One good thing about ranking the best twist endings of all time is that there needs to be a focus on older/classic movies that are really worthy of being all-timers, and so they’re all well-known and from films released at least a couple of decades ago. This makes spoilers kind of acceptable, but they will be here, regardless, so if you see the title of a movie you’ve not seen, just don’t read about what the twist involves. The images generally won’t give too much away, either.
Also, the focus here will really be on great twist endings, not great plot twists in general. The Crying Game won’t be here, which has its plot twist near the halfway mark, and neither will Fight Club, which reveals its big revelation near the start of the third act, rather than near the end of it. If a movie has a massive twist in the last scene or two, or it’s the last big piece of information the audience receives before things wrap up, then it can be counted as a twist ending for present purposes. The groundwork has been laid. Hopefully the groundwork’s been read and acknowledged.
10
‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920)
Possibly obligatory, since it was such an early twist ending, but The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari deserves a shoutout for what it represents regarding the concept of twist endings, within cinema history. Much of the film plays out as an extended flashback, with the truth about the state of the storyteller being revealed at the very end, which calls into question much of what he’d been saying up until that point.
If a movie nowadays pulled this whole unreliable narrator thing and had an ending in a mental institution, it might not seem as mind-blowing, but The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did it before it was cool, so to speak. It did it, like, decades and decades before it was cool. It’s easy to respect this silent film as intense for its time, and ultimately influential as far as psychological drama/thriller/horror movies were concerned.
9
‘Se7en’ (1995)
As mentioned before, Fight Club has one hell of a twist, but it happened a little too early on for it to 100% count as a twist ending. But a few years before Fight Club, David Fincher directed Se7en, and this one very much did have a twist ending… not so much who the killer was, even if it was a surprisingly famous face (not a twist in-universe, though), but how the killer gets what he wants by the end.
He’s basing all his murders on the seven deadly sins, and he gets one of the two main detectives to kill him by revealing he’s murdered the detective’s wife, and that if the detective kills him, that will be the final killing (wrath). The detective does. The bad guy wins. It’s miserable, but genuinely one of the most shocking endings of all time, or at least of the relatively famous/popular movies that have been willing to go this dark.
8
‘Oldboy’ (2003)
Oldboy works as both a thriller and something of an action movie for much of its runtime, even if there’s a central mystery that motivates much of the narrative. Things begin feeling claustrophobic, with the main character imprisoned out of nowhere for 15 years, with an understandable psychological unraveling in that time, and then he’s just as suddenly released from his imprisonment.
He goes out in search of who might’ve done such a thing, and wants to know why, largely so he can get revenge, but then he learns he’s part of someone else’s vengeance-fueled plan, owing to a misdeed he did when he was young. And what’s revealed, right near the end, regarding a young woman who was helping him with his whole quest for vengeance… it’s pretty intense, to say the least.
7
‘The Others’ (2001)
Most of The Others seems to be about a mother and her two children living in a strange house and dealing with supernatural occurrences. It’s more of a psychological drama/horror movie, at first, but the supernatural stuff gradually gets more intense, and then it feels pretty certain ghosts are most definitely playing a role in the movie… but not in the way you’d expect.
The Others reveals, near the end, that the mother and her two children have actually been the ghosts all along, and there’s a bit more revealed that makes the whole thing feel more sad than scary, in all honesty. There was another movie (released in 1999; it’ll be mentioned in a bit) that has a similar supernatural twist, albeit done a little better, and in a slightly different way.
6
‘Memento’ (2000)
The structuring of Memento is unique and kind of hard to explain in just a paragraph or two, but it is necessary to have the twist at the end land the way it does. Because it’s got very non-chronological storytelling, the twist doesn’t happen at the end in the traditional sense, but the revelation that the protagonist is willing to lie to himself does hit hard, and is made apparent at the film’s end.
Memento is undeniably rewarding to watch over, maybe even more so than most movies that hit you with a twist right near the end, just because rewatches also help make the movie as a whole come together a little more. It’s also just a great neo-noir movie in other regards, and overall, with the clever storytelling (done to replicate the feeling of having short-term memory loss) and the twist ending building upon the already strong neo-noir foundations.
