Warning: spoilers ahead for 37 movies. And they are major spoilers. Consider yourself warned!
Seriously, we’re warning you. (We’re not kidding in the headline of this piece!)
OK, this is your absolute final warning….
Now that we’ve got those things settled, let’s dive into the greatest movie plot twists of all time!
“No, I’m your father.” “Soylent Green is People!” “Rosebud.” “What’s in the box?” “I see dead people.”
Those are all dialogue lines related to some of the most shocking revelations in movie history. They might have been the clue to the twist, or maybe they were the twist itself, but either way, they impressed the audience.
In a interview with Jake Hamilton, The Sixth Sense And Divide filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan – the master of twist endings – explained his process for creating impact. “What you’re left with at the end of the movie should tell you what you saw…. When you hold the landing, you give them the keys to say, ‘This is how you should interpret everything you’ve seen,'” he said.
Check out some of the most memorable movie twists ever below.
Written by Patrick Brzeski, Tyler Coates, Ryan Gajewski, James Hibberd, Hilary Lewis, Kimberly Nordyke, Lexy Perez, Christy Piña, Carly Thomas and Etan Vlessing
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‘Reconciliation’ (2007)
Image credit: Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
Joe Wright’s 2007 film, based on the book of the same name, follows the heartbreaking romance between Keira Knightly’s Cecilia and James McAvoy’s Robbie. Through a series of misunderstandings, Cecilia’s sister Briony (played by Saoirse Ronan as a child) accuses Robbie of rape. He ends up in prison before going to fight in World War II. Still, viewers see Robbie and Cecilia reunite as Briony tries to apologize for what she said. It is not until the end of the film that viewers realize that Robbie and Cecilia’s rekindled romance was a lie. An elderly Briony (now played by Vanessa Redgrave) is interviewed about her new semi-autobiographical novel Penance, in which she tries to give Robbie and Cecilia a happy ending despite never being able to reunite. Instead, they both die separately during the war, Robbie of septicemia (blood poisoning) in Dunkirk and Cecilia months later in a bombing raid in London. — HL
