6. Saw: No One Saw It Coming

Moving on to the psychological horror section, do you want to play a game? Saw as a franchise has had ups and a lot of downs but stays relatively iconic due to its premise and original plot twist. The first film stands to go deeper than some horror films of the time and asks psychological questions for the characters and the audience. The film centers around Adam Stanheight whose life is in his own hands as he attempts to escape the destroyed bathroom where the film takes place. During the entirety of the film, a corpse is just lying in the room with Adam. In the end, the corpse stands, revealing himself as John Kramer, with a series of flashbacks to the rest of the story, placing Kramer’s story and reason for setting up his scheme. His motivation is to force others to appreciate life by bringing them as close to death as possible, thus allowing others to understand how being on the verge of dying due to disease makes him feel every day. The twist stands out for being incredibly unseen as almost no one who watches it guesses that the killer would be crazy enough to play dead for the entirety of Adam’s attempted escape. With the flashback, this plot twist lands itself in the number six spot.

5. Arrival: Hope For the Future

The most recent hard-hitting plot twist to stand out, the 2016 sci-fi thriller Arrival takes on a unique premise. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) must communicate with aliens coming to Earth while grieving her daughter’s death. Keep in mind, this twist impacts all the more because instead of being a twist on the characters, the twist is simply on the audience as crafted by the storytelling technique. The audience sees the grieving of the daughter as well as many other flashbacks of the child, as keys to understanding Banks as a character, as they would any memory scene in any film. This changes when a key character speaks to her from the future, or more accurately, to her future self from whom she is receiving a memory. The twist is not only key to the plot but also devastating, as all of the supposed memories of Banks’ dead daughter are, in fact, visions of her future. The film’s themes revolve around the incapability of choice and how fate will align, confirming that Banks will not only have a daughter who will die young, but she also has to have the child, all the while knowing her fate. The twist is expository for the theme, key to the plot, and deeply impactful. The only piece it lacks is historical significance which it is sure to snag as it rises higher in appreciation from the audience.

4. The Prestige: Classic Nolan

 Two key film pieces are sure to be layered with twists, turns, and plenty of confusing elements: magicians and Christopher Nolan. Following two rival magicians, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), the film layers their hijinks as they go back and forth, outdoing each other. Borden gains great fame earlier than Angier by perfecting the act known as The Transported Man. This desperation leads Angier to enlist the help of Nikola Tesla to create a machine to clone him during every performance. Yet, this wild lack of realism is not the key twist. When Angier is assumed dead, Borden is tried for murder and promptly hanged. The great twist comes when Borden comes back to shoot Angier, in which it is revealed that he was a twin the whole time, two men sharing a life so devoted to their craft that they shared injuries, lovers, and a second role as their own assistant. Yet, the power of the twist does not stop there as Michael Caine’s character, acting as Nolan talking, tells the speech told at the beginning of the film about the act of prestige. He details the opening trick (The Transported Man), the flashy second act (the cloning), and the prestige itself (the reveal of the twins). The key to this fantastic and ultimately confusing twist is that Nolan tells the audience that there will be a twist at the end, and even still, it is practically impossible to see it coming.

3. The Sixth Sense: Better Than the Rest

A plot twist movie list would be thoroughly incomplete without a film by M. Night Shyamalan. Known for his, at times, divisive movie twists, Shyamalan captures the attention of audiences with twists that change the course of the story he is telling. In The Sixth Sense’s, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is tasked with aiding the young Cole Sears (Haley Joel Osment) through a challenging time. All the while, he struggles with his marriage, claiming that his wife does not really see him. The twist comes with another iconic line in this list, that of “I see dead people,” uttered by Cole. At this moment, just before the credits, the audience gets to understand that Malcolm has been dead for most of the film. This twist, in particular, stands out for the emotional prowess delivered through Malcolm’s acceptance of death and the conversation around moving on. Both men gain acceptance through each other and find closure in their lives. Shyamalan delivers a twist that changes the entirety of the film and truly stands out from some of his lesser twists.

2. The Usual Suspects: Who is Keyser Soze?

The Usual Suspects can be a challenge to understand as it follows the real-time hunt for Keyser Soze while going back in time through Verbal Kint’s (Kevin Spacey) story about how Soze hired him and a team of miscreant outlaws. The story takes many turns, seeing the entire team killed with a whole movie full of tangents and minor side characters. After Kint finishes his story, he tells the cops that they will never see him again and leaves because he has immunity. The twist comes as the officer turns around to his board. If an audience member has been paying pristine attention to every minute detail of Kint’s story, they will recognize the twist immediately. The board and general room have plenty of names and references to Kint’s story as the truth comes out that he based a massive percentage of the story on random words and lies. A sketch of Keyser Soze then arrives from a patient in the hospital, confirming the truth for audience members who may have missed it. The special parts of this twist are the combination of the best parts of many twists, incredible acting from Spacey as he goes from a twittering buffoon Kint to the confident Soze, the dropping of the coffee mug in slow time with its own reveal on the bottom, and the innate rewatchability of a film jam-packed with details. It earns the number two spot, especially for that reason.

1. Fight Club: Everything and Then Some

In the number one spot, Fight Club plays on every twist trope that the top ten has used and perfects them. Seeing a return of both Edward Norton and Brad Pitt from earlier entries, the film sees an unnamed man (Norton) meeting Tyler Durden (Pitt) on a plane, and then when the man’s apartment and belongings blow up, he moves in with Tyler. They start their own fight club and recruit men to battling it out to relieve stress from their consumer-driven lives until it goes out of control. This happens when Tyler takes over and starts Project Mayhem, a plan uniting men across the country to disestablish consumer America through explosives and murder. The man attempts to talk Tyler out of the planned chaos but is nowhere to be found until the movie’s end. In the chaos, the members of Project Mayhem begin referring to “The Narrator” as Mr. Durden, thus the mindblowing reveal. The Narrator and Tyler are one and the same as a series of flashbacks shows the Narrator alone in key scenes with Tyler during the film. Few twists make an audience want to rewatch a film more than this one. The merits include the perfect use of the unreliable narrator, the editing that, upon rewatch, places Tyler in key focus, and the acting from Norton and Pitt, who seem to have a knack for these sorts of reveals. Truly, any of these films deserve a watch, even knowing the twist but few more than Fight Club.