The 50 Best Movie Plot Twists Of All Time - Page 2 of 5

40. The Hunchback Is His Wife & Son – “Kill List” (2011)
Not everything about the ending of Ben Wheatley’s horror breakthrough “Kill List” makes sense, somewhat by design. But the gut-punch it includes near the end certainly does, on an emotional level. Hitman Jay (Neil Maskell) is something of a monster, but one redeemed by his status as a genuinely loving family man to wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) and son Sam (Harry Simpson). So it’s all the more devastating at the end, when he’s forced by straw-masked cultists into a knife fight with a masked hunchback, only to learn after defeating his adversary that it was really Shel, with Sam strapped to her back. It’s the kind of horror that makes you feel nauseous (in a good way?), and feels like the true culmination of everything that came before.

39. Leonard Did It After All – “Witness For The Prosecution” (1957)
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas virtually made a career out of the Did-They-Do-It-No-They-Didn’t-Oh-Wait-They-Did thriller (see “Jagged Edge” and “Basic Instinct”), but that particular twist was pioneered, cinematically speaking, in Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution.” The director’s purest thriller sees sickly lawyer Charles Laughton take on the case of a young man (Tyrone Power) accused of killing an elderly widow, with the accused’s wife (Marlene Dietrich) being forced to testify that her husband had confessed to the crime. A mysterious woman gives Laughton a letter suggesting that Dietrich has a lover, giving her motivation to lie, and Power gets off — but shockingly, Dietrich then confesses that she was actually the mysterious woman, undermining her own testimony to save her guilty husband. It’s one of Christie’s niftier twists, beautifully executed here.

38. It’s a Murderous Dwarf, Not His Dead Daughter – “Don’t Look Now” (1973)
Look, this is a reductive list and the vast majority of these films are the kind of plot-driven genre movies that we don’t feel too bad about retrospectively deconstructing in a relatively crude manner. But forgive us, Movie Gods, for doing the same to Nicolas Roeg‘s horror masterpiece “Don’t Look Now,” which is so much more than its double-edged twist, but in which the twist is so all-time great we have to include it here. Guilt-ridden by the drowning death of his daughter, Donald Sutherland‘s grieving father pursues a vision of her through the back alleys of Venice, only to discover it’s not her but a psychotic dwarf who slashes his throat and, in so doing, brings the vision of his own funeral cortege, which he’d glimpsed but not understood, to pass. It’s insanely chilling, inexplicable and brilliant.

37. It’s Actually The Present Day – “The Village” (2004)
After “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Signs” were all big critical and commercial hits, the tide started to turn against M. Night Shyamalan with “The Village.” Which is somewhat unfair — we think it’s actually one of his better movies, beautiful-looking, surprisingly romantic and with a twist that makes real emotional sense, even if not entirely logical sense. We think we’re watching a period story about a Pennsylvania town being menaced by mysterious creatures in the woods, but the third-act bomb reveals that the creatures are the village elders in costumes, intended to keep their children from straying into the outside world — which is actually in the present day. It’s a clever idea, and one that, a decade on, when more and more of us feel like retreating from the shittiness of the world, has only come to be resonant over time.

36. He’s Dead – “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990)
Dead All Along is one of the more popular kinds of twist ending, with three examples on this list alone. It might not be the single most effective, but Adrian Lyne’s trippy horror “Jacob’s Ladder” is certainly the most nightmarish. Years after being stabbed in Vietnam, soldier Jacob (Tim Robbins) begins to see terrible, horrifying imagery suggesting that he and his army comrades might have been subject to a sinister experiment. But in fact, everything is just a hallucination he’s suffering while still on the table in Vietnam, on the brink of death, as he unravels what happens to him. In the best sense, it feels like a horrific “Twilight Zone” episode, whose single-minded purpose transcends the potentially hackneyed nature of its surprise.

35. Matthew McConaughey Is A Killer Appointed By God, And Can Really See Demons – “Frailty” (2001)
Given how surprising and well-executed his first effort as director, “Frailty,” was, it’s a shame that Bill Paxton has since only gone on to direct a golf movie starring Shia LaBeouf, especially as that didn’t have anything near the brilliance of the film’s double-twist ending. The film involves Matthew McConaughey’s Fenton confessing to an FBI agent (Powers Boothe) that both his father (Paxton) and brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) were serial killers who murdered “demons” who had committed horrible crimes themselves. But at the end, we get two twists: firstly, that McConaughey is in fact Adam, not Fenton; and secondly, that he really is able to sense “demons”as he dispatches the agent, who killed his own mother. If only “True Detective” ended like this…

34. Soylent Green Is People – “Soylent Green” (1973)
Belonging in the small but important category of “twists you knew before you saw the movie because of a joke on ‘The Simpsons‘” (see also “Citizen Kane,” “Planet Of The Apes”), ’70s sci-fi “Soylent Green” nevertheless delivers an extremely upsetting revelation, even if the movie around it isn’t that hot. Charlton Heston stars as an NYPD detective in an overcrowded 2022 suffering from food shortages and global warming (what was once sci-fi has become social realism as it gets closer). People live off a new green wafer called Soylent Green, and as Heston investigates a murder, it’s clear that it’s linked to the product, which is made not from plankton, as the corporation claims, but from human remains. There’s still a base horror that comes from the revelation, and from Heston’s wild-eyed scream of “Soylent Green is people!”

33. She’s Dead, So Are The Kids – “The Others” (2001)
So many great twists are just standard tropes reversed, and one of the greatest examples of that is Alejandro Amenábar‘s marvelously creepy Gothic horror. Unfolding for the most part as a standard haunted house/ghost story, with Nicole Kidman‘s pale, neurotic mother and her photosensitive kids (yeah, we really should’ve guessed, but we didn’t) terrorized by whisperings and unexplained noises and apparitions, the film is so beautifully atmospheric and so sincerely invested in the psychology of its leading lady that it’s not until we’re all the way down the rabbit hole that we realize that she, and her kids, are the ghosts. Of course real, living people would seem like apparitions to the ghostly, especially if they remain unaware of their own nature.

32. The Tunnel Is Behind The Poster – “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994)
Ignored on release before being reclaimed on home video, Frank Darabont‘s “The Shawshank Redemption” now regularly rides high on viewer favorites lists — a middlebrow mark of honor that has in turn meant it’s out of favor with more “refined” cinephiles. Certainly more refined than we are: For us, it’s simply one of the most satisfying, classically mounted, they-don’t-make-’em-like-this-anymore pictures of the last few decades, one that, as a bonus, boasts one of the cleverest and most elegant of movie twists. In as much a game of misdirection as any magic act, we’re given all the pieces to put together, but the moment that stone goes through the Raquel Welch poster still comes as a surprise — because the greatest trick this prison-break movie pulls is not letting you know it’s a prison-break movie until that very second.

31. The Dead Body In The Room Is Alive, And He’s The Mastermind – “Saw” (2004)
Before it was an increasingly sadistic, and increasingly rubbish, franchise, “Saw” was an ingenious, if stomach-churning, locked-room mystery, and it ends with a startling jump scare that’s been lying in wait for you in plain sight the whole time. Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell play two people who’ve been kidnapped, locked in a bathroom by the Jigsaw Killer with a dead body, and forced to complete gruesome tasks. As Whannell listens to a final tape from Jigsaw, suddenly the body rises from the ground, scaring the absolute living shit out of you and revealing that Jigsaw was in the room the whole time. Later films would try to top the twist, but none came even close to the simple brilliance of this.