- 3 minutes ago
Nobody saw these mind-blowing plot twists coming.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00Plot twists can be a wonderful thing in movies, when they're genuinely surprising, yet in a way that doesn't feel forced or contradictory to the established facts, they can elevate a great film to ensure classic status.
00:11Now, many of the great ones can dance within the realm of predictability, but these following reveals and rug pulls were all, in one way or another, totally and utterly jaw-dropping.
00:21So, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are the 10 best movie twists you genuinely never saw coming.
00:26Number 10, Hannah is Cal's daughter, Crazy Stupid Love.
00:30The inherent genius of the big plot twist in Crazy Stupid Love is that nobody really went into the star-studded rom-com expecting there to be a rug pull at all.
00:38Here, Steve Carell stars as Cal, a recently separated man who has a chance encounter with a serial womanizer named Jacob, played by Ryan Gosling, who vows to coach him in the art of picking up women.
00:49All the while, Jacob has found himself smitten with a woman, Hannah, played by Emma Stone, enough so that he begins to question his promiscuous lifestyle and consider a possible monogamous future with her.
01:00These two stories seem basically unrelated until, late in the film, Hannah actually brings Jacob home to meet her parents, where, surprise, surprise, we learn that Hannah is in fact Cal's daughter.
01:11If you saw this movie in a packed cinema on opening weekend, you'll surely remember the visceral, uproarious laughter from The Assembled Masses.
01:19And that's noteworthy because rom-coms rarely, if ever, produce this sort of audience response, and certainly not because of an ingeniously developed plot twist.
01:27Number 9, Malcolm was dead the whole time, The Sixth Sense.
01:30The he was dead the whole time twist has absolutely been done to death these days, but it's only because director M. Night Shyamalan delivered the definitive iteration of it in The Sixth Sense, and then ruined it for everyone else.
01:43The supernatural thrillers established in scene depicts child psychologist Malcolm Crow being shot and wounded by a former patient.
01:50The rest of the story unfolds, with Malcolm becoming close with his new patient Cole, a young boy who can communicate with the dead.
01:57But at the film's end, Malcolm realises that he himself is dead, having died from his gunshot wound at the very start of the movie.
02:04That fans are still discovering sneaky foreshadowing to the big reveal almost 25 years later is a real testament to Shyamalan's genius.
02:12Genius that he has admittedly been straining to recapture ever since.
02:16Number 8, a man is secretly living in the underground bunker, Parasite.
02:21This twist is so damn shocking and brilliant that it even helped the movie win the Best Picture Oscar.
02:27Bong Joon-ho's Parasite begins with an impoverished family, the Kims, progressively insinuating themselves into the lives of wealthy family, the Parks, as each become deployed in a different position of hired help, e.g. the chauffeur, the housekeeper, and so on and so on.
02:42It is a terrific set up for a delicious black comedy about class inequality, but one that takes a supremely, unexpectedly dark turn around the midpoint when the full grim truth is revealed.
02:52And that's because while the Parks are away on vacation, the Kims treat their fancy house as if it's their own, before the Parks' former housekeeper shows up insisting that she left something in the basement.
03:03She then reveals that the basement harbours a secret bunker where she stashed her husband, who has been living secretly there for four years in order to hide from loan sharks.
03:12At this point, Parasite turns into a much darker and more unhinged thriller as these two parties of imposters effectively go to war, all the while attempting to conceal it all from the Parks as they return home from their trip.
03:23Number 7, Tyler Durden Doesn't Exist, Fight Club
03:27If anyone tells you that they saw Fight Club's earth-shattering plot twist coming, well, don't believe them.
03:33David Fincher's surreal drama, of course, revolves around an unnamed narrator protagonist played by Edward Norton,
03:38a disaffected white-collar worker whose life is turned upside down by his new acquaintance, a mysterious soap salesman named Tyler Durden.
