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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
00:07unexpected 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
00:19twist 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. Planet of the Apes plot twist was such a game
00:36changer 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
00:51humanoids,
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,
01:12one 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
01:32-studded rom-com expecting 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 named
01:41Jacob,
01:42played 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,
02:01Hannah actually brings Jacob home to meet her parents, where, surprise, surprise,
02:05we learn that Hannah is in fact Cal's daughter.
02:08If you saw this movie in a packed cinema on opening weekend,
02:11you'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,
02:30who has been framed for the murder of his lover, Susan Atwell.
02:34The actual man responsible, Secretary of Defense David Bryce,
02:38takes 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,
02:54as both Susan's killer and the mysterious Yuri.
02:57But with the matter seemingly resolved,
03:00the 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,
03:28and 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 thriller's establishing 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.
04:16Genius that he has admittedly been straining to recapture ever since.
04:21There was never an Aaron, Primal Fear.
04:23Primal 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.
04:34The legal thriller follows hotshot defense attorney Martin Vale,
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.
04:59As such, Aaron is found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a psych hospital,
05:05but during his final meeting with Vale, he reveals that he faked the whole damn thing.
05:10Aaron 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 Vale 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 Vale 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,
05:55the Kims, progressively 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 around the midpoint,
06:16when 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 that she left something in the basement.
06:29She then reveals that the basement harbours a secret bunker where she stashed her husband,
06:33who has been living secretly there for four years in 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 as they return home from their trip.
06:49The Lego universe is a child's imagination, the 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 which 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 have been played out by an 8-year-old boy
07:19Finn,
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.
07:27In 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 playing with some colourful plastic bricks.
07:44Tyler 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, revolves around an unnamed narrator protagonist played by Edward Nott,
07:57a disaffected white-collar worker whose life is turned upside down by his new acquaintance,
08:02a mysterious soap salesman named Tyler Durden.
08:06And so, the pair form an underground fight club to vent their frustrations with the modern world,
08:10but as the movement grows, it mutates into a sprawling terrorist organisation,
08:15far beyond the control of our so-called hero.
08:17Ultimately, it's revealed that Tyler's plan is to destroy a series of buildings containing credit card data,
08:23effectively resetting the debt record and annihilating one of the key tenets of modern capitalism as we know it.
08:28Yet, Fincher's film is quite ingeniously so bizarre, hilarious, 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 to 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 on vicious crime boss Doyle Lonergan.
09:01The pair's elaborate ruse involves creating a fake betting parlour
09:05where Lonergan can be compelled to place a bad bet and lose a massive amount of money.
09:10But once the gamut plays out and Lonergan angrily demands his money back,
09:15the FBI storms the parlour to arrest Gondorf, while letting Hooker go.
09:20An infuriated Gondorf then shoots Hooker before FBI agent Polk shoots Gondorf.
09:25At which point, Lonergan is escorted from the scene.
09:29Once they've gone, however, Gondorf and Hooker reveal they're absolutely fine.
09:34The shootings were staged, and agent Polk is actually a con man working with the duo
09:39to ensure both Lonergan and 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 by two men he believes are dead.
09:51Incredible.
09:54From one classic to another, while there's admittedly a fair chance that you know the twist
09:58in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, whether you've seen the movie or not today,
10:01that speaks more to how utterly unexpected it is to the blissfully unaware.
10:06See, Hitchcock's thriller is centred around the shocking demise of Marion Crane,
10:10who is stabbed to death in the shower at the Bates Motel by 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, with her mummified corpse being
10:22found in the motel's cellar, before we then see that Norman has been committing the murders
10:26himself while dressed up as his own mammy dearest.
10:30As well known as the twist is today, it still leaves a bruising impact,
10:34and one can scarcely begin to imagine what audiences thought of it over 60 years ago.
10:39Vulture is Liz's dad, Spider-Man Homecoming
10:42The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't exactly known for its jaw-dropping plot twists,
10:48which is perhaps partly why Spider-Man Homecoming's big reveal managed to catch so many viewers off
10:53guard. At the end of the film's second act, Peter Parker is preparing to take Liz to the school
10:58homecoming dance, but when he knocks on the front door, he's greeted with none other than the
11:03movie's primary villain, Adrian Toomes. Yes, it turns out that Peter's antagonist also happens
11:09to be the father of his love interest, a fact which director John Watts managed to brilliantly
11:14hide in plain sight. And so when Toomes opens the door and greets Peter, it's a legitimately
11:20butt-puckering moment for both Peter and the audience. To date, it remains one of the MCU's
11:26best-executed plot twists, and much of its success lies in its sheer simplicity.
