The 50 Best Movie Plot Twists Of All Time

30. Morales Has Been Keeping The Killer Captive – “The Secret In Their Eyes” (2009)
Acclaimed winners of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film aren’t normally where you would go for killer plot twists, but Juan José Campanella’s Argentinean thriller “The Secret In Their Eyes” delivers one in spades. It sees retired judicial investigator Esposito (Ricardo Darín) attempting to wrap up an old case, the murder of the wife of Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago). A suspect, Gomez (Javier Godino) was found, but was released by a rival hoping to use him to fight left-wing guerillas. Twenty-five years on, Esposito gets Morales to confess to killing Gomez, but in fact, that’s far from the truth: He’s actually captured the killer, and has been holding him in a cell in the countryside for seemingly decades. It’s morally ambiguous, hugely powerful and utterly shocking (the 2015 U.S. remake retains it, but robs it of its political and emotional power).

29. Mr. Orange Is A Cop – “Reservoir Dogs” (1992)
Quentin Tarantino has become so famous for so many other things since — not all of them particularly positive — that it’s sometimes easy to forget that in his debut feature, he showed real flair for a classic, almost old-fashioned wrong-footing bait-and-switch plot device. Less to do with chronological hijinks or pop-culture-heavy dialogue than with an innate understanding of the mechanics of filmic storytelling, at about the halfway mark of his lean, mean heist thriller, Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), bleeding stickily to death, reveals himself to be the “rat” in the most dramatic way possible — by killing the psycho Mr. Blonde. Not only does this come as a relief following the torture scene, Tarantino even tops it off with an extra flourish when the doomed uniformed officer responds to Orange’s revelation with a simple “I know.”

28. There Are Two Killers – “Scream” (1996)
The appeal of the slasher film isn’t just about seeing teenagers get murdered (though it is also that), but also in the fun of guessing who the (usually masked) killer might be — again, it’s indebted to Agatha Christie in this respect. It’s led to some good twist endings in films like “Sleepaway Camp” and “Friday The 13th,” but as both a deconstruction and a celebration of the genre, “Scream” had to come up with a really clever resolution. And it succeeded in a big way. A major suspect early on is Billy (Skeet Ulrich), the boyfriend of Sidney (Neve Campbell), but when he’s seemingly murdered by Ghostface, he looks to be in the clear, albeit also dead. But no, it was him all along, working alongside pal Stu (Matthew Lillard), allowing the “killer” to be in two places at once. It had likely been done before somewhere, but it’s still genuinely surprising and unexpected here.

27. He’s Been Set Up As A Patsy – “The Parallax View” (1974)
The spate of political assassinations across the 1960s, followed by Watergate, led to a great spate of paranoid thrillers across the two decades, and while “The Manchurian Candidate” might be the most relevant right now, the very best is Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View,” in which Warren Beatty plays a journalist digging into the murder, a conspiracy led by the Parallax Corporation, of a Presidential candidate. Beatty follows the evidence to a rally for a Senator, ready to uncover the secret, only for the politician to be killed by a sniper, and Beatty to realize that he’s being framed as the killer. Not soon enough, though: He’s killed, and painted after his death as a lone-wolf gunman. It’s the kind of bleak, powerful conclusion that a similar film now would struggle to get away with.

26. It’s All Made Up By A Man In An Insane Asylum – “The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari” (1920)
Robert Wiene’s expressionist horror classic isn’t just one of the greatest of the silent movies, but also arguably the dawn of the twist ending in cinema, influencing countless other films afterwards. It sees Francis (Friedrich Feher) relating the story of how he clashed with the evil Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), who uses a sleepwalker (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. But wait! It’s really all the delusions of Francis, an inmate in an asylum led by a doctor resembling Caligari, with other characters in his story inspired by other inmates. It’s a great justification of the film’s heightened expressionism (which is dialed down in the final scene), and poses as many questions about what came before as it answers.

