>> Speaker 1: We're talking the surprise ending, the final reveal, the complete
reversal, the brilliant misdirection that's thrown right in our face.
These are our picks for the top ten best movie twists of all time.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: Okay, seriously, last chance.
We're about to ruin 47 a half different movies with great twists,
either by letting you know that they have one in the first place and
what kind it is or by dissecting it completely,
leaving it about as tantalizing as a swimsuit model after an autopsy.
So to everyone who's still here, either extremely well-watched, forgetful or
masochistic, let's kick it off with our first category.
The time and place twist.
While the vast majority of twists are aimed to deceiving us about
either the what or the who, for our number ten pick,
we wanna look at those that mislead us in terms of where and when.
When in movies like Triangle in the Village and where in films such as
Dark City, Pandorum, Inside Men, The Lego Movie and Barry.
However, for
our number ten pick, we prefer the ending of the Planet of the Apes.
>> Speaker 2: My God, I'm home.
>> Speaker 1: Not only is the idea that they were on Earth the whole time
absolutely brilliant, it perfectly rides the line between completely unexpected and
yet, inevitable that tends to be the recipe for great twists.
Too out of left field and it feels like a mid career in M Night Shyamalan film,
too predictable, and we're likely to smell it a mile off.
Ape's twist is also perfectly calculated to torture the jaded Charlton Heston and
his particular brand of misanthropy, while also participating in the nuclear dialogue
that was so very relevant in the 60s.
[SOUND] Next up at number nine, we're looking at the conspiracy twist.
A common heist trope, this is the kind of twist where we realize that
everything that's happened was actually what somebody intended.
The Spanish Prisoner, The Life of David Gayle, April Fools Day, Disclosure,
The Paralax View, Lucky Number Sleven, Oceans Eleven, Seven,
and The Game are all excellent examples of this.
But for our nine pick, we're going with The Sting.
>> Speaker 3: All right, everybody, FBI.
Don't anybody try to leave.
>> Speaker 1: It's not just that they're misleading Lonnegan when they convince him
to place a bet on Lucky Dan, it's that he thinks he's the one with the upper hand.
That he's going to be conning them.
And when he realizes that he's being duped, bad luck for the con man,
the FBI come to save the day and it looks like Lonnegan's coming out on top.
Of course, this too was a con.
We love this kind of twist because it takes advantage of our own hubris.
Just when we think we're ahead of the plot, fully informed, and
up on every aspect of the machinations, we realize that we too are being duped.
We're Lonnegan when we think we're Gondorff.
And we commit the exact same mistake he does, overbetting our hand.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: If you've ever watched Scooby Doo,
you'll be familiar with our number eight.
This is the unexpected bad guy, AKA, it was the gardener all along twist.
It's your basic whodunnit, and movies like No Way Out, Arlington Road,
Friday the 12th, Deep Red, Unknown, The Conversation, Witness for
the Prosecution, After the Thin Man, Unbreakable and
The Usual Suspects are all excellent examples of this twist.
But we think that Murder on the Orient Express did it better than
any of the other because it throws an extra twist on top.
>> Speaker 4: The murder must then have been committed by some person or
persons in the Calais coach, and therefore they're present in this dining car.
>> Speaker 1: Based on the Agatha Christie novel, Murder on the Orient Express
presents an incredibly complex portrait of 13 strangers on a train.
Each more suspicious than the next in the murder of Cassidy, a mafioso,
who'd kidnap, ransom, and killed an infant years before.
And while initially it seems that there is nothing connecting any of the suspects,
it emerges that the one thing they have in common is that they
all have a reasonable motive.
And the real killer?
Why, it was everyone.
They each stabbed him once.
The perfect coverup for who's guilty was that they're all guilty.
[SOUND] Of course not everyone is a secret murderer.
Sometimes we can be surprised by the villain turning out to be less guilty
than we thought.
The twist appears in films like Tell No One, Marnie,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and in both directions with Basic.
However, our favorite incarnation of it has to be from Charade.
>> Speaker 5: Of all the mean rotten, contemptible, crooked.
>> Speaker 6: Crooked?
I'd like to think you'd be glad to find out I'm not crooked.
>> Speaker 1: Cary Grant's Peter seems to have suspiciously self-interested motives.
Then, of course, he confesses that he's really Alex Dial,
the brother of a murdered man there to represent his interests.
Of course, when it turns out that the man had no brother,
the truth comes out he's in fact, Adam Canfield, a professional thief.
After being accused of being a murderer, then being the real murderer,
Cary Grant goes with Audrey Hepburn to the CIA to turn over the stolen wealth.
Because Cary Grant, AKA, Peter Joshua, AKA, Alex Dial, AKA,
Adam Canfield is actually CIA agent Brian Cruikshank all along in
disguise as a man in disguise as a man in disguise.
At number six, we have possibly the most controversial and occasionally obnoxious
twist commonly found in film, the it was all a dream twist.
Now, we say dream, but we're including any other related mechanics equivalent to not
the real world.
Think The Matrix, American Psycho, The Descent, Jacob's Ladder, Brazil,
Atonement, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,
Repo Man, Vanilla Sky, and Abre Los Ojos.
Total Recall, Existenz, Identity and maybe Mulholland Drive, nobody is really sure.
But for our number six pick, we've gotta give it to the original, the magical,
the lovable The Wizard of Oz.
>> Speaker 7: I tried to get back for days and days.
>> Speaker 8: There, there, my, quiet now.
You just had a bad dream.
>> Speaker 1: It was all a dream can be pretty frustrating when it seems like
something really interesting and subversive is going on, only to turn out
that nothing was real, nothing needs to make sense, it was just a prank, bro.
