Movies usually have three standard acts, where the final act will either start or end with a plot twist. While most aren’t anything special – most of them aren’t even identified as plot twists, really – we sometimes run into a plot twist that’s so good it’ll give you goosebumps.
In the history of cinema, we’ve seen a lot of plot twists. Below you’ll find the ones that are still considered to be some of the best we’ve ever seen. Spoilers, obviously.
Fight Club
Finding out that Edward Norton was Brad Pitt all along changed the entire dynamic of the story. The sheer insanity was just amazing.
Shutter Island
A US Marshal on the hunt for an escaped mental patient, turns out to be a mental patient himself that created a game where he’s looking for his escaped wife that he murdered after she murdered their three children. I’d probably go crazy too.
Se7en
The final two sins probably shocked audiences all over the world. Where it was just your average serial killer for the first five bodies, him turning Gwyneth Paltrow (who played the wife of the detective looking for him) and himself into the two last bodies was surely a bold move.
The Sixth Sense
“I see dead people” – in hindsight we should’ve known Bruce Willis was dead all along. It was a nice twist, though.
Memento
Leonard abuses his own amnesia to not have to remember that he killed his own wife due to giving her an accidental insulin overdose. That’s one way to deal with it, I guess.
The Prestige
Wolverine goes to incredible lengths because he’s jealous of how good a magician Batman is. He even gets Black Widow to act as a double agent to find out his secrets, only to later find out that Batman did all those amazing magic tricks because he had an identical twin and they swapped roles occasionally.
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father was a terror that only the older generation of geeks will remember. It turned an already good movie into a timeless classic, however.
