10. Judy is Madeleine – “Vertigo” (1958)
Possibly the biggest twist in Alfred Hitchock‘s recently dubbed Greatest Film Of All Time (by Sight & Sound) is the kink in lead character Scottie’s (James Stewart) psyche that leads him to think he can recreate the woman he loved and lost, but that’s only if you don’t count the meta-twist that this is a murder mystery in which we don’t give a damn about the murderer (Gavin Elster, in case you forgot), or indeed the victim (his poor wife). But within this brazenly depraved and deeply sadomasochistic story, there is also an incredibly involved, labyrinthine plot that we don’t fully comprehend until Judy’s (Kim Novak) guilt-ridden flashback clues us in. The necklace will give her away later to Scottie, but that’s fairly moot — the chief delight in the macabre turn things take is that it’s also a subversion of the well-worn movie cliche in which the same actor would often play two different people who were only supposed to look alike, like Hitchcock saying duh, hello, they’re both Kim Novak, of course they’re the same person.
9. She’s My Sister And My Daughter – “Chinatown” (1974)
Even without knowing anything about director Roman Polanski, this scene from his undisputed classic “Chinatown” is almost unwatchable in the vigor of its performance and the queasiness of its implications. Jack Nicholson’s Jake repeatedly slaps Faye Dunaway‘s Evelyn across the face until she confesses that the young girl she is hiding is the product of an incestuous relationship with her father — never has the conjunction “and” taken on more sickening weight. Once you know that Polanski, as we briefly mentioned in our 2017 Movie Preview, pled guilty to having “unlawful” sex with a 13-year-old girl, it becomes even more desperately upsetting to watch, which, rightly or wrongly, cannot detract from its stunning effectiveness in the context of the film.
8. Leonard Is The Killer, He’s Been Manipulated – “Memento” (2000)
Thanks to its immensely clever backwards structure (in fact, the structure is even more complicated than that, but we don’t have the space or time to get into it), Christopher Nolan’s phenomenal neo-noir “Memento” is essentially a series of twists and reveals. But it saves the best and biggest for the end (or beginning?), as Guy Pearce’s Leonard learns that his wife survived the attack that destroyed his memory, that he, like the Sammy Jankis in the story he was telling, accidentally killed her, that he caught and killed the real attacker a year ago, and that Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) has been using him to clean up the underworld ever since. It’s both immensely satisfying and emotionally devastating, but the knowledge that Teddy will get his (shown at the beginning), that Leonard left himself a trail of bread crumbs to follow, helps make it a surprisingly upbeat end, helped by the wry final line: “Now, where was I?”
7. What’s In The Box? – “Seven” (1995)
It’s been much parodied and joked about ever since, but the reason the end of “Seven” and the contents of the box delivered to the middle of the desert by some poor unthinking UPS guy are seared onto our brains forever is that it was virtually unthinkable that a movie — a studio movie! — could have done it. Even given all the other horrible stuff that happens across the rest of the film, there were certain things you felt you could assume. The people that would die would be strangers, or at worst Morgan Freeman in a heroic gunfight. The cops would get their guy. Brad Pitt would get to go home to his pregnant wife. But no. Early in the third act, the killer (Kevin Spacey) walks into the police station and hands himself in. And before you can say “anticlimactic,” he takes Detectives Somerset and Mills out in the desert, and that box arrives, and though we never see it (Pitt’s reaction is so visceral that many were convinced they had seen it), we soon realize that the box contains Paltrow’s head. Even today, it’s shocking that they went there, to such a bleak and unhappy ending, but really, it’s the only ending it could have had.
6. The Body In The Bathtub – “Les Diaboliques” (1955)
In most cases, we’re not too worried about spoilers because most people have seen most of these movies, but in the case of this 1955 film from Henri-Georges Clouzot, that might not be true, and if so, we can only beg you, one last time, not to read any further and watch the movie without delay. Ok, let’s proceed: Brilliantly manipulating the audience in much the same way that the killers (actually Simone Signoret and the not-dead Paul Meurisse) manipulate the mousy wife (Vera Clouzot) into a fatal heart attack, director Clouzot creates such an atmosphere of dank Gothic foreboding that the shock here comes from the revelation that actually this is not a ghost story, there’s nothing supernatural afoot, and the film’s only murder has just taken place.
5. Jack Vincennes Is Killed/Rollo Tomassi – “L.A. Confidential” (1997)
James Ellroy‘s “L.A. Confidential” is a great book, but if ever anyone falls to the fallacy of preaching that the book is always better than the movie, we recommend you look them square in the eye and, with the dying ghost of a smile on your lips, whisper “Rollo Tomassi.” Purely the brainchild of screenwriter Brian Helgeland and director Curtis Hanson, it’s not quite what gives this masterpiece its most memorably jaw-dropping scene (Kevin Spacey’s character could probably have been unceremoniously shot by Captain Smith without it), but it is what gives that scene such resonance — sowing the seeds of Dudley Smith’s (James Cromwell) destruction right there into his most dastardly act. The rare screenwriting invention that makes perfect, almost clockwork-beautiful sense of everything that comes after, Jack Vincennes’ death here is the twist, but it’s his dying words that just keep on twisting.
