The best psychological thrillers have twist endings that not only shock audiences but also force viewers to rewatch the entire movie to realize the truth was hiding there the entire time. The worst of the twists are when they are thrown in with no reason other than just shocking audiences. The best ones need to be set up so that the film doesn’t cheat the viewers, and the hints are there if someone watches for them.
Psychological thrillers play out in both mysteries and horror movie genres. These include both killers and generalized mysteries where the twists show how the entire film was never as it seemed. The perfect example of these involves fair-play clues, and the scenes foreshadow the twist so that it becomes more obvious on a second viewing. The best part is that there are several ways to set up these reveals.
When it comes to twists that the audience never sees coming, the narrative devices include an unreliable narrator, hidden identities, and even reality-bending reveals. The best directors to build these twists include names like Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and Martin Scorsese, and the best of these have won Oscars and remain the best in the genre even decades after their release.
10
The Prestige (2006)
In between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan took a break to make something very different. The Prestige stars Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as Victorian-era magicians whose rivalry turns deadly when they try to steal and outdo each other’s greatest illusion. The twist at the end was one that no one saw coming thanks to the sci-fi nature of the story.
The twist is a double reveal. The first twist is that Bale’s Alfred Borden was secretly twin brothers, taking turns as each other to make their illusion work. However, the second twist was even more shocking since Jackman’s Robert Angier was using a cloning machine, and he was drowning the clones to pull off his illusion in each performance. The opening actually explains the trick, but it’s not until the end that it all makes sense.
9
Primal Fear (1996)
Primal Fear has one of the most impressive twists in crime drama history. The movie stars Richard Gere as an attorney named Martin Vail, who is glory-seeking and takes on high-profile cases to feed his ego. This case involves an altar boy who is arrested for the murder of a powerful Chicago archbishop. The defense is that the young man says he is innocent, while he has dissociative identity disorder and his alter committed the murder.
The case ends when the young man snaps in court, and his alter attacks one of the prosecuting attorneys. This allows him to have his insanity claim come through. The twist is that there was no DID and he faked the entire affliction. What really sold this was Edward Norton’s performance in his feature film debut. He proved to be a star on the rise by selling this twist masterfully.
8
Oldboy (2003)
Oldboy is Park Chan-wook’s psychological thriller from 2003 that has become a cult classic and is considered one of the finest in the genre to come out of South Korea. The movie follows a man named Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) who is abducted and imprisoned in a private room for 15 years with no explanation. One day, he is released and given a deadline to find out why he lost his freedom.
This movie is completely set up by the mystery of why this man had 15 years of his life stolen from him. The twist comes when the abductor does the unthinkable. Years earlier, Dae-su saw his abductor in an incestuous relationship with his own sister and exposed it, leading to her suicide. When the abductor frees Dae-su, he sets up an encounter where he falls in love with his own daughter, not knowing who she is. It’s one of the most disturbing twists in movie history.
7
Gone Girl (2014)
Gone Girl is a psychological thriller that reveals the twist long before the final moments come. Directed by David Fincher and based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, the movie stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a man whose wife disappears, and he finds himself accused of her murder. As he fights to prove his innocence and show he wants to find out what happened to his wife, the twist arrives.
Rosamund Pike stars as Amy Dunne, Nick’s missing wife. She faked her own death and disappeared to make it look like Nick killed her after she learned he was having an affair. The entire situation backfires on her when she finds herself in danger, and she returns to reveal herself, where she fakes being abducted to keep from getting in trouble. The end, with the two reluctantly staying together, pays off the twist masterfully.
6
Identity (2003)
Released in 2003, Identity is a James Mangold-directed movie that is loosely based on Agatha Christie’s classic novel And Then There Were None. That original novel was about a group of people gathered in one place who start to die one by one. They know one of them is a killer, and the mystery involves finding out who the killer is before everyone ends up dead.
The movie has 10 strangers stranded at a remote Nevada motel during a storm, and they start to get murdered one by one. The twist here is one that no one could have seen coming because none of these people are real, and the killer is not there. This is all happening in the mind of a murderer with alternate personalities. Each of the victims is one of his alters, and it isn’t until the end that it shows which of the alters is the killer.
5
Memento (2000)
Memento is Christopher Nolan’s breakout movie, and it is one that still holds up today thanks to its unique storytelling structure. The movie plays out backward, with the final scene at the start of the movie and the first scene as the last one in the movie. This allows Nolan to play with time to make the movie play out like a puzzle, and all the pieces are finally in place for what is an interesting twist ending.
The movie stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a man with anterograde amnesia, meaning he can’t form new memories. He is hunting down the man he believes murdered his wife using notes, tattoos, and Polaroids to keep his clues in order. The twist is that he caused his wife’s death by giving her a fatal insulin overdose. His wife was attacked, but he had already killed the man who did it years before and doesn’t remember.
4
Se7en (1995)
David Fincher directed a brutal psychological thriller that was released in 1995 called Se7en. This was a dark noir mystery with a serial killer murdering people while using the seven deadly sins as his motif. The two detectives involved are a young hotshot detective named David Mills (Brad Pitt) and an older, world-weary detective named William Somerset (Morgan Freeman).
The twist in this movie has nothing to do with who the serial killer is. In fact, the killer, known only as John Doe, turns himself in and mentions he can lead the detectives to the final two bodies. The twist is that there are still two deaths. One of them is the head of Mills’ wife in a box, and the last death comes when Mills kills a handcuffed John Doe, making the final death represent wrath. It was the biggest gut-punch ending in a 90s thriller.
3
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Released in 1995, The Usual Suspects is the movie that made Bryan Singer a star director and Christopher McQuarrie one of the top screenwriters in Hollywood. The movie follows a man named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), who is detailing a deadly job that a group of small-time criminals are called in to by a mysterious crime lord named Keyser Söze. The film then shows the events as they happened.
The big twist comes at the end when Kint leaves the interrogation. The agent involved in the interview looks around the room and sees signs, posters, and more that have names and details that Kint gave in his account of the events. That is when Kint stops limping and straightens up to leave, and the movie reveals that Verbal Kint is Keyser Söze, and he gets away free and clear.
2
Shutter Island (2010)
Shutter Island is a rare Martin Scorsese genre movie, since it is nearly a psychological horror movie that is based on a mainstream novel by Dennis Lehane. The film opens with a U.S. marshal named Teddy Daniels arriving at a hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island to investigate a disappearance. His partner is played by Mark Ruffalo, and they try to figure out how the inmate disappeared.
The entire movie plays on the twist ending when it is revealed that Teddy is not a U.S. marshal but one of the inmates, and this is an elaborate role-play to try to get Teddy to remember that he killed his wife after she drowned their children. There are a lot of clues spread throughout the movie that lead to the twist, but it is still one that took most viewers completely by surprise.
1
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The most famous psychological thriller that relied on a twist ending is the 1999 M. Night Shyamalan release, The Sixth Sense. This is the movie that made Shyamalan Hollywood’s hottest director and also the movie that helped start the complaints that the director relies too much on twists. Despite those complaints, the twist here is masterfully done, and the clues never once cheat the audience.
The twist is that Bruce Willis’ Dr. Malcolm Crowe is dead. Haley Joel Osment’s Cole Sear really can see dead people, and Malcolm is one of them. Rewatching the movie shows so many clues, including how the conversations Malcolm has with others are not really happening the way he sees them, and the color red is a huge sign of what is real and what isn’t.
Leave a Reply