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Nobody saw these mind-blowing plot twists coming.
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00:00When a great plot twist hits, there's nothing quite as satisfying. Seeing the narrative pieces fall into place in shocking unexpected fashion can force the audience to entirely re-evaluate the movie they're watching.
00:13While filmmakers can certainly try to pull the wool over viewer's eyes, Who Among Us doesn't love a brilliantly engineered twist that's unpredictable while still playing fair with the audience?
00:23So let's dive in. This is WhatCulture, and here are the best movie twists you genuinely never saw coming.
00:30The planet was Earth all along, Planet of the Apes.
00:33Planet of the Apes plot twist was such a game changer that it spent decades being joked about across pop culture.
00:40Yet if taken on its own terms, it's easy to appreciate why.
00:44Protagonist George Taylor spends the movie stranded on a planet in the distant future where apes have evolved into intelligent humanoids,
00:51only to make a horrifying discovery in the final scene.
00:55George reaches the planet shoreline where he finds the remains of the Statue of Liberty,
01:00confirming that this strange planet is actually a future Earth, obliterated beyond recognition by nuclear war.
01:07If you saw Planet of the Apes without knowing what was coming, this was an all-timer twist for sure,
01:13one that so brilliantly reconfigured the audience's expectation of alien,
01:17while also handing them a savage warning about humanity's instinctual tendency towards self-destruction.
01:24Hannah is Cal's daughter, Crazy Stupid Love.
01:26The inherent genius of the big plot twist in Crazy Stupid Love is that nobody really went into the star-studded rom-com
01:33expecting there to be a rug pull at all.
01:35Here, Steve Carell stars as Cal, a recently separated man who has a chance encounter with a serial womanizer
01:41named Jacob, played by Ryan Gosling, who vows to coach him in the art of picking up women.
01:46All the while, Jacob has found himself smitten with a woman, Hannah, played by Emma Stone,
01:50enough so that he begins to question his promiscuous lifestyle and consider a possible monogamous future with her.
01:56These two stories seem basically unrelated until, late in the film, Hannah actually brings Jacob home to meet her parents,
02:04where, surprise, surprise, we learn that Hannah is in fact Cal's daughter.
02:08If you saw this movie in a packed cinema on opening weekend, you'll surely remember the visceral, uproarious laughter from The Assembled Masses.
02:15And that's noteworthy because rom-coms rarely, if ever, produce this sort of audience response,
02:20and certainly not because of an ingeniously developed plot twist.
02:24Pharrell is Yuri, No Way Out.
02:26No Way Out stars Kevin Costner as US Navy officer Tom Farrell,
02:31who has been framed for the murder of his lover Susan Atwell.
02:34The actual man responsible, Secretary of Defense David Bryce, takes part in a plan to pin the killing on Pharrell,
02:41while also claiming him to be a KGB mole codenamed Yuri.
02:45At film's end, with Pharrell and Bryce both having sensitive information which could implicate one another,
02:51Bryce agrees instead to frame his counsel, Scott Pritchard, as both Susan's killer and the mysterious Yuri.
02:57But with the matter seemingly resolved, the final scene reveals that Pharrell actually was Yuri all along.
03:04An ultra deep cover spy raised his American from childhood in order to infiltrate the US.
03:10Romancing Susan was an intelligence gathering mission due to her relationship with Bryce,
03:15though Pharrell slash Yuri did genuinely fall in love with her,
03:18and seemingly quits the spy game at the very end.
03:21This is an outstanding example of a twist that's hidden in plain sight.
03:26The bad guys try to frame the hero, and it turns out they unintentionally trip over the truth in the process.
03:32Malcolm was dead the whole time, the sixth sense.
03:35The he was dead the whole time twist has absolutely been done to death these days,
03:40but it's only because director M. Night Shyamalan delivered the definitive iteration of it in the sixth sense,
03:45and then ruined it for everyone else.
