy it on Apple TV. Give it watch if you’re adventurous, and maybe we can help Southland Tales 2 financed.