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Nobody saw these mind-blowing plot twists coming.
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00:00Plot twists can be a wonderful thing in movies. When they're genuinely surprising,
00:04yet in a way that doesn't feel forced or contradictory to the established facts,
00:07they can elevate a great film to ensure classic status. Now, many of the great ones can dance
00:12within the realm of predictability, but these following reveals and rug pulls were all,
00:17in one way or another, totally and utterly jaw-dropping. So, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com
00:22and these are the 10 best movie twists you genuinely never saw coming.
00:26Number 10. Hannah is Cal's daughter, Crazy Stupid Love. The inherent genius of the big plot twist in
00:32Crazy Stupid Love is that nobody really went into the star-studded rom-com expecting there to be a
00:37rug pull at all. Here, Steve Carell stars as Cal, a recently separated man who has a chance encounter
00:43with a serial womanizer named Jacob, played by Ryan Gosling, who vows to coach him in the art of
00:48picking up women. All the while, Jacob has found himself smitten with a woman, Hannah, played by
00:53Emma Stone, enough so that he begins to question his promiscuous lifestyle and consider a possible
00:58monogamous future with her. These two stories seem basically unrelated until, late in the film,
01:04Hannah actually brings Jacob home to meet her parents where, surprise surprise, we learn that
01:09Hannah is in fact Cal's daughter. If you saw this movie in a packed cinema on opening weekend,
01:14you'll surely remember the visceral uproarious laughter from the assembled masses. And that's
01:19noteworthy because rom-coms rarely, if ever, produce this sort of audience response. And certainly
01:24not because of an ingeniously developed plot twist. Number 9, Malcolm was dead the whole time,
01:29The Sixth Sense. The he was dead the whole time twist has absolutely been done to death these days.
01:35But it's only because director M. Night Shyamalan delivered the definitive iteration of it in The
01:40Sixth Sense and then ruined it for everyone else. The supernatural thrillers established in
01:45scene depicts child psychologist Malcolm Crowe being shot and wounded by a former patient. The rest of
01:51the story unfolds with Malcolm becoming close with his new patient Cole, a young boy who can
01:55communicate with the dead. But at the film's end, Malcolm realizes that he himself is dead, having
02:01died from his gunshot wound at the very start of the movie. That fans are still discovering sneaky
02:06foreshadowing to the big reveal almost 25 years later is a real testament to Shyamalan's genius. Genius that
02:13he has admittedly been straining to recapture ever since. Number 8, a man is secretly living
02:18in the underground bunker, Parasite. This twist is so damn shocking and brilliant that it even
02:24helped the movie win the Best Picture Oscar. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite begins with an impoverished
02:29family, the Kims, progressively insinuating themselves into the lives of wealthy family,
02:34the Parks, as each become deployed in a different position of hired help, e.g. the chauffeur,
02:39the housekeeper, and so on and so on. It is a terrific setup for a delicious black comedy
02:44about class inequality, but one that takes a supremely, unexpectedly dark turn around the
02:50midpoint when the full grim truth is revealed. And that's because while the Parks are away on
02:54vacation, the Kims treat their fancy house as if it's their own, before the Parks' former
02:59housekeeper shows up insisting that she left something in the basement. She then reveals that
03:04the basement harbours a secret bunker where she stashed her husband, who has been living secretly
03:09there for four years in order to hide from loan sharks. At this point, Parasite turns into a
03:14much darker and more unhinged thriller as these two parties of imposters effectively go to war,
03:19all the while attempting to conceal it all from the Parks as they return home from their trip.
03:24Number seven, Tyler Durden doesn't exist, Fight Club. If anyone tells you that they saw Fight
03:29Club's earth-shattering plot twist coming, well, don't believe them. David Fincher's surreal drama,
03:34of course revolves around an unnamed narrator protagonist played by Edward Nott, a disaffected
03:39white-collar worker whose life is turned upside down by his new acquaintance, a mysterious soap
03:44salesman named Tyler Durden. And so, the pair form an underground Fight Club to vent their frustrations
03:49with the modern world, but as the movement grows, it mutates into a sprawling terrorist organization
03:55far beyond the control of our so-called hero. Ultimately, it's revealed that Tyler's plan is to destroy a series of
04:01buildings containing credit card data, effectively resetting the debt record and annihilating one of
04:06the key tenants of modern capitalism as we know it. Yet, Fincher's film is quite ingeniously so bizarre,
04:12hilarious, visually stunning and well acted enough as to distract from the big twist hiding in plain
04:17sight. That being, of course, that Tyler doesn't actually exist. Literally countless films have ripped
04:23off this twist in the near 25 years since, but every single one pales in comparison to the flabbergasting
04:29brilliance of Fight Club's big reveal. Number 6, Norman Bates is the killer, Psycho.
04:34From one classic to another, while there's admittedly a fair chance that you know the
04:38twist in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho whether you've seen the movie or not today, that speaks more to
04:42how utterly unexpected it is to the blissfully unaware. See, Hitchcock's thriller is centered
04:47around the shocking demise of Marion Crane, who is stabbed to death in the shower at the Bates Motel
04:52by 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
05:02found in the motel's cellar, before we then see that Norman has been committing the murders himself
05:06while dressed up as his own mammy dearest. As well known as the twist is today, it still
05:12leaves a bruising impact, and one can scarcely begin to imagine what audiences thought of it
05:17over 60 years ago. Number 5, Mido is Desu's daughter, Oldboy.
