It gets old watching predictable films where almost anybody can predict the outcome. On the other hand, a movie that throws a curb ball near or at the ending can pretty much make the entire film that much better. I don’t know about anybody else but I like movies with endings that I never saw coming. With plot twists, there are always elements of surprise as well as fascination. These types of films are rare to find but they are out there.
There have been a number of movies with plot twists so great, nobody could have predicted them. I will note before I start naming these types of films that there will be spoilers that will reveal the twists that occur in these films. If you haven’t seen them and wish to, I would recommend not reading the rest of this article.
The Sixth Sense is a film with a perfect example of a plot twist that nobody saw coming. Staring Bruce Willis, a noted actor with an impressive resume of films, stars in this film as a child psychiatrist assigned to a very peculiar case. He meets with a young boy who has been having visions of dead people walking among the living. He talks with the boy and tries his best to help him all the while he feels as if his marriage is falling apart. The twist in this film is that one of the dead people is actually Bruce Willis! What a great Twist!
Unbreakable, another movie staring Bruce Willis, along with Samuel L. Jackson, tells the story of a modern day super hero that never knew what he was capable of. He gave up his football career for the woman he eventually married and later meets and intriguing man, played by Jackson who is bound to a wheel chair with an unfortunate disease that makes the bones in his body incredibly weak and easily broken. Convinced that Bruce Willis is some kind of a super hero, the man tracks him down after learning his survival in major accidents. At first, Willis is unsure of his talents until he puts them to the test. Finally accepting that he has some type of super human strength he goes out and attempts to fight crime and defend the innocent. The twist in this film is that Samuel L. Jackson’s character isn’t just a guy who is interested in Bruce Willis, he is actually a criminal who has been committing terrible acts of mass murder, killing countless numbers of people. I don’t know what it is about Bruce Willis, I guess he just knows how to pick a good movie role.
The Film Fight Club also offers up a great plot twist. This film stars two of the greats, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The main character, played by Norton, meets an interesting man who encourages him to let loose of his anger by participating in an activity where men get together and generally beat the crap out of each other to relieve stress and perhaps get a break from reality for a while. Driven on by Pitt’s character, Norton creates the club and gets other men, bored from their jobs and starved for some excitement, to join his cause. Eventually the plot twist is revealed that Pitt’s character never really existed and was simply the split personality of Norton’s character.
Staring John Cusack, the film Identity, shows us another good plot twist. He and five other strangers find themselves spending the night in a motel to avoid a rain storm. Over the course of the night, people keep turning up dead with room keys found somewhere on the corpses. The characters in the motel begin to notice strange similarities about one another. For one, they all have the same birthday. Pointing the finger at each other, they desperately try to find out who the killer is. This movie actually has a double plot twist. Not only are the characters all different personalities living inside the body of a convicted murderer, but one of the personalities was responsible for the murders and they must find that personality and kill him or her before the man is put to death for his crimes. The weakest and least suspected of the personalities, a young boy, turns out to be the killer.
The movie Fallen, staring Denzel Washington, falls along the lines of a religious flick. A demon who has been transferring himself into the bodies of random people and committing crimes, focuses his energy on a morally pure character, played by Washington. He possesses those closest to the main character in an attempt to posses him. Finally, the main character drives to a remote location where he believes the demon will be forced back to hell after he finds no other humans around to transfer himself into. The plot twist is that his assumption failed and after the man dies, the demon transfers himself into the body of a cat. It was a good attempt Denzel, maybe you’ll get him next time.
Nicole Kidman stars in another film that has a great example of a plot twist that we never saw coming. The film is called The Others. She moves into a strange house with her children and suspects that it is haunted. After many incidents of strange things happening, it’s clear that her assumption was probably correct. For most of the film, you go on believing that there are people haunting the house that she and her two children are living in. The end reveals that it is actually Kidman and her two children that are haunting the house. They had been dead the entire time and have actually been bothering the actual owners of the house who were really the ones alive.
Plot twists in movies never get old but sometimes it seems that even the most planned out plot twists can be predictable as we have seen in films like Hide and Seek, Signs and Vanilla Sky. And then of course there are those plot twists that just aren’t that good like we have seen in movies like The Village, The Number 23, and the original Planet of the Apes. Plot twists aren’t always an effective way to make a movie better but those that hit the mark just right are movies that we won’t soon forget.