03:47The supernatural thrillers established in the scene depicts child psychologist Malcolm Crowe being shot and wounded by a former patient.
03:55The rest of the story unfolds, with Malcolm becoming close with his new patient Cole,
03:59a young boy who can communicate with the dead.
04:01But at the film's end, Malcolm realizes that he himself is dead,
04:06having died from his gunshot wound at the very start of the movie.
04:09That fans are still discovering sneaky foreshadowing to the big reveal almost 25 years later,
04:14is a real testament to Shyamalan's genius.
04:17Genius that he has admittedly been straining to recapture ever since.
04:21There was never an Aaron, Primal Fear.
04:24Primal Fear's closing reveal is one of those goddamn moments that cements a movie's legacy forevermore,
04:30while also securing Ed Norton a well-earned Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.
04:35The legal thriller follows hotshot defense attorney Martin Vail,
04:39as he defends a teenage altar boy, Aaron Stampler, accused of murdering an archbishop.
04:44We eventually learn that Aaron did kill the archbishop, albeit in revenge of being sexually abused,
04:50and moreover he was also suffering from disassociative identity disorder at the time of the killing,
04:56adopting a sadistic alternative personality called Roy.
05:00As such, Aaron is found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a psych hospital.
05:05But during his final meeting with Vail, he reveals that he faked the whole damn thing.
05:11Aaron faked his disassociative identity disorder.
05:14He cooked it up effectively, allowing himself to get away with murder.
05:18And to make matters even worse, when Vail asks him if Roy ever existed,
05:23Aaron offers an ice-cold reply,
05:25There was never an Aaron.
05:27Aaron had been faking a shy guise for the entire movie,
05:31when the more violent, sociopathic Roy was his true persona the entire time.
05:36All a shell-shocked Vail can do is leave the courthouse in disbelief,
05:40and the audience can certainly relate.
05:42A man is secretly living in the underground bunker, Parasite.
05:46This twist is so damn shocking and brilliant,
05:49that it even helped the movie win the Best Picture Oscar.
05:52Bong Joon-ho's Parasite begins with an impoverished family, the Kims,
05:56progressively insinuating themselves into the lives of wealthy family the Parks,
06:00as each become deployed in a different position of hired help,
06:04e.g. the chauffeur, the housekeeper, and so on and so on.
06:08It is a terrific setup for a delicious black comedy about class inequality,
06:12but one that takes a supremely, unexpectedly dark turn
06:15around the midpoint when the full grim truth is revealed.
06:18And that's because, while the Parks are away on vacation,
06:21the Kims treat their fancy house as if it's their own.
06:23Before, the Parks' former housekeeper shows up insisting
06:26that she left something in the basement.
06:29She then reveals that the basement harbors a secret bunker
06:32where she stashed her husband,
06:33who has been living secretly there for four years
06:36in order to hide from loan sharks.
06:38At this point, Parasite turns into a much darker and more unhinged thriller
06:41as these two parties of imposters effectively go to war,
06:45all the while attempting to conceal it all from the Parks
06:47as they return home from their trip.
06:49The Lego Universe is a child's imagination.
06:52The Lego Movie
06:53The Lego Movie pulled off an incredibly bold and daring twist
06:57that could have so easily fallen totally flat.
07:00The film was marketed as a purely animated adventure,
07:04yet in the third act, Lego Everyman Emmett falls down a portal
07:08which leads him to the real world.
07:10At this point, the Lego Movie shifts to live action,
07:14while revealing that the events of the story so far
07:16have been played out by an eight-year-old boy, Finn,
07:19and that the villainous Lord Business is really a parallel of Finn's father,
07:24who dislikes his son playing with his precious Lego set.
07:28In the wrong hands, this could have been terrible,
07:30yet seeing the parallels between the Lego Universe and the real world,
07:34it ends up feeling like a joyous celebration of creativity and play.
07:38That something so imaginative could be rustled up by a kid
07:41playing with some colourful plastic bricks.
