10 Best Movie Twists You Genuinely Never Saw Coming
Nobody saw these mind-blowing plot twists coming.
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00:00 Plot twists can be a wonderful thing in movies.
00:02 When they're genuinely surprising, yet in a way that doesn't feel forced or contradictory
00:05 to the established facts, they can elevate a great film to ensure classic status.
00:10 Now many of the great ones can dance within the realm of predictability, but these following
00:15 reveals and rug pulls were all, in one way or another, totally and utterly jaw-dropping.
00:20 So I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are the 10 Best Movie Twists You Genuinely
00:25 Never Saw Coming.
00:26 10.
00:27 The First One Is Cal's Daughter - Crazy Stupid Love
00:30 The inherent genius of the big plot twist in Crazy Stupid Love is that nobody really
00:33 went into the star-studded rom-com expecting there to be a rug pull at all.
00:38 Here, Steve Carell stars as Cal, a recently separated man who has a chance encounter with
00:43 a serial womanizer named Jacob, played by Ryan Gosling, who vows to coach him in the
00:48 art of picking up women.
00:49 All the while, Jacob has found himself smitten with a woman, Hannah, played by Emma Stone.
00:54 If so, he begins to question his promiscuous lifestyle and consider a possible monogamous
00:58 future with her.
01:00 These two stories seem basically unrelated until late in the film, Hannah actually brings
01:05 Jacob home to meet her parents where, surprise surprise, we learn that Hannah is in fact
01:10 Cal's daughter.
01:11 If you saw this movie in a packed cinema on opening weekend, you'll surely remember
01:15 the visceral uproarious laughter from the assembled masses.
01:18 That's noteworthy because rom-coms rarely, if ever, produce this sort of audience response,
01:24 and certainly not because of an ingeniously developed plot twist.
01:27 9.
01:28 Malcolm Was Dead The Whole Time â The Sixth Sense
01:30 The "he was dead the whole time" twist has absolutely been done to death these days.
01:35 But it's only because director M. Night Shyamalan delivered the definitive iteration
01:39 of it in the sixth sense and then ruined it for everyone else.
01:43 The supernatural thrillers established in scene depicts child psychologist Malcolm Crow
01:48 being shot and wounded by a former patient.
01:50 The rest of the story unfolds with Malcolm becoming close with his new patient, Cole,
01:54 a young boy who can communicate with the dead.
01:57 But at the film's end, Malcolm realises that he himself is dead, having died from
02:02 his gunshot wound at the very start of the movie.
02:04 That fans are still discovering sneaky foreshadowing to the big reveal almost 25 years later is
02:09 a real testament to Shyamalan's genius.
02:12 Genius that he has admittedly been straining to recapture ever since.
02:16 8.
02:17 Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite â The Kims Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite begins with an
02:28 impoverished family, the Kims, progressively insinuating themselves into the lives of wealthy
02:33 family the Parks as each become deployed in a different position of hired help, e.g. the
02:39 chauffeur, the housekeeper, and so on and so on.
02:42 It is a terrific set-up for a delicious black comedy about class inequality, but one that
02:46 takes a supremely unexpectedly dark turn around the midpoint when the full grim truth is revealed.
02:52 And that's because while the Parks are away on vacation, the Kims treat their fancy house
02:56 as if it's their own, before the Parks' former housekeeper shows up insisting that
03:01 she left something in the basement.
03:03 She then reveals that the basement harbours a secret bunker where she stashed her husband,
03:07 who has been living secretly there for four years in order to hide from loan sharks.
03:12 At this point, Parasite turns into a much darker and more unhinged thriller as these
03:16 two parties of impostors effectively go to war, all the while attempting to conceal it
03:20 all from the Parks as they return home from their trip.
03:23 Number 7 - Tyler Durden doesn't exist - Fight Club
03:27 If anyone tells you that they saw Fight Club's earth-shattering plot twist coming, well,
03:31 don't believe them.
03:32 David Fincher's surreal drama of course revolves around an unnamed narrator protagonist
03:36 played by Edward Norton, a disaffected white-collar worker whose life is turned upside down by
03:41 his new acquaintance, a mysterious soap salesman named Tyler Durden.
03:46 And so, the pair form an underground fight club to vent their frustrations with the modern
03:49 world, but as the movement grows, it mutates into a sprawling terrorist organisation far
03:55 beyond the control of our so-called hero.