5
‘Saw’ (2004)
With every new Saw movie, there was an attempt to out-twist the original, and it was fun watching the series try, even if it always failed, because there’s no out-twisting the ending to Saw. The sequels also went all-out with graphic violence, so there was successful escalation in that regard, for better or worse. Saw (2004) feels positively PG-13, in comparison… well, not actually, since it’s still grisly, but it doesn’t really linger on violence, and is more concerned with psychological horror.
Anyway, the first Saw ends with the reveal of who the Jigsaw Killer really is, and it was a guy pretending to be dead in the room that much of the film took place in. Watching him sit up as his whole scheme is revealed is such a great moment, even if you want to pick it apart and call parts of that whole ending implausible. It just works in the moment, and that’s enough.
4
‘Psycho’ (1960)
Yes, the biggest twist in Psycho famously (or maybe notoriously?) happens quite a while before the ending, since it involves the seeming main character up until about a third of the way through the movie getting stabbed to death in a shower. It happens out of nowhere, or it did used to happen out of nowhere, all before it just proved too enticing to talk about, and now the shower scene is the first thing people know about, when it comes to Psycho. Movie fans are not as restrained about spoilers as fans of theater, it seems, because there’s still some famed secrecy about the ending to The Mousetrap.
The thing about Psycho is that there’s another pretty great twist that’s almost just as surprising as the shower scene, and it comes right near the end.
Oh well. The thing about Psycho is that there’s another pretty great twist that’s almost just as surprising, and it comes right near the end. It has to do with Norman Bates’ mother having been dead all along, and Norman being the person behind both of the murders depicted in Psycho. Okay, sure, Norman Bates being a killer or the overall face of what became the Psycho series is also pretty well-known nowadays, but the stuff regarding his dead mother and the way he has a split personality might take people off guard a little more in the modern day than what goes down during that shower scene.
3
‘The Usual Suspects’ (1995)
For the most part, The Usual Suspects is a pretty great crime/thriller/mystery movie, even if it more or less feels like it exists purely to have a great ending. So, judging the movie as a whole might be a little difficult, but when the topic is regarding twist endings specifically (like right now, what do you know?), then yes, The Usual Suspects is more than able to step up and make a big impression.
The whole film is about uncovering the identity of a mysterious crime lord named Keyser Söze, with the reveal at the end being that he’s actually the person who’s been interrogated the whole movie; a man who had previously gone by Roger “Verbal” Kint. He fools the detectives interrogating him and ends up walking free as they realize too late that they’ve been duped. It doesn’t sound as impressive when it’s laid out so simply, but the film is designed to have you tricked alongside the detectives, and sure, maybe that makes The Usual Suspects a movie with precisely one trick up its sleeve, but still, what a trick it is.
2
‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (1980)
The one you probably knew before you even watched The Empire Strikes Back, were you not there for its initial release back in 1980, it’s the development about who Darth Vader really is, in relation to Luke Skywalker. It’s been widely referenced and parodied, but even if you’ve not seen anything that referenced or parodied it, the existence of the prequel trilogy, which some might suggest should be watched before the original trilogy (1977–1983), is all about how Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader.
So, you have to try and imagine how it felt back then, or if you were around back then and got blindsided by it, then you’re very lucky. Also, this counts as a twist ending, but still gets to be unpacked and explored throughout the next movie, Return of the Jedi, which helps make the development introduced by the twist feel even more interesting and also emotional. If you wanted to argue that The Empire Strikes Back also subverts expectations by not having the good guys win (Han frozen, Luke minus a hand, the Empire having successfully struck back), then there’s an extra something on top of the “No, I am your father” twist.
1
‘The Sixth Sense’ (1999)
The Sixth Sense is another movie that’s hard to imagine many people watching for the first time in the 2020s (or beyond) without knowing about how it concludes. “Bruce Willis was a ghost the whole time” is, for one, a great twist, and it’s also a twist that’s very easy to summarize and spoil in just a few words, alongside “Darth Vader is Luke’s father” and “the person being interrogated about the killer was the killer” (The Empire Strikes Back and The Usual Suspects, respectively).
With The Sixth Sense, the twist doesn’t feel contrived, and it also doesn’t feel like the whole movie existed for the twist. It’s a compelling enough psychological/supernatural thriller about a kid who can speak to dead people, and the child psychologist who wants to help him… so the psychologist being a dead person all along feels so obvious, in hindsight. But if you go into The Sixth Sense somehow unspoiled, it does take you off guard, and then makes you feel silly about how surprised you felt, which might well be a sign of a perfect twist being executed.
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