05:22Park Chan-wook's masterful thriller Oldboy touts such a strange, intoxicating atmosphere
05:27from the very beginning, that viewers are quite ingeniously distracted from figuring out its final
05:32plot twist. A 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,
05:41Oh Desu, gets kidnapped and imprisoned within a room for 15 years. As Desu investigates,
05:47he 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
05:56was his former schoolmate Woo Jin. At school, Desu caught Woo Jin committing incest with his sister,
06:02as 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
06:13just as he had, and so reveals that Mido is actually Desu's own daughter. Yeah, it's uh,
06:19well I said it was icky didn't I? To accomplish this, Woo Jin used hypnosis to orchestrate Desu
06:24meeting 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
06:33that simply can't be predicted. 4. Jigsaw is in the bathroom all along
06:38Saw. Saw is a film that was so brilliantly positioned to lure audiences into a false sense
06:44of security. Upon its original 2004 release, few expected merch from James Wan's grotty low-budget
06:50horror 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
07:01second worst bathroom at the behest of the vicious jigsaw killer, who tortures people he believes
07:06don't value their lives. Between Adam and Lawrence though lies the corpse of a man,
07:11who seemingly shot himself in the head during a prior jigsaw game. Though at the film's end we
07:16learn that this is no dead body, rather it's actually Jigsaw himself, who slathered himself
07:22in fake blood and played dead for the entirety of the game before standing up and giving Adam
07:27the surprise of his life. Better still, Jigsaw is actually John Kramer, one of Lawrence's terminal
07:32cancer patients briefly glimpsed earlier in the film. It's a twist so devious and so clever that
07:38every subsequent sequel has struggled to match it, let alone one up it. Number three, Borden was
07:44identical twins, and Gia duplicates himself, The Prestige. The Prestige may not be Christopher Nolan's
07:51best film, but it arguably touts the strongest plot twist from any of his movies. And in fairness,
07:57Nolan's tightly-wound mystery thriller is pretty much jam-packed with twists, though there's very
08:02clearly one above all others that lands with thunderous impact. So for a bit of context here,
08:08Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman star as rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier, with
08:13Borden inventing a mesmerizing trick called the transported man, whereby he is seemingly able to
08:18instantly teleport across the stage. Angier anguishes over being unable to learn Borden's secret, and so
08:25entrusts Nikola Tesla to build him a device that can duplicate anything placed inside it. This allows
08:31Angier to create his own grim version of the transported man, whereby the original Angier
08:36drowns in the tank underneath the stage, and the new Angier clone takes his place during each
08:42performance. At the film's end though, we actually learn Borden's trick, particularly that Borden was
08:47actually a persona adopted by a pair of identical twins, one posing as Borden and the other as his
08:53confidant Fallon. This is how he pulled off the transported man, and when Borden is later hanged
08:58after being accused of Angier's drowning murder, that leaves the other Borden twin free to kill
09:02Angier and make off into the night. It's nuts, but in the context of the movie it all makes perfect
09:08sense, and it is so surprising. Number two, the flashbacks are actually visions of the future,
09:14Arrival. Denis Villeneuve's masterful sci-fi drama Arrival begins with a devastating montage chronicling
09:20linguist Louise Banks, raising her young daughter who dies at just 12 years of age due to an incurable
09:26illness. The visual language of this scene suggests that this tragedy unfolded before the movie's alien
09:32invasion story, but as we learn near the end, that's not the case at all. While interacting with
09:38the aliens, or Heptapods, Louise begins to learn their strange language, and is told by one of the
09:43Heptapods that they offer a weapon to help humanity. Louise realizes that the alien weapon they speak
09:49of is actually language itself, which allows those who learn it to change their brain's linear
09:54perception of time. And so it's revealed that Louise's flashbacks of her late daughter aren't
09:59memories at all, they're actually premonitions of the future to come. With that, Louise comes to
10:04appreciate the heartbreaking agony that, despite knowing her daughter's doomed fate, she will still
10:09conceive her regardless with her new love interest, Ian, and that Ian will eventually leave her after
10:14finding out that she knew it would go down this way. It's one of cinema's all-time greatest noodle
10:20baking depictions of determinism, while cleverly toying with how we as viewers understand the visual
10:25vocabulary of film. Number one, humanity suddenly defeats the monsters, The Mist. Frank Darabont's The
10:32Mist delivers one of the all-time most brutal final gut punches in cinema history. And considering it took a
10:38sharp left turn from Stephen King's original novella, not even fans of the source material saw
10:43this one coming. Here, protagonist David Drayton leads a small group of survivors attempting to
10:47escape the interdimensional Lovecraftian monsters that have materialized in the town of Bridgeton,
10:52Maine. At film's end, David and three other adult survivors enter a suicide pact after driving past
10:58a 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,
11:09but 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,
11:20just as a tank rolls through the mist, revealing that the army has now taken control of the situation
11:26and actually pushed the creatures back. Though audiences probably expected that humanity would
11:30eventually prevail over the monsters, they surely didn't expect it to be framed in quite such bleak,
11:36soul-crushing fashion. So, that's our list. I want to know what you guys think down in the comments
11:40below. What did you think about these plot twists? Did you see any of them coming? And are there any
11:45better ones that I missed off here? While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like,
11:48share, 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.
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