Entertainment
The 10 Most Perfect Movie Plot Twists of the 2000s, Ranked
If you get your opinions exclusively from very angry people online, you may have heard there’s been backlash lately against the concept of movie twists. Audiences demand that movies cater to their expectations, and when movies instead surprise them, that’s a deep betrayal.
Fortunately, people haven’t always felt this way (and many people don’t feel that way even now). The first decade of this century brought us some movies with amazing twists. Some were movies that never got the recognition they deserved, while others were huge enough to launch franchises or to turn their filmmakers into stars.
Warning: Spoilers, obviously.
10
‘Atonement’ (2006)
The book Atonement, by Ian McEwan, has a twist that would seem hard to translate to film. You read a story of war and romance where things go very wrong, but in the end, there are hints of a somewhat happy ending. Then comes a postscript that reveals you’ve been reading a fictionalized account written by one of the characters themselves. The real version of the story ended quite miserably.
How do you adapt that as a movie? Should the last scene be an epilogue revealing that the previous footage was a movie directed by one of the characters? 2006’s Atonement adaptation does not do that. Instead, Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) is once again an author, revealing in an interview that she wrote a fictionalized account of her life. The previous scenes we saw depict the novel she wrote.
That was the right choice. If they instead revealed that what we’d seen was an in-universe movie, with Briony now praising the performances of Keira Knightly and James McAvoy, the whole thing would have come off as a joke. You’re allowed to break the fourth wall, but you must do so with great caution.
9
‘The Mist’ (2007)
The ending of The Mist breaks several guidelines on what movies can do. Faced with what appears to me a monster apocalypse that has wiped out civilization, our hero David (Thomas Jane) shoots the entire band of survivors he’s traveling with. He kills them out of mercy, with their consent, but this still isn’t the way we’ve been taught movies are supposed to end. In addition to several charming elderly people, this band of survivors includes the hero’s young son, and Hollywood tells us kids that age are immortal. Then, moments later, the military arrives, revealing the world is far from over and they would have been saved had they just held out longer.
It’s even more of a shocking twist if you’ve read the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based, because that ends with the hero and his son surviving and feeling optimistic when they pick up a radio signal. Crazy thing, though? The movie ending (which King has said is the superior one) and the book ending have the same message. Whether the characters live or die, both endings still say: Don’t give up.
8
‘Moon’ (2009)
Sam Rockell stars as a lone astronaut stationed on the Moon, and along with him is a robot, voiced by Kevin Spacey. The robot appears to be entirely helpful, and it sometimes communicates by displaying the image of a smiley face. Then, at the end of the movie, in a twist that destroys everything we thought about how science-fiction works, the robot… does not turn out to be evil.
Okay, that’s not the real twist of the movie. The actual twist, which comes in multiple stages, may send you into a deep state of worry about the nature of existence. We’re not going to recount it here, and we’re actually not going to recount the twist for many of the movies we’re listing. We’re just going to assure you each twist is good. That’s this list’s twist.
7
‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)
With many movies, the big twist is that nothing we’ve seen up to this point was real, that it was all in someone’s head. Mulholland Drive isn’t even the only movie on this list to go that route. But rarely do these movies, after showing you the fantasy, spend much time showing the reality. You might get just a quick glimpse of the character confined in an asylum, and then we cut to credits.
Mulholland Drive’s reality lasts a good half hour. Maybe every movie that tries a twist like this needs to do something similar, because you can’t appreciate someone’s fantasy without knowing in detail what they’re escaping.
Though, it does take a few viewings to even understand what you’re watching. And if you watched it for the first time years ago, without knowing who Namoi Watts is, you might have looked at the two very different versions of the same character, seen what appears to be two clearly different women, and wondered why they cast two actresses who look so much like each other.
6
‘The Fountain’ (2006)
In The Fountain, we again have what appears to be a single actor (Hugh Jackman) playing multiple characters. Exactly what the connection is between these three men (as well as between the multiple women played by Rachel Weisz), well, that turns out to be the movie’s twist. Some people leave the movie still unclear on the answer, which is surely a testament to how good a twist it is.
The movie also has a more traditional twist, a sort of Twilight Zone twist in which someone does not get the victory they sought. It’s the most famous scene, as you might have seen a GIF of Jackman staring blissfully at some golden light, without your having any idea what the context is. The full scene is a bit different from what you’d expect from the meme, and the sight is all the more impressive when you learn they pulled this movie off using only half the originally planned budget.
