Entertainment
10 Most Perfect Movie Plot Twists of the 2020s So Far
Movie fans love saying, “You’ll never see the ending coming.” Most of the time, they’re exaggerating. But every decade produces a handful of movies that actually earn that reputation. The 90s gave us Fight Club and The Sixth Sense, two movies that are still the default reference point whenever someone tries to describe a gut-punch plot twist to a friend. The 2000s had Oldboy, Saw, The Prestige, and the 2010s kept the streak going with Interstellar, Shutter Island, and Parasite.
The 2020s are only about halfway over, but they’ve already delivered an incredible collection of twists that nobody saw coming. So, we went through and picked the 10 that stuck with us the most. Here they are, ranked.
10
‘Trap’ (2024)
Nobody does plot twists quite like M. Night Shyamalan. Sadly, Trap is also one of those movies that had its big surprise ruined by the trailer. But if you were lucky enough to go in blind, you got to experience one of the coolest twists of the decade.
At first, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) seems like an ordinary dad taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert. But as the movie goes on, it becomes clear the arena is packed with FBI agents who are hunting a notorious serial killer known as The Butcher, and you soon find out Cooper is the one they’re looking for. Suddenly, Shyamalan flips the entire cat-and-mouse formula on its head by making the killer the one who’s trapped, and somehow still gets you rooting for him to slip past the cops.
9
‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ (2022)
For most of its runtime, Bodies Bodies Bodies plays out like a classic whodunit. A group of wealthy twenty-somethings gathers for a hurricane party, someone ends up dead, and everyone starts trying to figure out which friend is secretly the killer. Old grudges resurface, accusations fly in every direction, and the body count keeps growing exactly like you’d expect from a slasher.
Except there never was a killer. The ending reveals that David (Pete Davidson) accidentally slices his own throat trying to open a champagne bottle with a kukri for a TikTok video. Every death after that is just the group turning on each other out of paranoia, trying to find a killer that never existed.
8
‘Project Hail Mary’ (2026)
If you went into the movie blind, just meeting Rocky for the first time is already one of the best surprises in recent sci-fi. The film starts as a lonely survival story about a guy stranded in space trying to find his way back home. And then, out of nowhere, another spaceship appears, and from that moment on, the movie becomes a wholesome story about the bond between Grace (Ryan Gosling) and Rocky.
But the movie saves its biggest gut punch for the very end. Throughout the film, Grace insists he never wanted to be on the Hail Mary mission, and you’re wondering what finally changed his mind. Once his memories fully return, we learn he never volunteered at all. Project director Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) had him sedated and placed aboard the ship after the original crew died just before launch. Looking back, that’s what makes the ending so much more moving. Grace couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice his life to save all of humanity. But by the end of the movie, he’d grown to love Rocky so much that he gave up his only chance of getting home just to save one alien.
7
‘The Drama’ (2026)
The Drama opens like a glossy pre-wedding rom-com between Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson). But director Kristoffer Borgli drops an emotional grenade in the very first act that completely subverts genre expectations. During a drinking game with friends, everyone confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. And Emma reveals that when she was 15, she planned a school shooting and only backed out at the last minute. From that moment on, the movie goes from a cute rom-com to a fascinating psychological drama about whether love can really be unconditional.
Charlie is forced to reconcile the woman he thought he knew with a version of her he never could have imagined. It’s built around the idea that some things, once said, can never be unsaid. You can forgive them, you can try to move past them, but they’ll always sit somewhere in the back of your mind, changing the way you see that person forever.
6
‘It’s What’s Inside’ (2024)
Forbes (David Thompson) shows up to his old friend group’s pre-wedding party with a briefcase that lets everyone at the party swap bodies for the night. And the rest of the movie turns into a guessing game of figuring out who’s actually walking around in whose body. Forbes himself is shady the entire time. He’s always hovering at the edges of the party and never quite explaining why he tracked this group down after years of no contact.
But then you find out that the guy pulling all the strings was never actually Forbes. It was his sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport) the entire time, having swapped into her brother’s body and knocked him out before the party even started. And this was all revenge on the group that got her institutionalized years earlier.