11:31Mido is Desu's daughter, Oldboy.
11:34Park Chan-wook's masterful thriller, Oldboy, touts such a strange, intoxicating atmosphere
11:39from the very beginning, that viewers are quite ingeniously distracted from figuring out
11:43its final plot twist. A twist that, admittedly, is so damn icky that you probably wouldn't
11:49think of it anywhere.
11:50See, Oldboy's primary mystery concerns why loser businessman, Oh Desu, gets kidnapped and
11:55imprisoned within a room for 15 years. As Desu investigates, he becomes close with a
12:00young chef called Mido, and the pair eventually embark on a sexual relationship. It's revealed
12:04near the end of the film, though, that the party responsible for Desu's imprisonment
12:08was his former schoolmate, Woo Jin. At school, Desu caught Woo Jin committing incest with his
12:13sister, as resultingly became gossip around the school, causing Woo Jin's sister to then
12:18take her own life. The real twist, though, well, that's that the crux of Woo Jin's revenge
12:23plan was to make Desu suffer just as he had, and so reveals that Mido is actually Desu's
12:29own daughter. Yeah, it's, uh, well, I said it was icky, didn't I?
12:33To accomplish this, Woo Jin used hypnosis to orchestrate Desu meeting his daughter, falling
12:37in love with her, and ultimately embarking on a romantic relationship. Through its creatively
12:41messed up nature, it's truly one of the rare, unbelievable plot twists that simply can't
12:46be predicted.
12:47Anthony is a Hallucination Dead Man Shoes Shane Meadows Dead Man Shoes is a criminally
12:53under-seen psychological thriller in which a soldier, Richard, returns to his hometown to
12:58wrecking with a group of drug dealers who have tormented his mentally disabled brother,
13:03Anthony.
13:03Near the end of the movie, we learn the nauseating truth. Anthony committed suicide following the
13:09group's abuse, and Richard has actually been seeing hallucinations of his late brother
13:13throughout the movie. It completely changes the temperature of the story and the nature of
13:19Richard's revenge spree, ensuring most viewers will want to immediately rewatch the film with
13:24this new knowledge, that Richard isn't really being accompanied by his brother on his quest.
13:29These twists are incredibly tough to pull off in a post Sixth Sense world, yet Dead Man
13:35Shoes is a rare example of one that makes it work, even with a few generous clues being dangled
13:40in front of us, like Anthony wearing the same clothes in flashbacks.
13:44Jigsaw is in the bathroom all along, Saw. Saw is a film that was so brilliantly positioned to lure
13:50audiences into a false sense of security. Upon its original 2004 release, few expected merch from
13:56James Wan's grotty low budget horror flick, such that its ingenious final twist crept up on viewers
14:01and smacked them around the face. As we all know now, Saw revolves around two men, Adam and Lawrence,
14:08who wake up chained in the world's second worst bathroom at the behest of the vicious Jigsaw killer,
14:13who tortures people he believes don't value their lives. Between Adam and Lawrence though,
14:18lies the corpse of a man who seemingly shot himself in the head during a prior Jigsaw game,
14:23though at the film's end we learn that this is no dead body. Rather, it's actually Jigsaw himself,
14:29who slathered himself in fake blood and played dead for the entirety of the game before standing up
14:34and giving Adam the surprise of his life. Better still, Jigsaw is actually John Kramer,
14:39one of Lawrence's terminal cancer patients briefly glimpsed earlier in the film. It's a twist so
14:45devious and so clever that every subsequent sequel has struggled to match it, let alone one opinion.
14:51K isn't the chosen one, Blade Runner 2049. Relatively earlier on in Blade Runner 2049,
14:58it seems to be teeing up the inevitable reveal that Replicant K is the child of Deckard and Replicant
15:03Rachel. Given the tendency for belated legacy sequels to introduce new heroes with convoluted ties to
15:10the original leads, it certainly would have been completely on brand for Hollywood in the 2010s.
15:16And so, what a surprise it was when, deep into the movie's third act, K learns that he isn't the
15:21child of Deckard and Rachel, completely obliterating the typical chosen one arc that had seemingly been
15:27carved out for him. Furthermore, the Replicant Child ends up being an incredibly minor character,
15:33Dr. Anna Stalline, briefly glimpsed much earlier in the story. Ultimately, Blade Runner 2049 brilliantly
15:40bait and switches the audience, leading them to believe a garden variety hero's journey is in the
15:46works, only to pull the rug out and give K some heroic agency that's very much his own. In the
15:52end,
15:52being Constant K is enough for him. Or as Ryan Gosling's Ken would say, Knuff.