07:43Tyler Durden Doesn't Exist Fight Club
07:46If anyone tells you that they saw Fight Club's earth-shattering plot twist coming,
07:51well, don't believe them.
07:52David Fincher's surreal drama, of course,
07:54revolves around an unnamed narrator protagonist played by Edward Norton,
07:57a disaffected white-collar worker whose life is turned upside down
08:01by his new acquaintance,
08:02a mysterious soap salesman named Tyler Durden.
08:06And so, the pair form an underground fight club
08:08to vent their frustrations with the modern world,
08:10but as the movement grows, it mutates into a sprawling terrorist organisation
08:14far beyond the control of our so-called hero.
08:17Ultimately, it's revealed that Tyler's plan is to destroy a series of buildings
08:21containing credit card data,
08:23effectively resetting the debt record
08:25and annihilating one of the key tenets of modern capitalism as we know it.
08:29Yet, Fincher's film is quite ingeniously so bizarre,
08:32hilarious, visually stunning and well-acted enough
08:34as to distract from the big twist hiding in plain sight.
08:37That being, of course, that Tyler doesn't actually exist.
08:41Literally, countless films have ripped off this twist in the near 25 years since,
08:45but every single one pales in comparison
08:47to the flabbergasting brilliance of Fight Club's big reveal.
08:51The con within the con, The Sting.
08:53The Sting follows two grifters, Gondorf and Hooker,
08:56as they hatch a plan to perform the con of a lifetime
08:59on vicious crime boss Doyle Lonergan.
09:01The pair's elaborate ruse involves creating a fake betting parlor
09:05where Lonergan can be compelled to place a bad bet
09:08and lose a massive amount of money.
09:10But once the gamut plays out
09:12and Lonergan angrily demands his money back,
09:15the FBI storms the parlor to arrest Gondorf
09:17while letting Hooker go.
09:20An infuriated Gondorf then shoots Hooker
09:22before FBI agent Polk shoots Gondorf,
09:26at which point Lonergan is escorted from the scene.
09:29Once they've gone, however,
09:31Gondorf and Hooker reveal they're absolutely fine.
09:34The shootings were staged
09:35and Agent Polk is actually a con man
09:38working with the duo to ensure both Lonergan
09:40and the real authorities think the duo are dead.
09:43And like that, Lonergan never returns for his money,
09:47entirely unaware that he just got robbed
09:49by two men he believes are dead.
09:51Incredible.
09:52Norman Bates is the killer, Psycho.
09:55From one classic to another,
09:56while there's admittedly a fair chance
09:58that you know the twist in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
10:00whether you've seen the movie or not today,
10:01that speaks more to how utterly unexpected it is
10:04to the blissfully unaware.
10:06See, Hitchcock's thriller is centered around
10:08the shocking demise of Marion Crane,
10:10who is stabbed to death in the shower at the Bates Motel
10:12by a figure implied to be Norma Bates,
10:15the mentally deranged mother of the motel's owner, Norman.
10:18Eventually, though, we learn that Norma died years prior,
10:21with her mummified corpse being found in the motel's cellar,
10:24for we then see that Norman has been committing the murders himself
10:27while dressed up as his own mammy dearest.
10:30As well-known as the twist is today,
10:32it still leaves a bruising impact,
10:34and one can scarcely begin to imagine
10:36what audiences thought of it over 60 years ago.
10:39Vulture is Liz's dad, Spider-Man Homecoming.
10:43The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't exactly known
10:46for its jaw-dropping plot twists,
10:48which is perhaps partly why Spider-Man Homecoming's big reveal
10:51managed to catch so many viewers off guard.
10:54At the end of the film's second act,
10:56Peter Parker is preparing to take Liz
10:58to the school homecoming dance,
10:59but when he knocks on the front door,
11:01he's greeted with none other than
11:03the movie's primary villain, Adrian Toombs.