5
‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ (2023)
Most movies get one great twist if they’re lucky, but Across the Spider-Verse keeps piling them on, and each one is better than the last. The Spot starts out as a goofy villain-of-the-week that every superhero movie has the hero beat in the opening act before the real big bad shows up. But Spot turns his humiliation into motivation and actually evolves into a multiversal-level threat nobody saw coming. Another big blow comes when Miles learns he was never supposed to become Spider-Man at all, and that his dad is going to die because of it.
And just when you think the movie’s done throwing twists at you, the ending drops the biggest one of all. It looks like Miles is finally going to tell his mom he’s Spider-Man, and that’ll be the big cliffhanger for the next movie. But his mom just stares back at him confusedly. She has no idea who Spider-Man is. The colors feel slightly off. His room looks familiar but not quite right. Then Miles glitches, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. He never made it home. Miguel’s Go Home Machine sent him to Earth-42 instead, where his Uncle Aaron is still alive, his father is dead, and the Miles of this world grew up to become the Prowler!
4
‘Caddo Lake’ (2024)
Caddo Lake opens with Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) searching for her missing stepsister Anna (Caroline Falk), who went missing on the lake, and Paris (Dylan O’Brien) investigating a section of the water that has strangely receded. Initially, these look like two separate stories running side by side. But you soon realize that Caddo Lake isn’t just a missing person mystery; it’s actually a time travel story.
The twist is that Ellie and Paris are both wandering through different decades of the same lake, which acts as a portal through time, and their lives have been intersecting the whole movie. Anna disappears through the lake and is transported back to 1952, where she is found by Paris and eventually grows up to become his mother. The entire film was a loop with no real beginning and no real end.
3
‘Bugonia’ (2025)
Yorgos Lanthimos spends most of Bugonia inviting you to laugh at two conspiracy theorists, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO because they’re convinced she’s an alien. Given the movie’s darkly comedic tone, their beliefs sound completely ridiculous. They come across as even more unhinged than the kind of people who believe in flat Earth theories or fake moon landings.
Every awkward conversation and absurd detail they reveal about the aliens seems designed to convince you that these two are just deeply traumatized men who have completely lost touch with reality. Except the conspiracy turns out to be true. Emma Stone’s character really is an alien, the empress of the Andromedans, and the ending reveals that Teddy wasn’t crazy at all.
2
‘Barbarian’ (2022)
This one starts off like a typical serial killer thriller. Tess (Georgina Campbell) shows up to her double-booked Airbnb late at night and has to decide whether to trust her mysterious housemate Keith (Bill Skarsgård), and every polite thing he does feels laden with menace. In the middle of the night, she follows him down to the basement where she finds a labyrinth of underground tunnels, and then the movie completely switches genres on you.
What was a slasher setup turns into a creature feature about a monstrous woman living in a network of tunnels underneath the house. And right after that jump scare, the film abruptly cuts to black and jumps to a completely different character, AJ (Justin Long), a disgraced actor who owns the property and has no idea what’s waiting for him downstairs. By repeatedly changing the genre rules and forcing viewers to start over every time they thought they understood the movie, Barbarian became a defining horror debut and launched Zach Cregger as one of the genre’s most promising new filmmakers.
1
‘Strange Darling’ (2023)
Told non-linearly across six chapters, Strange Darling spends its opening stretch playing like a fairly straightforward slasher. A wounded woman known only as the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) is desperately running through the woods while a man called the Demon (Kyle Gallner) hunts her down with a rifle. Every visual cue tells you exactly how this story is supposed to work, and it feels obvious who the victim and the predator are.
But that assumption is exactly what Strange Darling wants you to make. The film masterfully uses your own horror movie instincts against you, and as the chapters go on, you find out that the Lady wasn’t a helpless survivor at all. She was actually the Electric Lady, a ruthless serial killer responsible for a string of murders. And the Demon was her intended victim who managed to turn the tables on her.
Strange Darling
- Release Date
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August 23, 2024
- Runtime
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96 Minutes
- Director
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JT Mollner
- Writers
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JT Mollner
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