- 5 months ago
Dreams, delusions, and deceit — we’re breaking down unforgettable movie moments that either deepen a story or leave viewers furious when everything turns out to be imagined. From chilling horrors and mind‑bending heists to gimmicky cop‑outs and emotional reckonings, we explain why these reveals succeed or fail. We examine nightmares like A Nightmare on Elm Street, the ambiguous heist of Inception, The Descent and Jacob’s Ladder, and cheap resets such as Click, Repo Men and Breaking Dawn. Spoiler alert: major plot points are discussed.
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00:00Welcome to Ms. Mojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the best and worst examples
00:09of movies trying to trick us with a dream sequence. This list reveals major twists
00:14from a lot of movies, so a spoiler alert is in effect.
00:18Number 5. Enraged. Repo-Man. In this dystopian thriller with a juicy premise, Jude Law plays Remy,
00:36a repo man with a unique function. He doesn't reclaim cars, he reclaims transplanted organs
00:43when their new owners fall behind on their payments.
00:46Henry Smythe, I'm legally bound to ask you if you would like an ambulance on standby
00:50or to take you to hospital. No? Okay.
00:56Remy ends up on the run where he receives a new heart transplant and begins a mission to tear
01:01down the entire exploitative and violent system he used to represent.
01:06Now take me out of the system. Fine, give me your heart.
01:12I said take me out of the system.
01:14And I said give me your goddamn heart.
01:17For Christ's sakes, you sound like one of them whining and begging.
01:21And then he wakes up.
01:23That's right, Remy's entire rebellion against the system was a coma-induced dream,
01:28stemming from a head injury sustained early in the film.
01:31It takes the movie's promising story and utterly destroys it for a cheap twist.
01:36I want to be comfortable, all right?
01:37Yes, sir.
01:37Nothing to worry about.
01:39If that hook had hit him any lower, it might have posed a problem.
01:42The M5 neural net is the top of the line.
01:44Number 5.
01:45Helped.
01:46The Descent.
01:47Sarah is still reeling from the death of her husband and daughter
01:50when she joins her friends for a caving adventure in Appalachia.
01:54Friendships are tested, betrayals come to light,
01:57and several of the women are murdered by carnivorous, cave-dwelling creatures.
02:09In the last scene, the film reveals that the previous sequence,
02:13seeing Sarah climb out of the cave and into the light, was all a dream.
02:17She is still in the cave, and the monsters are closing in.
02:30Sarah's grief is ever-present throughout the descent,
02:33and her inability to escape is not just horrific, it's thematically relevant.
02:38In a way, Sarah's as trapped by her anger and grief as she is by the conditions in the cave,
02:43and this is ultimately her undoing.
02:46Number 4.
02:58Enraged.
02:59Wisdom.
03:00At the height of his Brat Pack fame,
03:02Emilio Estevez wrote, directed, and starred in this nihilistic crime thriller
03:07about a college graduate named John Wisdom.
03:10Disillusioned by capitalism and his inability to find gainful employment,
03:15Wisdom and his girlfriend begin robbing banks and using their loot to pay off people's debts.
03:20All tellers, away from the chatter, let me see your hands, down on the floor.
03:24Don't know who we are, know why we're here, so let's get on with it.
03:26The whole thing ends with him dying in a hail of bullets, but the movie kills any chance it has at making an impact,
03:34if it had any, with a cop-out of an ending.
03:37You have the right to remain silent.
03:40If you give up this right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
03:46Wisdom's bloodied face dissolves to the film's opening scene, with him seemingly daydreaming in a bathtub.
03:52America tried to make a hero out of John Wisdom and found out that it was wrong.
03:57Critics tore apart every aspect of the movie, but the ending put the final nail in the coffin.
04:02Number 4. Helped Jacob's Ladder
04:05From the start, we know something just isn't right with Jacob Singer.
04:10Already, he's been traumatized by his time in Vietnam,
04:12and now he's having what he hopes are hallucinations of tentacled monsters and other bizarre incidents.
04:19The revelation that his platoon was drugged with a psychotropic chemical agent only colors his descent into the surreal.
04:34Who was I? I was just some hippie chemist, right? What did I know?
04:39But the final gut punch reveals that the traumatized soldier never left Vietnam.
04:43The movie has been his brain's last flickering gasp as he dies in an army triage tent.
04:50If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.
04:56Jacob's Ladder deals with the lingering post-traumatic stress of war,
05:00but Jacob literally never left Vietnam makes this one of those rare instances where a dream reveal feels poignant.
05:07He looks kind of peaceful, the guy.
05:11Put up a hell of a fight, though.
05:13Number 3. Enraged. Click.
05:16Adam Sandler stars in this unexpectedly devastating take on A Christmas Carol.
05:20He plays Michael, a man who discovers a remote control that can disrupt his life's timeline,
05:25allowing him to fast forward and rewind as he wishes.
05:29I'm not asking for like a whole day. You don't have to do that much. How big a deal is that?
05:33I am so tired of having this argument.
05:34However, after some truly upsetting developments take place, Michael awakes to find that these events did not come to pass, but were merely a warning.