11:06Yes, it turns out that Peter's antagonist
11:08also happens to be the father of his love interest,
11:11a fact which director John Watts
11:13managed to brilliantly hide in plain sight.
11:16And so when Toombs opens the door and greets Peter,
11:19it's a legitimately butt-puckering moment
11:21for both Peter and the audience.
11:23To date, it remains one of the MCU's best-executed plot twists,
11:28and much of its success lies in its sheer simplicity.
11:31Mido is Desu's daughter, Oldboy.
11:34Park Chan-wook's masterful thriller Oldboy
11:36touts such a strange, intoxicating atmosphere
11:39from the very beginning
11:40that viewers are quite ingeniously distracted
11:42from figuring out its final plot twist,
11:45a twist that, admittedly, is so damn icky
11:47that you probably wouldn't think of it anywhere.
11:50See, Oldboy's primary mystery concerns
11:52why loser businessman, Oh Desu,
11:54gets kidnapped and imprisoned within a room for 15 years.
11:58As Desu investigates, he becomes close with a young chef called Mido,
12:01and the pair eventually embark on a sexual relationship.
12:04It's revealed near the end of the film, though,
12:06that the party responsible for Desu's imprisonment
12:08was his former schoolmate, Woo Jin.
12:10At school, Desu caught Woo Jin committing incest with his sister,
12:14as, resultantly, became gossip around the school,
12:16causing Woo Jin's sister to then take her own life.
12:19The real twist, though, well,
12:21that's that the crux of Woo Jin's revenge plan
12:23was to make Desu suffer just as he had,
12:26and so reveals that Mido is actually Desu's own daughter.
12:30Yeah, it's, uh, well, I said it was icky, didn't I?
12:33To accomplish this, Woo Jin used hypnosis
12:35to orchestrate Desu meeting his daughter,
12:37falling in love with her,
12:38and ultimately embarking on a romantic relationship.
12:40Through its creatively messed up nature,
12:43it's truly one of the rare, unbelievable plot twists
12:45that simply can't be predicted.
12:47Anthony is a hallucination.
12:49Dead Man's Shoes.
12:51Shane Meadows' Dead Man's Shoes
12:52is a criminally under-seen psychological thriller
12:55in which a soldier, Richard,
12:57returns to his hometown to reckon with a group of drug dealers
13:00who have tormented his mentally disabled brother, Anthony.
13:03Near the end of the movie, we learn the nauseating truth.
13:06Anthony committed suicide following the group's abuse,
13:10and Richard has actually been seeing hallucinations
13:12of his late brother throughout the movie.
13:15It completely changes the temperature of the story
13:18and the nature of Richard's revenge spree,
13:21ensuring most viewers will want to immediately re-watch the film
13:24with this new knowledge,
13:25that Richard isn't really being accompanied
13:27by his brother on his quest.
13:29These twists are incredibly tough to pull off
13:32in a post-Sixth Sense world.
13:34Yet Dead Man's Shoes is a rare example of one
13:36that makes it work,
13:38even with a few generous clues being dangled in front of us,
13:41like Anthony wearing the same clothes in flashbacks.
13:44Jigsaw was in the bathroom all along.
13:47Saw.
13:48Saw is a film that was so brilliantly positioned
13:50to lure audiences into a false sense of security.
13:53Upon its original 2004 release,
13:55few expected much from James Wan's
13:57grotty, low-budget horror flick,
13:59such that its ingenious final twist
14:00crept up on viewers
14:01and smacked them around the face.
14:03As we all know now,
14:05Saw revolves around two men,
14:07Adam and Lawrence,
14:08who wake up chained in the world's second-worst bathroom
14:10at the behest of the vicious Jigsaw Killer,
14:13who tortures people he believes
14:14don't value their lives.
14:16Between Adam and Lawrence, though,
14:18lies the corpse of a man who seemingly shot himself in the head
14:21during a prior Jigsaw game.
