Best Plot Twist Movies & Biggest Plot Twists in Movie History

The man who you at first suspect of being the killer is just another pawn in Jigsaw’s game. That’s a small-scale, warmup twist, but the major twist is yet to come. The dead body that has been lying in the center of the room for the entire film is more than meets the eye. As the game draws to a close, Jigsaw rises from the pool of blood, hiding in plain sight and masterminding the entire time.

The Others is a twist on the entire ghost movie formula. What at first seems to be a standard ghost film with good performances, compelling lighting, and well-executed scares, it turns out to be an inversion of the exact type of film you thought you were watching. The main characters are revealed to be ghosts themselves in the film’s shocking final plot twist.

BEST PLOT TWIST MOVIES

17. Parasite (2019)

Primal Fear follows Richard Gere as an attorney fighting, at first, for the freedom of a man he believes to be innocent, then for his case to be ruled “not guilty by reason of insanity” after realizing his client is suffering from dissociative identity disorder. But, here comes the twist, the split personality is nothing more than a ruse. The man truly is guilty and is faking a split personality to get off with a lighter sentencing. 

Coming out of South Korea from director Kim Jee-woon, A Tale of Two Sisters contains a familiar but extremely well-executed plot twist. The titular “two sisters” are actually just one sister, with the other having died before the events of the film. An extra wrinkle thrown in sees the one sister not just projecting as both sisters, but also as their cold-hearted stepmother as well.

Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy is an incredible film all around and the twist at the end is shocking in a manner perfectly suited to this particular film. The film actually plays a trick on you by making you think you’ve already gotten the plot twist: that the villain was sleeping with his sister who then killed herself after being exposed by the protagonist many years ago. But then the real twist comes rushing at you, that our protagonist has now been tricked and manipulated into sleeping with his own daughter, mirroring the past.

Shutter Island presents itself from the beginning as an off-kilter thriller where you cannot trust your eyes and where nothing is as simple as it first seems, and yet, the film still manages to catch you off guard with a grade-A twist ending.

Our protagonist being a patient of the mental hospital rather than a detective investigating it, and him being the killer he’s convinced himself he’s trying to catch, combine into a memorable twist that recontextualizes every single scene in the film before capping off with a perfectly ambiguous ending.

The plot twist in Soylent Green has miraculously transcended the film it lives within. Through numerous pop cultural references, many people who have never seen Soylent Green will undoubtedly recognize the line “Soylent Green is people!” Not many plot twists become a standalone phrase embedded in the zeitgeist while the film itself is not.

The twist that made Gone Girl a sensation in the book industry hits just as hard in film form. Our everyman protagonist is under suspicion of killing his wife. We’re too busy questioning whether he did it or if someone else did it to consider the possibility of her being a sociopath and faking the whole thing in order to frame him and ruin his life for cheating on her. This is another example of a mid-point twist working fabulously in place of a twist ending.

MOVIES WITH GREAT TWISTS

5. Memento (2000)

Memento has one major twist ending but to consider this the film’s only twist would be doing it a disservice. Memento is like a great, big ball of twists that you spend the entire film unraveling. Each new scene feels like a twist following the proceeding one. The nature of this non-chronological film’s structure means that the plot plays out through constant reveals where every single scene recontextualizes the one that came before it.

Fight Club’s iconic twist is one that has been copied and mimicked time and time again and, to be fair, Fight Club wasn’t even the first film to execute this particular type of twist but it does do it better than almost any other. There are so many little hints, clues, and subliminal messages of the truth before the big reveal that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are both, in fact, playing the same character of Tyler Durdin.

The Oscar-winning screenplay for The Usual Suspects from Christopher McQuarrie is tight and inventive from beginning to end, but especially the end. Wow, that ending. Beyond just being one of the best twist endings, The Usual Suspects stands amongst the best movie endings, period. The reveal that the meek Verbal Kint is secretly the criminal mastermind we’ve been hearing about the entire film, Keyser Soze, is perfectly executed.

The reason why we said Fight Club executed the split personality twist better than almost any other film, is because Psycho did it first, and did it the best. Psycho’s twist ending is undyingly iconic, not least of all because of Anthony Perkins’ mesmerizing performance and Alfred Hitchcock’s pitch-perfect direction. Psycho actually contains two twists, the former of which is overshadowed by the latter and somewhat lost with age. The film’s protagonist being murdered before the halfway point is a shocking twist in its own right, before the definitive twist ending is even in sight.