- 6 weeks ago
Ever walked out of a cinema scratching your head? This video dives into the most confusing and perplexing movie endings that have baffled viewers for years, from Memento's reverse narrative to Donnie Darko's temporal paradoxes and Annihilation's existential questions. Prepare to have your mind twisted!
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00:00Movies are often made by their endings, and if a filmmaker gets it wrong, it can catastrophically
00:05tank a film's reception. After all, those final moments before the credits roll are
00:09going to linger in the viewer's brain as they leave the cinema, and if they stink,
00:13then the film as a whole is affected. But get it right, and a great movie can become
00:17a surefire classic, leaving audiences on an elated, mesmerised high.
00:21Some movies, however, dare to take a wholly different tack, simply aiming to bewilder
00:26and baffle as much as possible, and giving viewers a heap to digest as they head home.
00:31So with that in mind, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture, here with the most confusing movie endings people
00:37don't understand. Memento.
00:39In an attempt to replicate amnesiac hero Leonard's fractured mental state, the majority of the
00:44film's scenes unfold in reverse order, leading to the climactic mind-melter of a reveal that
00:49Shelby himself accidentally killed his wife by administering an insulin overdose to her due to
00:54his amnesia. The story starts and ends with Leonard murdering Teddy, the man he believes
00:59to be the attacker. However, as we travel backwards, it's revealed that Teddy is in fact
01:03an undercover cop and helped Leonard kill the attacker a year prior. Teddy has since been
01:07exploiting Leonard's amnesia to set up other unsavory figures to be killed, prompting Leonard
01:12to leave himself a Polaroid, falsely incriminating Teddy as the killer, and eventually leading to his
01:17death. Long story short, Leonard intentionally deceives himself into believing that Teddy was one of
01:21the attackers, creating his own revenge narrative to paper over the fact that he himself was
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01:47Annihilation. Alex Garland's sci-fi masterwork was one of 2018's most WTF movies, following a group of
01:53scientists as they head a mysterious quarantine zone known as the Shimmer. At the climax, Natalie
01:58Portman's Lena finds the source of the Shimmer and learns that her husband, who had been missing for
02:02a year, actually killed himself and the man who returned was a doppelganger created by the Shimmer.
02:08She then comes across her only surviving teammate Ventress, who quickly succumbs to the Shimmer and
02:13transforms into a nebulous object before absorbing a drop of Lena's blood and creating a metallic
02:18doppelganger. The clone mimics Lena's movements exactly, but by handing a white phosphorus grenade
02:24to the doppelganger, she's able to kill it and burn down the lighthouse. The fire appears to destroy
02:29the Shimmer, and the film ends with Lena meeting Kane's doppelganger. They embrace, and their irises
02:33both glisten, prompting the viewer to question whether or not the real Lena escaped or her imposter.
02:39Are Kane and Lena really who they appear to be, and are they still human despite their DNA being
02:43altered so significantly? I apologise because that wasn't really an explanation, but it should help.
02:49Planet of the Apes
02:49One of the more vocal complaints about Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake was that the general
02:55plot, and especially its ending, confused the hell out of everyone. At the end, Mark Wahlberg's
03:00hero travels back in time to the Earth of the present, only to be greeted by apes in the place
03:05of humans. The abrupt ending left many fans scratching their heads, especially as it was such a sharp
03:09180 from the iconic conclusion of the original film. Now, it's never precisely explained how
03:14this new reality came to be, though fans are left to assume that the villainous Thade somehow beat
03:21Leo back to Earth and instigated all the changes, fashioning himself as an Abraham Lincoln-like figure
03:27in the process. Now, for his part, Burton claimed that the ending wasn't really supposed to make sense
03:32beyond providing an intriguing cliffhanger to set up a sequel, but ultimately, most were left more
03:37baffled than excited by it.
03:39Donnie Darko
03:40Despite being one of the biggest cult classics of the last 20-plus years, Donnie Darko is also
03:45an extremely obtuse and impenetrable film at times. What makes Richard Kelly's film especially
03:50confusing is that much of the key information lies in supplementary materials released alongside it,
03:55namely a fictional book featured in the movie The Philosophy of Time Travel, the cliff notes of which
04:00Kelly made available online. To cut to the chase, when Donnie survives a plane crash at the start of the
04:05film, he creates a parallel universe, which the rest of the movie takes place in, and in order to prevent
04:10a
04:11cataclysmic event which destroys the original primary universe, he voluntarily allows himself to be killed by the
04:16falling jet engine at the end of the 28 days. This then protects the original universe, including his
04:22girlfriend Gretchen, but the tragic irony is that by dying as originally intended, Gretchen and him never end up
04:28meeting. Grease. On the face of it, Grease is a pretty straightforward musical that shouldn't be
04:33keeping anyone awake at night, but then it all goes a bit weird when Danny and Sandy fly off over
04:39the
04:39horizon in a car. It's baffling in itself, but even more so because the rest of the film is so
04:44grounded
04:45and normal if you ignore the musical part. One prominent fan theory suggests that the car taking
04:49flight is symbolic of Sandy's ascent to heaven, and that the entirety of the movie was actually her
04:54dying dream. You see, though she talks about being saved by Danny from drowning at the beach, that's
04:59just a little wishful thinking, and she wasn't quite so lucky. Jim Jacobs, who co-created the
05:03original musical, has rubbished that theory, though curiously didn't provide any sort of explanation in
05:09its place. Apparently, we're just supposed to believe that the singular moment of fantasy just
05:13sort of happens. No country for old men. The Coen Brothers' best picture winning masterpiece ended in
05:19an elliptical fashion that just about nobody expected. After Javier Bardem's Anton
05:24eludes capture, the final scene of the film sees Sheriff Ed share two dreams he had with his
05:29wife. In the first, he loses some money given to him by his father, and in the second, he's riding
05:33past the snowy mountain with his father, who rides ahead to start a fire and wait for his son, and
05:38with
05:38that, we cut to black. It might seem complex, but if you pay attention to the movie, it actually does
05:43sort of make sense. The first dream quite clearly relates to the movie's money plot and Belle's own
05:48failure to recover the illicit cash, but the second is a far more haunting and significant one. It relates to
05:53Belle's own advancing age and a death that probably isn't that far off. His father, who is presumably
05:58dead already, is lighting the fire in what's surely a reference to the afterlife. Basically, it's just
06:03a summary of the movie's title. Belle is just an old man now incapable of being effective against the
06:09violent, younger men of today. Primer
06:11Mind-melting cult classic Primer revolves around two engineers who accidentally create a crude time
06:17machine, and before long, all hell starts to break loose, as it always does in time travel films.