5
‘The Disappearance of Alice Creed’ (2009)
The lowest-budgeted film on the list, however, by a wide margin, would be The Disappearance of Alice Creed. The movie cost just $1.5 million. They must have saved some money on cast salaries, as the cast consists of just Gemma Arterton, Martin Compston, and Eddie Marsan. Those aren’t the leads: That’s the entire cast, as the whole movie has only three characters.
A little bit into the movie, there’s a twist. Then, after a bit, there’s another twist. Then there’s another twist. You’re supposed to go into movies like this knowing nothing in advance, and we hopefully haven’t spoiled anything for you by telling you there are twists, because after all that, once you figure you now know where it’s all going, there’s a twist.
4
‘A Beautiful Mind’ (2001)
Given all the biopics of Great Men that came out in the years that followed A Beautiful Mind, you might imagine this 2001 movie was a sort of early template that a bunch of later movies iterated on. The truth is the opposite. It plays out like a twist on a bunch of movies that hadn’t even been made yet.
Many movies tell you the story of some figure you’re already familiar with. A Beautiful Mind tells you a story something like that then tells you that a chunk of what it told you isn’t true. Its twist assumes, correctly, that the viewer knows less about the subject of the movie than could be learned by reading the intro to his Wikipedia article (if economist John Nash had a Wikipedia article in 2001, which he did not).
Few biopics attempt anything close to that. Sure, Oppenheimer, to its credit, does have a big twist, but the twist is not, “Actually, there never was an atomic bomb.” If it were, that would have been quite a surprise.
3
‘Memento’ (2000)
We definitely need one Christopher Nolan movie in this roundup, and Memento’s final twist is one for the ages. What’s really notable about it, though, looking back, is that the movie probably could have got away with having no twist ending at all. The movie already had its gimmick. When a movie’s premise is especially nutty and becomes especially famous, you’ll often discover it doesn’t have a twist ending.
The Truman Show doesn’t end with a twist. Groundhog Day doesn’t end with a twist. The Matrix, despite the wild reveal one-third in, doesn’t end with a twist (unless “the main character, who they said was the Chosen One, really is the Chosen One” counts as a twist). So, Memento could have just been a movie about someone with short-term memory loss, told in reverse, about him tracking down a murderer. It wouldn’t have been as great as it is, but it still then may have permanently shaken pop culture, leaving us forever referring to anterograde amnesia as “Memento disease.”
2
‘Triangle’ (2009)
Other movies play with time, and you can name several where the twist is the character’s in a loop. You might guess, early on, that’s what’s happening in Triangle. You might even guess one mysterious hooded figure who tussles with the main character (Melissa George) is really the main character herself, from the future.
You’d be right. Except, that’s not all the movie has in store. Time loops can get more complicated than what you’re used to. And then, the movie gets truly weird when it breaks the laws that you assumed were in place and shifts to more horrifying stuff that you’d think was physically impossible. In fact, you should feel silly for thinking the story was constrained by rules at all. It’s a movie. The story can do whatever it wants.
1
‘Saw’ (2004)
In 1999, The Sixth Sense somehow made everyone agree on what the ultimate movie twist is: What if that guy who’s been on the screen the entire movie turns out to have been dead the whole time? Saw took that and instead offered us: What if that guy who’s been on the screen the entire movie turns out to have been alive the whole time?
That wasn’t its only twist. It also gave us the inconspicuous background character who masterminded everything, the apparent good guy secretly taking orders from the bad guy, and the creepy villain who’s actually just another victim. Also, a man saws off his own foot. It’s hard to even remember that last part was a twist, but it was. The movie’s about a guy (Cary Elwes) figuring out how to escape his bonds without cutting his foot off, but then, he actually does cut his foot off, and we weren’t supposed to expect that.
Of course, Saw isn’t really the best movie of its decade and is probably not truly the one with the best twist. We still wanted to spotlight it to remind you how good twists can get, even in movies that some dismiss as trash. On the other end of the spectrum, 2023 saw the release of the tenth Saw film, and though it was the only movie in the franchise to receive positive reviews, its final twist was a wet wad of nothing. Now that the series is in the hands of new owners, let’s hope it does not forget the importance of twists in motion pictures.
The old owners, incidentally, go by the name of Twisted Pictures.
- Release Date
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October 29, 2004
- Runtime
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103 minutes
- Director
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James Wan
- Producers
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Gregg Hoffman, Mark Burg, Oren Koules
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Leigh Whannell
Adam Faulkner-Stanheight
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