15:58Borden was identical twins, and Gia duplicates himself, The Prestige. The Prestige may not be
16:05Christopher Nolan's best film, but it arguably touts the strongest plot twist from any of his movies.
16:11And in fairness, Nolan's tightly won mystery thriller is pretty much jam-packed with twists,
16:16though there's very clearly one above all others that lands with thunderous impact.
16:21So, for a bit of context here, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman star as rival magicians Alfred Borden
16:26and Robert Angier, with Borden inventing a mesmerising trick called The Transported Man,
16:31whereby he is seemingly able to instantly teleport across the stage. Angier anguishes over being
16:37unable to learn Borden's secret, and so entrusts Nikola Tesla to build him a device that can duplicate
16:43anything placed inside it. This allows Angier to create his own grim version of The Transported Man,
16:49whereby the original Angier drowns in the tank underneath the stage, and the new Angier clone
16:55takes his place during each performance. At the film's end though, we actually learn Borden's trick,
17:00particularly that Borden was actually a persona adopted by a pair of identical twins, one posing as
17:06Borden, and the other as his confidant Fallon. This is how he pulled off The Transported Man,
17:11and when Borden is later hanged after being accused of Angier's drowning murder,
17:15that leaves the other Borden twin free to kill Angier and make off into the night. It's nuts,
17:20but in the context of the movie it all makes perfect sense, and it is so surprising.
17:25Darth Vader is Luke's father, The Empire Strikes Back.
17:29In terms of mega budget movies though, no twist is more iconic than Darth Vader revealing himself to
17:35be Luke Skywalker's father at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. It was a perfect,
17:40what the actual revelation on which to conclude the middle chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy,
17:47leaving fans with plenty to think about ahead of Return of the Jedi's release,
17:51and damn near ensuring they'd be back to see how it all played out.
17:55Though parentage twists are decidedly more common nowadays, they've never been more earth shattering
18:01than in this movie, creating a devastating link between the hero and villain which went on to
18:06find the franchise for four decades. That is, unless you happen to read a 1978 newspaper interview with
18:13David Prowse in which he inadvertently spoiled it a whole two years before the movie came out.
18:19Thankfully, this being the pre-internet age, his slippery tongue didn't quite have the same reach.
18:25The flashbacks are actually visions of the future, Arrival. Denis Villeneuve's masterful sci-fi drama
18:31Arrival begins with a devastating montage chronicling linguist Louise Banks,
18:35raising her young daughter who dies at just 12 years of age due to an incurable illness.
18:41The visual language of this scene suggests that this tragedy unfolded before the movie's alien
18:46invasion story. But as we learn near the end, that's not the case at all. While interacting with
18:52the aliens or heptapods, Louise begins to learn their strange language and is told by one of the
18:57heptapods that they offer a weapon to help humanity. Louise realizes that the alien weapon they speak of
19:03is actually language itself, which allows those who learn it to change their brain's linear
19:08perception of time. And so it's revealed that Louise's flashbacks of her late daughter aren't
19:13memories at all, they're actually premonitions of the future to come. With that, Louise comes to
19:18appreciate the heartbreaking agony that, despite knowing her daughter's doomed fate, she will still
19:23conceive her regardless with her new love interest, Ian, and that Ian will eventually leave her after
19:28finding out that she knew it would go down this way. It's one of cinema's all-time greatest noodle
19:34baking depictions of determinism, while cleverly toying with how we as viewers understand the
19:39visual vocabulary of film. Humanity suddenly defeats the monsters, The Mist. Frank Darabont's The Mist
19:45delivers one of the all-time most brutal final gut punches in cinema history. And considering it took a
19:51sharp left turn from Stephen King's original novella, not even fans of the source material saw this one
19:56coming. Here, protagonist David Drayton leads a small group of survivors attempting to escape the
20:01interdimensional Lovecraftian monsters that have materialized in the town of Bridgeton, Maine.
20:06At film's end, David and three other adult survivors enter a suicide pact after driving
20:11past a gigantic skyscraper-sized monster that understandably resigns them to believing that
20:16humanity has lost. And so in a deeply harrowing scene, David shoots not only the adult survivors
20:22in the car, but also his very own young son, in an attempt to spare him the horror of being
20:27killed
20:27by the monsters. With no bullet left for himself though, David walks out into the mist to be devoured
20:32by the monsters, just as a tank rolls through the mist, revealing that the army has now taken control
20:39of the situation and actually pushed the creatures back. Though audiences probably expected that humanity
20:44would eventually prevail over the monsters, they surely didn't expect it to be framed in quite such
20:49bleak, soul-crushing fashion.
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