Every filmgoer loves a twist – the more outrageous, the better. But not all surprises are created equal, and pulling off a truly breathtaking switcheroo on screen is a challenge only the very best can accomplish. Here are 15 of the finest cinematic bombshells – and, yes, there are spoilers ahead, reports BritPanorama.
15: The Others (2001)
Nicole Kidman is hypnotically unhinged as a mother shut away in a big spooky house on Jersey in 1945 along with her two children, who have a severe allergy to sunlight. Awaiting her husband’s return from the war, she is disturbed to find that mysterious intruders are making their presence felt in the mansion.
Is the supernatural at play? Yes – but Kidman and her offspring are the restless spirits, and it is they who are stalking the newcomers from beyond the grave, rather than the other way around. All this time, we’ve been watching a ghost story told from the perspective of the unquiet dead.
14: Seven (1995)
“What’s in the box?” While we never see the object delivered to Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman’s detectives at the end of this gothic slasher, it is widely understood to be the head of Pitt’s character’s wife, played by a young Gwyneth Paltrow.
“I admire you… and your pretty wife, Tracy,” Kevin Spacey’s psychopath John Doe tells Pitt’s detective Mills. “I visited your home this morning. I tried to play husband, I tried to taste the life of a simple man – it didn’t work out, so I took a souvenir… her pretty head.”
Losing his temper, Mills is overcome with rage and so helps close the loop of Doe’s spree of murders inspired by the seven deadly sins of Christian theology. Doe is jealous of Mills’s normal life – meaning he is guilty of envy – and when Mills shoots him, he has given in to wrath. All seven sins are ticked off – and a generation of filmgoers traumatised.
13: The Prestige (2006)
Two becomes one in Christopher Nolan’s feverish account of a rivalry between a duo of magicians (Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) that hinges on the mind-bending surprise that Bale’s character, Borden, is in fact a pair of twins working in cahoots. This is how he is able to carry off his “Transported Man” trick, in which the magician steps into a cabinet and emerges through another door at the opposite end of the stage.
There is no magic – just the twins doubling up. But Nolan has more than one reveal up his sleeve. The second involves Jackman’s Robert Angier and his obsession with recreating The Transported Man – which he does by cloning himself and then drowning one version of himself by falling through a trapdoor into a water tank. Every night he dies all over again – all to beat Borden at his own game.
12: Psycho (1960)
Today everyone knows Hitchcock’s classic is about softly spoken sociopath Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his mother issues (said mother being a skeleton he keeps in the cellar). But when Psycho arrived in cinemas, it was sold as a pacy thriller starring Janet Leigh as a secretary who steals $40,000 from her boss.
She is the main character for the first half of the film – right up until she stops for the night at the remote Bates Motel, where the polite manager attacks her while she is in the shower (dressed as his mother for bonus Freudian frights). Only now does Hitchcock show his hand as he reveals that it isn’t a crime caper but the original serial killer chiller.
11: Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
Before its release, much of the attention around Olivia Wilde’s period melodrama focused on reported on‑set tension between the cast, including Wilde, her then‑boyfriend Harry Styles, Florence Pugh and Chris Pine. But when the 50s‑set psychological thriller landed, it did so with a bang as it was revealed that the story is unfolding inside a virtual reality machine, where Pugh’s character is imprisoned by her husband (Styles) who, when he “goes to work” each day, is actually leaving VR and returning to the real world.
Wilde lives in this fantasy world, too – only in her case it is by choice, as she is too traumatised by the death of her children to face reality. Far from a period character study, it is a manosphere horror movie. We’d love to say that the really big twist is that Harry Styles can act – but alas, no. Asked to conjure anything above surface-level charm and he’s all at sea.
10: Shutter Island (2010)
When Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are working together, you expect high cinema. But they served up the exact opposite in the surreally, pulpy adaptation of the 2003 Dennis Lehane’s thriller – where the story of US marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his visit to an asylum in Boston Harbour turns out to be a fantasy unfolding in the head of an unreliable narrator.
Daniels, we eventually discover