03:46And so, the pair form an underground fight club to vent their frustrations with the modern world, but as the movement grows, it mutates into a sprawling terrorist organization, far beyond the control of our so-called hero.
03:58Ultimately, it's revealed that Tyler's plan is to destroy a series of buildings containing credit card data, effectively resetting the debt record and annihilating one of the key tenants of modern capitalism as we know it.
04:09Yet, Fincher's film is quite ingeniously so bizarre, hilarious, visually stunning and well-acted enough as to distract from the big twist hiding in plain sight.
04:18That being, of course, that Tyler doesn't actually exist.
04:21Literally countless films have ripped off this twist in the near 25 years since, but every single one pales in comparison to the flabbergasting brilliance of Fight Club's big reveal.
04:31Number 6, Norman Bates is the killer, Psycho
04:34From one classic to another, while there's admittedly a fair chance that you know the twist in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, whether you've seen the movie or not today, that speaks more to how utterly unexpected it is to the blissfully unaware.
04:45See, Hitchcock's thriller is centred around the shocking demise of Marion Crane, who is stabbed to death in the shower at the Bates Motel by a figure implied to be Norma Bates, the mentally deranged mother of the motel's owner, Norman.
04:57Eventually, though, we learn that Norma died years prior, with her mummified corpse being found in the motel's cellar, before we then see that Norman has been committing the murders himself while dressed up as his own Mammy Dearest.
05:09As well-known as the twist is today, it still leaves a bruising impact, and one can scarcely begin to imagine what audiences thought of it over 60 years ago.
05:19Number 5, Mido is Desu's daughter, Oldboy
05:22Park Chan-wook's masterful thriller, Oldboy, touts such a strange, intoxicating atmosphere from the very beginning that viewers are quite ingeniously distracted from figuring out its final plot twist.
05:32A twist that, admittedly, is so damn icky that you probably wouldn't think of it anywhere.
05:38See, Oldboy's primary mystery concerns why loser businessman, Oh Desu, gets kidnapped and imprisoned within a room for 15 years.
05:46As Desu investigates, he becomes close with a young chef called Mido, and the pair eventually embark on a sexual relationship.
05:52It's revealed near the end of the film, though, that the party responsible for Desu's imprisonment was his former schoolmate, Woo Jin.
05:59At school, Desu caught Woo Jin committing incest with his sister, as resultingly became gossip around the school, causing Woo Jin's sister to then take her own life.
06:07The real twist, though, well, that's that the crux of Woo Jin's revenge plan was to make Desu suffer just as he had, and so reveals that Mido is actually Desu's own daughter.
06:18Yeah, it's, uh, well, I said it was icky, didn't I?
06:21To accomplish this, Woo Jin used hypnosis to orchestrate Desu meeting his daughter, falling in love with her, and ultimately embarking on a romantic relationship.
06:28Through its creatively messed up nature, it's truly one of the rare, unbelievable plot twists that simply can't be predicted.
06:35Number 4, Jigsaw is in the bathroom all along, Saw.
06:40Saw is a film that was so brilliantly positioned to lure audiences into a false sense of security.
06:45Upon its original 2004 release, few expected much from James Wan's grotty, low-budget horror flick, such that its ingenious final twist crept up on viewers and smacked them around the face.
06:55As we all know now, Saw revolves around two men, Adam and Lawrence, who wake up chained in the world's second-worst bathroom at the behest of the vicious Jigsaw Killer, who tortures people he believes don't value their lives.
07:08Between Adam and Lawrence, though, lies the corpse of a man who seemingly shot himself in the head during a prior Jigsaw game.
07:15Though, at the film's end, we learn that this is no dead body.
07:18Rather, it's actually Jigsaw himself, who slathered himself in fake blood and played dead for the entirety of the game before standing up and giving Adam the surprise of his life.
07:29Better still, Jigsaw is actually John Kramer, one of Lawrence's terminal cancer patients briefly glimpsed earlier in the film.