03:57 Ultimately, it's revealed that Tyler's plan is to destroy a series of buildings containing
04:02 credit card data, effectively resetting the debt record and annihilating one of the key
04:06 tenets of modern capitalism as we know it.
04:09 Yet Fincher's film is quite ingeniously so bizarre, hilarious, visually stunning and
04:13 well-acted enough as to distract from the big twist hiding in plain sight - that being
04:18 of course, that Tyler doesn't actually exist.
04:21 Literally countless films have ripped off this twist in the near 25 years since, but
04:25 every single one pales in comparison to the flabbergasting brilliance of Fight Club's
04:30 big reveal.
04:31 Number 6 - Norman Bates is the killer - Psycho
04:34 From one classic to another, while there's admittedly a fair chance that you know the
04:37 twist in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho whether you've seen the movie or not today, that
04:41 speaks more to how utterly unexpected it is to the blissfully unaware.
04:45 See Hitchcock's thriller is centred around the shocking demise of Marion Crane, who is
04:49 stabbed to death in the shower at the Bates Motel by a figure implied to be Norma Bates,
04:54 the mentally deranged mother of the motel's owner Norman.
04:58 Eventually though, we learn that Norma died years prior, with her mummified corpse being
05:02 found in the motel cellar, before we then see that Norman has been committing the murders
05:05 himself while dressed up as his own mammy dearest.
05:09 As well-known as the twist is today, it still leaves a bruising impact, and one can scarcely
05:14 begin to imagine what audiences thought of it over 60 years ago.
05:18 Number 5 - Mido is Dae-soo's daughter - Oldboy
05:22 Park Chan-wook's masterful thriller Oldboy touts such a strange, intoxicating atmosphere
05:26 from the very beginning, that viewers are quite ingeniously distracted from figuring
05:31 out its final plot twist.
05:32 A twist that, admittedly, is so damn icky that you probably wouldn't think of it anyway.
05:38 The Oldboy's primary mystery concerns why loser businessman Oh Dae-soo gets kidnapped
05:43 and imprisoned within a room for 15 years.
05:46 As Dae-soo investigates, he becomes close with a young chef called Mido, and the pair
05:49 eventually embark on a sexual relationship.
05:51 It's revealed near the end of the film though that the party responsible for Dae-soo's
05:56 imprisonment was his former schoolmate Woo-jin.
05:58 At school, Dae-soo caught Woo-jin committing incest with his sister, as resultingly became
06:03 gossip around the school, causing Woo-jin's sister to then take her own life.
06:07 The real twist though?
06:08 Well, that's that the crux of Woo-jin's revenge plan was to make Dae-soo suffer just
06:13 as he had, and so reveals that Mido is actually Dae-soo's own daughter.
06:20 To accomplish this, Woo-jin used hypnosis to orchestrate Dae-soo meeting his daughter,
06:25 falling in love with her, and ultimately embarking on a romantic relationship.
06:28 Through its creatively messed up nature, it's truly one of the rare, unbelievable plot twists
06:33 that simply can't be predicted.
06:35 SAUR is a film that was so brilliantly positioned to lure audiences into a false sense of security.
06:44 Upon its original 2004 release, few expected much from James Wan's grotty low-budget
06:49 horror flick, such that its ingenious final twist crept up on viewers and smacked them
06:54 around the face.
06:55 As we all know now, SAUR revolves around two men, Adam and Lawrence, who wake up chained
07:00 in the world's second worst bathroom at the behest of the vicious Jigsaw killer, who
07:04 tortures people he believes don't value their lives.
07:08 Between Adam and Lawrence lies the corpse of a man who seemingly shot himself in the
07:12 head during a prior Jigsaw game.
07:14 Though at the film's end we learn that this is no dead body.
07:18 Rather, it's actually Jigsaw himself, who slathered himself in fake blood and played
07:23 dead for the entirety of the game before standing up and giving Adam the surprise of his life.
07:28 Better still, Jigsaw is actually John Kramer, one of Lawrence's terminal cancer patients
07:33 briefly glimpsed earlier in the film.
07:35 It's a twist so devious and so clever that every subsequent sequel has struggled to match
07:41 it, let alone one-up it.
07:43 3.