14:23Though, at the film's end,
14:24we learn that this is no dead body.
14:26Rather, it's actually Jigsaw himself,
14:29who slathered himself in fake blood
14:31and played dead for the entirety of the game
14:33before standing up
14:34and giving Adam the surprise of his life.
14:37Better still, Jigsaw is actually John Kramer,
14:39one of Lawrence's terminal cancer patients
14:41briefly glimpsed earlier in the film.
14:44It's a twist so devious and so clever
14:46that every subsequent sequel has struggled to match it,
14:50let alone one opinion.
14:51K isn't the chosen one,
14:53Blade Runner 2049.
14:55Relatively earlier on in Blade Runner 2049,
14:58it seems to be teeing up the inevitable reveal
15:00that Replicant K is the child of Deckard
15:03and Replicant Rachel.
15:04Given the tendency for belated legacy sequels
15:07to introduce new heroes
15:08with convoluted ties to the original leads,
15:11it certainly would have been completely on brand
15:14for Hollywood in the 2010s.
15:16And so, what a surprise it was when,
15:18deep into the movie's third act,
15:20K learns that he isn't the child of Deckard and Rachel,
15:23completely obliterating the typical chosen one arc
15:26that had seemingly been carved out for him.
15:29Furthermore,
15:30the Replicant Child ends up being
15:31an incredibly minor character,
15:33Dr. Anna Stalline,
15:35briefly glimpsed much earlier in the story.
15:38Ultimately, Blade Runner 2049
15:40brilliantly bit and switches the audience,
15:43leading them to believe
15:44a garden-variety hero's journey is in the works,
15:47only to pull the rug out
15:48and give K some heroic agency
15:50that's very much his own.
15:52In the end,
15:52being constant K is enough for him,
15:55or as Ryan Gosling's Ken would say,
15:57K'nuff.
15:58Borden was identical twins,
16:01and Gia duplicates himself,
16:02The Prestige.
16:04The Prestige may not be Christopher Nolan's best film,
16:07but it arguably touts the strongest plot twist
16:09from any of his movies.
16:11And in fairness,
16:12Nolan's tightly-wanned mystery thriller
16:14is pretty much jam-packed with twists,
16:16though there's very clearly one above all others
16:19that lands with thunderous impact.
16:21So, for a bit of context here,
16:23Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman star
16:24as rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier,
16:28with Borden inventing a mesmerizing trick
16:30called the transported man,
16:31whereby he is seemingly able
16:33to instantly teleport across the stage.
16:35Angier anguishes over being unable
16:37to learn Borden's secret,
16:39and so entrusts Nikola Tesla
16:41to build him a device
16:42that can duplicate anything placed inside it.
16:45This allows Angier to create
16:47his own grim version of the transported man,
16:49whereby the original Angier drowns
16:51in the tank underneath the stage,
16:53and the new Angier clone takes his place
16:56during each performance.
16:58At the film's end, though,
16:58we actually learn Borden's trick,
17:00particularly that Borden was actually a persona
17:03adopted by a pair of identical twins,
17:06one posing as Borden,
17:07and the other as his confidant, Fallon.
17:09This is how he pulled off the transported man,
17:11and when Borden is later hanged
17:13after being accused of Angier's drowning murder,
17:15that leaves the other Borden twin free to kill Angier
17:18and make off into the night.
17:19It's nuts,
17:20but in the context of the movie,
17:22it all makes perfect sense,
17:23and it is so surprising.
17:25Darth Vader is Luke's father.
17:27The Empire Strikes Back
17:29In terms of mega-budget movies, though,
17:31no twist is more iconic
17:33than Darth Vader revealing himself
17:35to be Luke Skywalker's father
17:37at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
17:39It was a perfect,
17:40what the actual f*** revelation
17:43on which to conclude the middle chapter
17:45of the original Star Wars trilogy,
17:47leaving fans with plenty to think about
17:49ahead of Return of the Jedi's release,
17:51and damn near ensuring they'd be back
17:53to see how it all played out.