4. He’s Mother (And The Killer) – “Psycho” (1960)
You know there’s something not quite right about that Bates boy — maybe it’s the fixity of Anthony Perkins‘ stare; the taxidermy hobby; or his isolated, apron-string life — from the first time you see him. Even if it’s hard to comprehend the full impact that Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Psycho” had on audiences in 1960, it’s remarkable how effective its now-immensely familiar beats still remain, from the jaggedly iconic shower scene to the shocking climax in which we lurch violently from the supposition that Norman is the killer, to the idea that it’s his mother, and finally to the realization that it’s Norman as his mother. Piling up shock on shock — it’s also got the best “it’s a skeleton!” reveal ever — the modern slasher movie might have been born in that shower, but psychosexual, Freudian horror was forged in that basement.
3. Darth Vader Is Luke’s Father – “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980)
We’re having a fun time imagining there might be anyone on the planet reading this list who’s like, “What?? Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father???” But just because a twist has become as deeply embedded in the cultural consciousness as this one doesn’t make it less of a twist — in fact, it makes it more so. We still very much live in the blockbuster world that “Star Wars” created (more so since last year than ever, actually), but it was this moment, in the best film of the original trilogy, that kicked the franchise into the stratosphere. It set a seal on the preoccupation with paternity (that still exists even now in ‘Rogue One‘), but also instantaneously made a single story into a saga about destiny, legacy and just what you can do about the sins of your father — at least until the penny drops about what that means for Luke snogging Leia.
2. Oh My God, I Was Wrong, It Was Earth All Along – “Planet Of The Apes” (1968)
There are certain movies that you expect twist endings to — thrillers or noirs in particular, or horror films. But “Planet Of The Apes,” at least in the 1968 original (when Tim Burton put a monkey on the Lincoln Memorial for his 2001 remake, you saw it coming a mile off — wisely, the recent trilogy has avoided twist endings), didn’t seem to be one of those of films — it was a far-flung sci-fi movie about a distant world where monkeys rule and humans are slaves. We know that Charlton Heston travelled there, he was in a spaceship. And then virtually out of nowhere, Heston and Linda Harrison’s Nova escape into the Forbidden zone, onto a beach, where they find the remains of the Statue of Liberty. It turns the film on its head completely — what seemed like pure sci-fi becomes a cautionary tale, a tragedy, lending the film and its sequels a melancholy that few other films in the genre can match.
1. Verbal Kint Is Keyser Söze – “The Usual Suspects” (1995)
Here’s the thing that’s so amazing about about the twist ending of Bryan Singer‘s epochal “The Usual Suspects”: You probably don’t agree with the conclusion that Chazz Palminteri‘s dogged cop has come to (that Keaton was Keyzer Söze), but, out of the myriad other possibilities on offer that you’re probably mentally checklisting as the final scene unfolds, you never for a second suspect it’s Verbal Kint. (You of course have the right to insist you saw it coming, but we have the right to thoroughly disbelieve you). Partly it’s Kevin Spacey‘s extraordinary performance, partly it’s the sheer number of red herrings sent up into the air like flak to distract from the real story, but mostly this is just some Keyser Söze-level mind-trick misdirection, in which everything is cued up to point in any direction other that the right one, right until Palminteri takes that second sip of coffee and we twig the truth at the very same instant that he does — just a fraction of a second too late.
You thought we were done, but twist! There’s a whole bunch more of last-minute reversals and surprises that we couldn’t find room for in the main list, but feel are worth a mention nevertheless. Perhaps the biggest is the revelation of the identity of “Rosebud” in “Citizen Kane” — namely, that it’s a sledge. We’d argue that it’s a surprising reveal, but perhaps not quite a twist, so we ended up excluding it in the end. Others that nearly made the cut include Robert De Niro being literally the devil in “Angel Heart,” Ludivine Sagnier not being the publisher’s daughter in “Swimming Pool,” Angela turning out to be her dead brother and the killer in “Sleepaway Camp,” the revelation that the kids in “The Cabin In The Woods” are part of a ritual sacrifice, the mission turning out to be a ruse to expose Colonel Turner as a traitor in “Where Eagles Dare,” and Kyle Reese turning out to be John Connor’s dad in “The Terminator.”
There’s also there being no George Kaplan in “North By Northwest,” Maxim hating Rebecca in “Rebecca,” Deckard being a replicant (or not) in “Blade Runner,” Michael Caine in a wig being the killer in “Dressed To Kill,” most of “Donnie Darko” being a peri-mortem dream, Diane and Betty being the same person in “Mulholland Drive,” Rosemary’s Baby being the antichrist in “Rosemary’s Baby,” and the very early twist that Sam Bell is one of a number of clones in “Moon.”
Further off, we also thought about surprising twists in “Adaptation,” “Arlington Road,” “Mystic River,” “The Descent,” “Fallen,” “Friday The 13th,” “The Game,” “American Psycho,” “Secret Window,” “Identity,” “Shutter Island,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Machinist,” “Eastern Promises,” “American Beauty,” “Matchstick Men,” “Side Effects,” “Source Code,” “Following,” “Femme Fatale,” “High Tension,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “The Notebook,” “The Butterfly Effect,” “Carnival Of Souls,” “Clue,” “Signs,” “Marnie,” “The Gift,” “Laura,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Inception,” “Kiss Me Deadly,” “Brazil,” “Catfish,” “The Last Seduction,” “The Grifters,” Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” “Tell No One,” “The Skeleton Key,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Obsession,” “Starship Troopers,” “Superman II” and “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?” among others, but you’ll have to watch the movies, or at least do a Wikipedia deep-dive, to find out what happens in them.
Anything else we’ve forgotten? Let us know by faking your death and returning as your doppelgänger to leave a comment.