07:44 Borden was identical twins, and Gia duplicates himself.
07:47 The Prestige.
07:49 The Prestige may not be Christopher Nolan's BEST film, but it arguably touts the strongest
07:54 plot twist from any of his movies.
07:56 And in fairness, Nolan's tightly-wanned mystery thriller is pretty much jam-packed
08:00 with twists.
08:02 Though there's very clearly one above all others that lands with thunderous impact.
08:06 So for a bit of context here, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman star as rival magicians Alfred
08:11 Borden and Robert Angier, with Borden inventing a mesmerising trick called the Transported
08:16 Man whereby he is seemingly able to instantly teleport across the stage.
08:21 Angier anguishes over being unable to learn Borden's secret, and so entrusts Nikola
08:26 Tesla to build him a device that can duplicate anything placed inside it.
08:31 This allows Angier to create his own grim version of the Transported Man, whereby the
08:35 original Angier drowns in the tank underneath the stage, and the new Angier clone takes
08:40 his place during each performance.
08:42 At the film's end though, we actually learn Borden's trick, particularly that Borden
08:47 was actually a persona adopted by a pair of identical twins, one posing as Borden and
08:52 the other as his confidant Fallon.
08:54 This is how they pulled off the Transported Man, and when Borden is later hanged after
08:58 being accused of Angier's drowning murder, that leaves the other Borden twin free to
09:02 kill Angier and make off into the night.
09:04 It's nuts, but in the context of the movie it all makes perfect sense, and it is so surprising.
09:11 The flashbacks are actually visions of the future.
09:14 Arrival, Denis Villeneuve's unmasterful sci-fi drama Arrival, begins with a devastating
09:19 montage chronicling linguist Louise Banks raising her young daughter who dies at just
09:24 12 years of age due to an incurable illness.
09:27 The visual language of this scene suggests that this tragedy unfolded before the movie's
09:31 alien invasion story, but as we learn near the end, that's not the case at all.
09:37 While interacting with the aliens, or Heptapods, Louise begins to learn their strange language,
09:42 and is told by one of the Heptapods that they offer a weapon to help humanity.
09:47 Louise realises that the alien weapon they speak of is actually language itself, which
09:51 allows those who learn it to change their brains linear perception of time, and so it's
09:56 revealed that Louise's flashbacks of her late daughter aren't memories at all, they're
10:00 actually premonitions of the future to come.
10:03 With that, Louise comes to appreciate the heartbreaking agony that, despite knowing
10:07 her daughter's doomed fate, she will still conceive her regardless with her new love
10:11 interest Ian, and that Ian will eventually leave her after finding out that she knew
10:16 it would go down this way.
10:17 It's one of cinema's all-time greatest noodle-baking depictions of determinism, while
10:22 cleverly toying with how we as viewers understand the visual vocabulary of film.
10:27 1.
10:28 Humanity Suddenly Defeats the Monsters - The Mist
10:31 Frank Darabont's The Mist delivers one of the all-time most brutal final gut-punches
10:35 in cinema history, and considering it took a sharp left turn from Stephen King's original
10:40 novella, not even fans of the source material saw this one coming.
10:43 Here, protagonist David Drayton leads a small group of survivors attempting to escape the
10:48 interdimensional Lovecraftian monsters that have materialised in the town of Bridgeton,
10:52 Maine.
10:53 At film's end, David and three other adult survivors enter a suicide pact after driving
10:57 past a gigantic skyscraper-sized monster that understandably resigns them to believing that
11:02 humanity has lost.
11:04 And so, in a deeply harrowing scene, David shoots not only the adult survivors in the
11:08 car, but also his very own young son, in an attempt to spare him the horror of being killed
11:14 by the monsters.
11:15 With no bullet left for himself, David walks out into the mist to be devoured by the monsters,
11:20 just as a tank rolls through the mist, revealing that the army has now taken control of the
11:25 situation and actually pushed the creatures back.
11:28 Though audiences probably expected that humanity would eventually prevail over the monsters,
11:32 they surely didn't expect it to be framed in quite such bleak, soul-crushing fashion.
11:38 So that's our list, what did you think about these plot twists?
11:42 Did you see any of them coming and are there any better ones that I missed off here?
11:46 While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like, share, subscribe and
11:49 head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
11:53 Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you