07:36It's a twist so devious and so clever that every subsequent sequel has struggled to match it, let alone one-up it.
07:43Number three, Borden was identical twins, and Gia duplicates himself, The Prestige.
07:48The Prestige may not be Christopher Nolan's best film, but it arguably touts the strongest plot twist from any of his movies.
07:56And in fairness, Nolan's tightly-wound mystery thriller is pretty much jam-packed with twists, though there's very clearly one above all others that lands with thunderous impact.
08:06So, for a bit of context here, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman star as rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier.
08:13With Borden inventing a mesmerizing trick called The Transported Man, whereby he is seemingly able to instantly teleport across the stage.
08:21Angier anguishes over being unable to learn Borden's secret, and so entrusts Nikola Tesla to build him a device that can duplicate anything placed inside it.
08:31This allows Angier to create his own grim version of The Transported Man, whereby the original Angier drowns in the tank underneath the stage, and the new Angier clone takes his place during each performance.
08:43At the film's end, though, we actually learn Borden's trick, particularly that Borden was actually a persona adopted by a pair of identical twins, one posing as Borden and the other as his confidant, Fallon.
08:54This is how he pulled off The Transported Man, and when Borden is later hanged after being accused of Angier's drowning murder, that leaves the other Borden twin free to kill Angier and make off into the night.
09:05It's nuts, but in the context of the movie, it all makes perfect sense, and it is so surprising.
09:10Number two, the flashbacks are actually visions of the future, Arrival.
09:15Denis Villeneuve's masterful sci-fi drama Arrival begins with a devastating montage chronicling linguist Louise Banks raising her young daughter, who dies at just 12 years of age due to an incurable illness.
09:27The visual language of this scene suggests that this tragedy unfolded before the movie's alien invasion story.
09:33But as we learn near the end, that's not the case at all.
09:37While interacting with the aliens, or Heptapods, Louise begins to learn their strange language, and is told by one of the Heptapods that they offer a weapon to help humanity.
09:47Louise realizes that the alien weapon they speak of is actually language itself, which allows those who learn it to change their brain's linear perception of time.
09:55And so it's revealed that Louise's flashbacks of her late daughter aren't memories at all, they're actually premonitions of the future to come.
10:03With that, Louise comes to appreciate the heartbreaking agony that, despite knowing her daughter's doomed fate, she will still conceive her regardless with her new love interest, Ian, and that Ian will eventually leave her after finding out that she knew it would go down this way.
10:17It's one of cinema's all-time greatest noodle-baking depictions of determinism, while cleverly toying with how we as viewers understand the visual vocabulary of film.
10:27Number one, humanity suddenly defeats the monsters, The Mist.
10:31Frank Darabont's The Mist delivers one of the all-time most brutal final gut punches in cinema history.
10:37And considering it took a sharp left turn from Stephen King's original novella, not even fans of the source material saw this one coming.
10:44Here, protagonist David Drayton leads a small group of survivors attempting to escape the interdimensional Lovecraftian monsters that have materialized in the town of Bridgeton, Maine.
10:53At film's end, David and three other adult survivors enter a suicide pact after driving past a gigantic skyscraper-sized monster that understandably resigns them to believing that humanity has lost.
11:04And so, in a deeply harrowing scene, David shoots not only the adult survivors in the car, but also his very own young son in an attempt to spare him the horror of being killed by the monsters.
11:15With no bullet left for himself though, David walks out into the mist to be devoured by the monsters, just as a tank rolls through the mist, revealing that the army has now taken control of the situation and actually pushed the creatures back.
11:28Though audiences probably expected that humanity would eventually prevail over the monsters, they surely didn't expect it to be framed in quite such bleak, soul-crushing fashion.
11:38So, that's our list, I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below, what did you think about these plot twists, did you see any of them coming, and are there any better ones that I missed off here?
11:47While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like, share, subscribe, and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
11:53Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.
Be the first to comment