06:21It was consciously designed with the refusal to dumb down any of the film's technical dialogue,
06:26but naturally that just meant it was very hard to understand. They use time travel to make profits
06:31on the stock market, but their conflicting philosophies, one is keen to exploit time travel
06:35and the other is deeming it too dangerous, inevitably leads them down a dark path involving
06:39numerous competing timelines and realities. Though it ultimately appears that the two manage to resolve
06:44the anomalies, the ending reveals the full extent of Aaron's ambition, with numerous temporal versions of
06:50himself in play as he goes ahead with building a warehouse-sized time machine. This is a massively
06:55simplified explanation of the film's plot, which is literally too dense for words, and in many ways
06:59its labyrinthian nature is very much the point. But there's no shame in being confused by it, or as the
07:05case may be, considering it too smart for its own good. The Tree of Life. Anyone who's seen any of
07:09Terrence Malick's films will know that he's not a fan of conventional stories, and in that respect,
07:14the Tree of Life is his magnum opus to himself. To add a cherry on top of it, the final
07:19passage of
07:20the film sees Sean Penn's Jack end up on a beach where he's reunited with his younger parents,
07:25and of course, his dead brother. Malick never makes it entirely clear whether this is the afterlife
07:30following Jack's death, or something more metaphorical and less literal. True to his recent
07:34artistic focus, though, it makes sense that this as a sequence is more interested in feeling than
07:39consistent narrative logic. The film ends with Jack smiling and seemingly relieved, which seems to be
07:44the point here. Whether you feel to death through the lens of the afterlife, or simply choose to
07:48remember the departed, they're both valid means of keeping the dead alive and finding peace. Or
07:53something like that anyway. Mulholland Drive. David Lynch's challenging, surrealist masterpiece is one
07:58of the most intensely debated films of the last 20-plus years, and true to character, Lynch hasn't
08:03expressed much interest in clarifying things for his fans. Amid a fleet of fascinating and deeply
08:08unsettling subplots, Naomi Watts' Betty and Laura Haring's Rita embark on a sexual relationship
08:14before opening a mysterious blue box that completely flips the script. At this point,
08:19the narrative shifts to Diane, the woman whose apartment Betty and Rita were investigating.
08:23Diane is a failed actress and deeply depressed after her affair with actress Camilla comes to an end.
08:29The film concludes with Diane hiring a hitman to kill Camilla, and after she's notified the job is
08:33done by way of receiving a blue key, she shoots herself. What? The most common fan theory is
08:38that the Betty plot is merely the psychosis-induced dream of Diane, hence the likeness of Betty and
08:43Rita to herself and Camilla, not to mention the idealised version of her life as an on-the-rise
08:49actress. But despite this being the most easily digestible explanation for Mulholland Drive's
08:54twisty narrative, there are some who feel that it's also too straightforward, and a literal reading
08:59of the movie's overall narrative. Arrival. Denis Villeneuve's mind-blowing sci-fi thriller Arrival
09:05is a head-scratcher and a half. It opens with the revelation that genius linguist Louise's daughter
09:10died from an incurable illness as a teenager. It then follows her attempts to help the US
09:15government understand and communicate with a series of extraterrestrial creatures which
09:19have landed on Earth. Near the end of Arrival, it's revealed that the alien language allows those
09:23who learn it to view time in a non-linear fashion, and that Louise's memories of her past are in
09:28fact
09:29visions of her future. That is to say that her daughter hasn't been born yet.
09:33Furthermore, it's revealed that Louise's colleague, Ian, will be the father of her child,
09:38and her eventually telling Ian that she knew their daughter would die causes him to leave her.
09:43The film ends with Louise embracing her envisioned future in all of its beauty and pain. What really
09:49made audiences struggle with this ending, though, is its approach to time and how humans perceive it.
09:54The way we live our lives encourages us to view it as a linear line from A to B. But
09:59Arrival challenges
10:00audiences to disregard that and view it instead as a flat circle with no real beginning and no real end.
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