25. She Unwittingly Caused Her Son’s Death – “The Orphanage” (2007)
Of course J.A. Bayona‘s “The Orphanage” is a horror movie (one of the very best of the century, according to us), but it is also one of the most powerfully sorrowful films of the new millennium, and the twist it delivers is the moment we realize that the horror and the sadness come from the very same place. Having dedicated herself, to the exclusion of all else, to discovering what happened to her beloved son Simon after he disappeared, Laura (a magnificent Belén Rueda) finally does find out — and after all the jump scares and potentially supernatural goings-on, there’s a tiny, tawdry, desperately possible and deeply banal explanation. It’s also one that makes her the unwitting cause of his death, for which her guilt drives her to maybe the most heart-piercingly moving filmic suicide (and the most heart-swellingly cathartic afterlife) in recent memory.

24. Tyler Durden Is Imaginary – “Fight Club” (1999)
“Fight Club” has aged curiously in the 18 years since its release. On the one hand, David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk were well ahead of the curve in pinpointing a certain kind of 21st-century white male impotence and the violent ways it can manifest itself, which we’re arguably only feeling the effects of now. On the other, it’s also a weird celebration of that in some ways, and a film that’s been misread and misinterpreted quite a bunch by film-bros. Nevertheless, despite the problems, it’s a film with thrilling filmmaking and storytelling moments, and none are better than when it drops the bomb that Brad Pitt’s charismatic anarchist is really the figment of our unnamed protagonist (Edward Norton)’s imagination, and represents the darker, assertive side of his personality that he didn’t know he had. Others have tried the gambit before, but a second viewing reveals (perhaps unsurprisingly) just how rigorous Fincher is with the logic here.

23. He’s Faking Multiple Personality Disorder – “Primal Fear” (1996)
Perhaps one of the reasons that we were surprised by the “Fight Club” twist is that we were trainedby his astonishing Oscar-nominated debut in “Primal Fear” to think that Edward Norton couldn’t possibly have multiple personalities. One of the best in the 1990s courtroom-thriller boom, it’s another film that relies on a “Witness For The Prosecution”-style twist, but arguably perfects it, thanks largely to Norton. Richard Gere plays an attorney who’s defending a shy, stuttering young man (Norton) accused of murdering the Archbishop who sexually abused him, and whose trauma appears to manifest itself with multiple personality disorder. After an outburst from his alter ego “Roy,” he’s found not guilty by reason of insanity, but when Gere comes to tell Norton of the result, the young man drops a bombshell: He’s a sociopath who’s been faking his mental illness in order to achieve this exact result. Norton is phenomenal throughout, but truly chilling here, utterly selling what could have been something cheap.

22. Kevin Costner Is A KGB Mole – “No Way Out” (1987)
Tight scripting, clever (mis)direction and committed performances are all necessary requirements to really pull off a twist, but sometimes the groundwork is laid already at casting stage. Kind of a masterpiece of sheer timing, too, Roger Donaldson‘s “No Way Out” arrived just as Kevin Costner‘s rise to all-American leading-man fame was kicking up a gear, mere months after he’d embodied the crusading Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma‘s “The Untouchables” — he was maybe the last actor anyone would imagine playing a KGB mole. Indeed, for most of the film, the audience is with him because they fear once that composite photo finishes rendering, it might lead to him being falsely suspected of being the traitor. The idea that he’s the actual traitor doesn’t even occur to us until he’s standing there being called a “hero of the Soviet Union.”

21. As A Child, He Witnessed His Own Death As An Adult – “Twelve Monkeys” (1995)
While undoubtedly featuring one of the all-time great twists, we’re always a little hesitant to give Terry Gilliam‘s hugely entertaining time-travel mindbender full props, being as its most impressive aspects are all avowedly lifted from Chris Marker‘s “La Jetée,” which we exclude here on the grounds that it’s a short film. And compared to Marker’s elegant, black-and-white photomontage, “Twelve Monkeys” can seem a little florid and overwrought by comparison. Still, the inherent cleverness of this reveal — in which the images that have haunted Bruce Willis‘ time-traveler since childhood turn out to be a glimpse of his own death as an adult — works in both formats, summoning the Grandfather paradox, the circularity of life and the inescapability of your destiny all at once. But only “Twelve Monkeys” has Willis in that mustache, so bonus points there, Mr. Gilliam.