Who doesn’t love movies with huge twists? When The Sixth Sense came out, it’s all anyone talked about. Same with The Usual Suspects.
Here’s a great list of 18 films with twist endings, including the above-mentioned landmark films.
Warning: It should go without saying, but if you haven’t seen any of the films mentioned, I’d just check the titles and not read the descriptions because – SPOILER ALERT – they give away the twists!
To their list, I would also add many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, especially Vertigo and North by Northwest (two of my favorite movies of all time), and even Hitchcockian thrillers made by others, such as the magnificently twisty Charade (with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn) and the 1991 film, Shattered (with Tom Berenger). The less I say about them, the better, but I highly recommend all of them.
The riveting 2004 film, The Forgotten, drew mixed reviews, but I thought it had a killer premise (a mother’s son disappears, nobody remembers her ever having a son, and there is no trace of his ever having existed) and it certainly had a twist toward the end that I didn’t expect.
More recently, I thought the sci-fi film Arrival (Amy Adams) had a brilliant twist that clearly differentiated it from most alien invasion films.
And of course, almost every Twilight Zone episode ever made had a killer twist (my favorite being the “To Serve Man” episode, where an alien race had a book called “To Serve Man,” that turned out to be:
SPOILER ALERT
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A cookbook!
What other twist-ending films have you seen and recommend?
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