But there's a good version of this twist too, and it usually happens when
the dream has some real consequence for the character in the outside world.
They need to solve an internal problem, and
the dream was a subconscious mechanism for doing this, by externalizing the internal.
And this is what The Wizard of Oz does right.
Not only is she subconsciously working out her conflicts in a symbolic way,
she ends up learning an important lesson about home by the end.
That makes her waking up meaningful to the part of the story that
happened before her dream began.
Of course, sometimes only part of a story is all in the protagonist's head.
The twist, of course, comes from detangling the fantasy from the reality.
These are headtrips like The Machinist, Secret Window,
Shutter Island, A Beautiful Mind, and Memento.
Films where the audience experiences the delusions alongside their
unreliable narrator.
Primal Fear twists against this by being not all in his head.
But our number five pick goes to another Ed Morton mind [BLEEP],
and if you haven't guessed it by now, it's Fight Club.
>> Speaker 9: We have just lost cabin pressure.
>> Speaker 1: Probably one of the most popular twists of the last few decades,
Fight Club manages to slip an entire character by us without us noticing.
A character who interacts with all kinds of different characters, unlike the other
films that we mentioned here that tend to keep their hallucinations separate.
Fincher adeptly juggles the two characters into and
out of scenes keeping them both involved almost simultaneously but never quite.
And the reveal, a wonderful hallucinogenic moment of reality
crashing down around the narrator in the moment of pure cinema.
Counting down to number four is a classic of horror films and
thrillers alike, the not dead after all twist.
The twist is done best in films like Gone Baby Gone, Tell No One,
And Then There Was None, Laura, Lady Abelique, Gone Girl, and Saw.
It was also subverted brilliantly in The Prestige and The Sixth Sense,
where characters are dead after all.
However, for our number four pick, there's no character we're happier to find
still alive than Harry Lime from The Third Man.
>> Speaker 10: Soon as I get to the bottom of this, I'll get the next plane.
>> Speaker 11: Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins,
leave death to the professionals.
>> Speaker 1: When writer Holly Martins travels to Vienna to see his childhood
friend, Harry Lime, he finds that he's just died in an accident,
but the facts don't add up.
He suspects murder, until one day he hears footsteps following him and
sees a dark figure in a doorway to reveal the one, the only Harry Lime.
Played by a devilishly charming Orson Welles,
the twist is revealed in one of the most magical shots ever committed to film.
I don't think there's ever been a grin as perfect as Welles' here.
Which is practically reason enough alone for us to pick it.
But it's also an excellent twist where the entire plot flips on its head and
the victim becomes the perpetrator.
So it's a must on our list.
Next up at number three we've got ourselves another look at Orson Welles.
While you might guess CItizen Kane, you'd be wrong.
Rosebud is a wonderful reveal but we're not quite sure it's really a plot
twist in the traditional sense of the word.
Instead, this spot is here to honor straight up lies.
Consider the Mist, a movie that convinces us there's no hope for
salvation until we learn otherwise.
Or Witness for the Prosecution where a wife lies to a jury about her husband's
guilt so as to purposefully be exposed proving him innocent.
Or Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and its myth of a missing son.
No, for our pick our favorite line actually goes to a documentary,
the last 17 minutes of F for Fake.
>> Speaker 12: Tell it by the fireside, or in the marketplace, or in a movie.
Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.
>> Speaker 1: Orson Welles' documentary about forgery and
authenticity begins with a promise.
>> Speaker 12: During the next hour,
everything you hear from us is really true, based on solid facts.
>> Speaker 1: And this of course isn't a lie but the film last 85 minutes, not 60.
So, one hour in, Orson Welles' story turns from a documentary to fiction
engaging in a sort of meta commentary on the act of forgery.
In the end, Orson comes clean but not without first making us feel
paranoid about pretty much everything else we've ever seen in a documentary.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: Closing in at number two,
we've got the good old-fashioned identity mixup.
There's Frailty and The Crying Game and
Shattered and Matchstick Men and Enemy and Old Boy and The Man From Earth.
But for our pick, we're pretty sure you commenters would eat us alive if we
didn't give it to Luke's father from The Empire Strikes Back.
>> Speaker 13: Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father.
>> Speaker 1: As far as twists go, this is about as big as they come.
So how did they keep it a secret?
Well, they lied about it in the script and to just about everybody but Lucas and
Hamill, then overdubbed the line later.
And while a common myth suggests they had him say Obi Wan is your father,
he really just said, come and join me on the dark side.
Which definitely has far less impact.
Finally, for our number one we've got a slightly different take on
the mistaken identity twist.
Instead of realizing we've confused someone for
another, we realized they're the exact same person.
Think High Tension and The Skin I Live In and the Color of Night and especially
Chinatown, but unfortunately there's no one for the top of our list but Hitch.
And with two strong contenders for this spot, it's not going to
be easy to let Vertigo off with only an honorable mention but we have to.
Because our number one twist goes to the Norman Bates reveal in Psycho.
>> [SOUND].
[SOUND] >> Speaker 1: Of course this
isn't the only twist in the film where the shot.
Let's not forget that the main character dies a third of the way into movie and
that his mother's actually been dead for ten years.
But when it's revealed that mild mannered Norman actually dresses up as his
dead mother so that he can kill protagonists weirdly early in
the movie just to [NOISE] with our heads, well, that just about takes the cake.
Which is why it's our pick for the number one best movie twist of all time.
>> [MUSIC] >> Speaker 1: So what do you think?
Did we not spoil enough movies for you?
Did we spoil the wrong movies?
God forbid, we spoiled too many.
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix spoiler lists, I mean, movie lists.
>> [MUSIC]