Leaving just enough open to interpretation can make a movie immortal, ensuring that fans
will be left debating the meaning of their favorites for years to come.
In that vein, we've assembled an assortment of movies that have left audiences puzzled.
Here are a few of the most confusing plot twists explained.
"I missed out on the whole thing to be honest with you.
I was confused by it.
I was confused by the whole thing, if I'm being honest."
Who's who in Lost Highway?
In 1997's Lost Highway, we meet Fred Madison, a jazz musician accused of murdering his wife,
Renee.
Fred goes to jail, but the next morning the guards discover that Fred's place has been
taken by Pete Dayton, a car mechanic with mild amnesia.
Pete is soon entangled with Alice Wakefield, a woman who looks identical to the murdered
Renee.
The movie continually questions who's who, all while a mysterious man follows them both,
videotaping the confusing carnage that ensues.
The obsessive display of infidelity, characters watching and being watched, and grisly murders
might all seem familiar to anyone who watched the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995.
Nearly 10 years after Lost Highway's release, director David Lynch would elaborate on the
connection between the movie and the Simpson trial in his book Catching The Big Fish.
Lynch wrote
"I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living, and we found this great
psychology term, psychogenic fugue, describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape
some horror."
Fred Madison is a man who murdered his wife and invented an entire alternate life story
to escape his own guilt.
It's fitting, then, that the movie ends with a high-speed car chase in which Fred feels
out of control; at least it wasn't on the 405 highway like O.J.
Vertigo's lookalikes
40 years before David Lynch confounded audiences with Lost Highway's pair of lookalike characters
played by the same actress, Alfred Hitchcock pulled a similar trick in Vertigo.
The film introduces us to Scottie, a private investigator who has retired from police work
due to his struggles with, well, vertigo.
His old friend Gavin hires Scottie to trail his wife, Madeline, because he fears she's
possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother.
Madeline is drawn to the mission where her great-grandmother died, and rushes up the
bell tower.
Scottie's vertigo prevents him from following, and he watches in horror as she falls to her
death.
He's so shaken that he's committed to an institution.
Upon release, he meets a woman named Judy, who looks eerily like Madeline.
The two begin an unhealthy relationship as Scotty remakes Judy to look like Madeline.
"You're looking for the suit that she wore for me.
You want me to be dressed like her"
"Judy, I just want you to look nice."
A flashback reveals the twist: that the "Madeline" Scottie knew was always Judy, who Gavin hired
in an elaborate plot to get rid of his wife.
All of the supernatural elements of the story were concocted to confuse Scottie, whose vertigo
was guaranteed to leave him a helpless witness to the fake fatality.
Parental revelations
After Rey was introduced in The Force Awakens with vague questions about the identity of
her long-lost parents, The Last Jedi had her confront the truth.
In a shocking twist for viewers that were expecting some variation of Luke Skywalker's
own twisted family free, it turns out that her parents were nobody important.
While some saw this twist as a cop-out, director Rian Johnson had his reasons.
Thematic parallels are an essential part of the Star Wars formula.
As George Lucas likes to say,
"Again, it's like poetry, they rhyme.
Every stanza kinda rhymes with the last one."
On an episode of Empire's film podcast, Johnson explained that he didn't just write that moment
to contrast the famous scene in Empire Strikes Back.
It's actually the most dramatic and difficult thing for Rey to reckon with.
Instead of being given a tailored role in the story like so many heroes before her,
she gets told that her place isn't where she's been looking for it.
"Hardest thing to hear is 'nope, this is not gonna define you.
In fact, Kylo is going to use this to undercut your confidence so that you'll feel you have
to lean on him for your identity."
It's now in her hands to find her own identity.
It's purposeful, and it's an intentional change in the familiar patterns found in all previous
Star Wars films.
Psycho killer
American Psycho is designed to leave audiences wondering how much of what they've seen is
actually real.
As the film reaches its climax in an over-the-top killing spree riddled with explosions and
swooping police helicopters, it becomes clear that Patrick Bateman may not be an entirely
reliable narrator.
The morning after the climactic chaos, Bateman returns to the apartment where he'd been executing
people for weeks, ready to clean up the evidence of his misdeeds.
He's disturbed to find the place empty and freshly painted.
"You saw the ad in the Times?"
"No… yeah, I mean, yeah.
In the times."
"There was no ad in the Times."
What does this scene represent for the plot?
According to screenwriter Guinevere Turner,
"He did do all this stuff and he still cannot stand out.
[...] He's stuck."
Because Bateman's crimes are so unremarkable in the film's viciously heightened universe
of Wall Street capitalism that all attention, even punishment, will elude him forever.
"Don't you know who I am?
I'm not Davis.
I'm Patrick Bateman."
Twisted timelines
As the Fast & Furious franchise has branched out into ambitious new plot threads, it's
quickly revealed itself as a labyrinth of non-linear narrative that must be explored,
in the words of the immortal Dominic Toretto,
"A quarter-mile at a time."
In the series' third film, 2006's Tokyo Drift, newcomer Sean Boswell is taken under the wing
of Han, a racer who teaches him the power of drifting.
Unfortunately, Han is tragically killed during a race, prompting Toretto to appear and declare
himself an old friend of Han's in the final scene.
Now here's where the twist comes in.
2009 saw the release of the series' fourth film, Fast & Furious, which reunited the original
cast and Han.
Han says he's off to Tokyo, leading the audience to believe that the fourth film takes place
concurrently with the third.
But no, Han's back again in a more significant role in Fast Five, and sticks around through
Fast & Furious 6.
The story finally catches up to Han's death in a post-credits scene at the end of the
sixth movie, which reveals that Deckard Shaw, the villain of Furious Seven, was actually
responsible for the "accident" in Tokyo Drift.
So, the series chronology means that Tokyo Drift actually happens in between the sixth
and the seventh movie.
Although, don't expect the series to get any simpler just because the timeline finally
matches up.
Series writer Chris Morgan has recently speculated that Han could come back yet again.
And why not?
After all, Han is family and
"you don't turn your back on family."
Just a dream, right?
Despite the popularity of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, director Wes Craven
never envisioned the series living beyond one film.
Executive producer Robert Shaye disagreed, hoping to leave the door open for a follow-up,
and the compromise they reached resulted in a fairly baffling finale for the original
movie.
Even though Nancy vanquished Freddy earlier in the film, the ending scene seems to imply
his return, when she's trapped in a convertible bearing Krueger's trademark red and green
stripes:
What does it all mean?
When Nancy reappears in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, she mentions that
Krueger got rid of her friends and her mother.
We can assume, then, that Nancy undoing the murders in her defeat of Krueger was a dream
in itself.
In the documentary Never Sleep Again, Robert Englund, the actor who plays Freddy Krueger,
proposes his own theory that the film is a precognitive nightmare:
"Everything in it will happen, but it hasn't really happened, she's just dreamt that it's
going to happen, and she's trying to warn everybody.
And then it begins in the very ending."