17:55Though parentage twists
17:57are decidedly more common nowadays,
17:59they've never been more earth-shattering
18:01than in this movie,
18:03creating a devastating link
18:04between the hero and villain
18:06which went on to define the franchise
18:07for four decades.
18:09That is, unless you happen to read
18:11a 1978 newspaper interview with David Prowse
18:14in which he inadvertently spoiled it
18:16a whole two years before the movie came out.
18:19Thankfully, this being the pre-end,
18:21internet age,
18:22his slippery tongue
18:23didn't quite have the same reach.
18:25The flashbacks are actually
18:27visions of the future, Arrival.
18:29Denis Villeneuve's masterful sci-fi drama Arrival
18:32begins with a devastating montage
18:33chronicling linguist Louise Banks
18:35raising her young daughter
18:36who dies at just 12 years of age
18:39due to an incurable illness.
18:41The visual language of this scene
18:42suggests that this tragedy
18:44unfolded before the movie's
18:46alien invasion story.
18:47But as we learn near the end,
18:49that's not the case at all.
18:51While interacting with the aliens
18:53or heptapods,
18:54Louise begins to learn
18:55their strange language
18:56and is told by one of the heptapods
18:58that they offer a weapon
18:59to help humanity.
19:01Louise realizes that the alien weapon
19:02they speak of
19:03is actually language itself,
19:05which allows those who learn it
19:07to change their brain's
19:08linear perception of time.
19:09And so it's revealed that
19:10Louise's flashbacks of her late daughter
19:12aren't memories at all,
19:14they're actually premonitions
19:15of the future to come.
19:17With that,
19:17Louise comes to appreciate
19:19the heartbreaking agony
19:20that, despite knowing
19:21her daughter's doomed fate,
19:23she will still conceive her
19:24regardless with her new
19:25love interest, Ian,
19:26and that Ian will eventually
19:27leave her after finding out
19:29that she knew
19:30it would go down this way.
19:31It's one of cinema's
19:32all-time greatest
19:33noodle-baking depictions
19:35of determinism,
19:36while cleverly toying
19:37with how we as viewers
19:38understand the visual
19:39vocabulary of film.
19:41Humanity suddenly
19:42defeats the monsters,
19:43The Mist.
19:44Frank Darabont's The Mist
19:45delivers one of the
19:46all-time most brutal
19:48final gut punches
19:49in cinema history.
19:51And considering it took
19:51a sharp left turn
19:52from Stephen King's
19:53original novella,
19:54not even fans of the
19:55source material
19:56saw this one coming.
19:57Here, protagonist
19:58David Drayton leads
19:59a small group of survivors
20:00attempting to escape
20:01the interdimensional
20:02Lovecraftian monsters
20:03that have materialized
20:04in the town of Bridgeton, Maine.
20:06At film's end,
20:07David and three other
20:08adult survivors
20:09enter a suicide pact
20:10after driving past
20:11a gigantic skyscraper-sized
20:13monster that understandably
20:14resigns them to believing
20:16that humanity has lost.
20:18And so,
20:18in a deeply harrowing scene,
20:19David shoots not only
20:21the adult survivors
20:22in the car,
20:23but also his very own
20:24young son in an attempt
20:25to spare him the horror
20:27of being killed
20:27by the monsters.
20:28With no bullet left
20:29for himself though,
20:30David walks out into the mist
20:32to be devoured by the monsters
20:33just as a tank rolls
20:35through the mist,
20:37revealing that the army
20:37has now taken control
20:39of the situation
20:39and actually pushed
20:40the creatures back.
20:41Though audiences probably
20:43expected that humanity
20:44would eventually prevail
20:45over the monsters,
20:46they surely didn't expect
20:47it to be framed
20:48in quite such bleak,
20:50soul-crushing fashion.
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