05:46I'm young again.
05:48I'm young again.
05:49Well, I mean, you're not young, young. I mean, I'm young. You're kind of on the back nine.
05:53While this device works in A Christmas Carol, something seems fishy here.
05:58Click is very much against being able to alter your own timeline, but that's exactly what Michael gets to do in the end.
06:04It all just resets.
06:06It would have made a much bigger impact if he had to truly confront the time he sacrificed with the people he loves.
06:13And from now on, we're going to exercise together, and I'm not going to wear a speed-up.
06:16Okay!
06:17All right, and you?
06:19What a nice jump. I love you.
06:21Number three. Helped.
06:23Romy and Michelle's high school reunion.
06:25If there's one thing that moviegoers usually hate, it's an extended dream sequence.
06:30BFF's Romy and Michelle get into a characteristically zany fight on the way to their titular reunion and go their separate ways.
06:38As of Tucson, we're finished.
06:41Well, drive fast.
06:43Well, they go their separate ways to the same reunion.
06:55The dream sees the two as their totally cool and professionally successful idolized selves,
07:00making their bullies envious and never reconciling their friendship.
07:07And I invented them totally by myself.
07:10I mean, all Michelle's ever seen.
07:12What about making them yell at me?
07:15Really?
07:16It works because it completely fits the movie's distinctive brand of humor.
07:20It also serves as an enlightening counterpoint to how sad and unfulfilled all their formerly popular
07:26classmates seem to be once they get to the real reunion.
07:30Michelle, what are you up to?
07:33Okay.
07:34Um, I invented post-its.
07:36You're kidding.
07:37You must have made a fortune.
07:39Number 2.
07:40Enraged.
07:41The Devil's Advocate.
07:42Keanu Reeves stars as an ambitious lawyer who will stop at nothing to win a case.
07:47He comes to realize he's working at a law firm under the devil himself.
07:51The further he strays from his own moral code, the more spiritually corrupted he becomes.
07:56We find somebody new.
07:58You consult.
08:00You live to fight another day, sir.
08:02What are you talking about, King Salt?
08:03I put together a great jury.
08:05Reeves's character is nearly dragged to the depths of depravity before he is returned to
08:10the courtroom where we first met him.
08:12His entire encounter with the devil has been a vision.
08:26The movie isn't bad.
08:28In fact, it has some even wilder plot twists before this.
08:32But its unwillingness to decide whether it's a horror movie or a legal drama is reflected
08:37in its pedestrian ending.
08:39I'm terribly sorry, but I can no longer represent my client.
08:47I need to be replaced as counsel.
08:50Order.
08:51Order.
08:51Order!
08:52Number 2.
08:53Helped.
08:54A Nightmare on Elm Street.
08:56For a movie that's all about a killer who can only claim his victims in their dreams,
09:00it's actually surprising how clear it is what's real and what's fake in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
09:06Please, God.
09:07This.
09:09Here's God.
09:13It's the ending that really shocks you with a dream reveal.
09:17Having defeated Freddy Krueger, our final girl, Nancy, gets into a car with all her dead
09:23friends, all of them seemingly alive again.
09:26Hi, everybody.
09:26It's as if the previous 90 minutes hadn't happened, but then, Freddy returns to crash the party.
09:39Was he really defeated?
09:40Was it all a dream?
09:42Is the answer a secret third thing?
09:44The truth is, we're not sure, and it makes an already terrifying movie villain feel even
09:49more real and dangerous.
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10:16your settings and switch on notifications number one enraged the twilight saga breaking dawn part
10:24two if there's one thing you can say about this supernatural juggernaut it's that the fans really
10:30cared about the characters near the end of the final twilight entry a violent and deadly brawl
10:35breaks out between our heroes and the voltori it's a truly epic sequence full of potentially
10:41devastating character deaths then the movie pulls one of the most aggravating audience insulting dream
10:57reveals ever and reveals it was all alice cullen's vision of what could happen if a fight broke out
11:05fans of the books were probably enraged because they didn't initially deceive the readers into
11:17thinking the vision was something that really happened meanwhile the rest of us were probably
11:23severely let down as the battle scene makes the actual climax feel all the more anticlimactic
11:31such a prize
11:36number one helped inception christopher nolan's entire heist movie is based on the premise that anything
11:43you're seeing hearing or experiencing could be a dream because its characters can influence the world
11:49around them even when they're dreaming
12:06inception actually pulls that it was all a dream card while we're in the middle of a dream it's almost
12:12more noteworthy when something isn't a dream let me ask you a question you you never really remember
12:18the beginning of a dream do you you always wind up right in the middle of what's going on i guess yeah
12:24so how did we end up here well we just came from the uh think about it ariadne how did you get here
12:33where are you right now the confusion about the nature of reality is also central to its main
12:38character's personal dilemma without this constant reminder that the line between dreams and reality
12:43can be blurry the long discussed open ending wouldn't be nearly as impactful
13:00are you a fan of the dream reveal trope tell us in the comments the walls of reality will come crashing
13:06down one minute you'll be the savior of the rebel cause and the next thing you know you'll be cohagan's
13:12bosom buddy
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