Matt Glasby’s monthly column How to… turns a sly, critical eye on how the movie world really works. This month: How to… make a twist movie.
There’s a contradiction at the heart of most movie-viewing. On one hand, films offer us an escape from the crushing predictability of life. On the other, most mainstream efforts are so formulaic you could feed them to a baby. Twist movies solve the problem by offering two experiences for the price of one: the excitement of being surprised followed by the satisfaction of working out how it happened.
This article contains spoilers for the following films: one of this year’s big Oscar pictures, an old Malcom McDowell film, Seven, The Shawshank Redemption, The Sixth Sense, Haute Tension, Atonement, Fight Club, Memento, The Prestige, Planet of the Apes, Remember Me.
Set it up properly
For a twist to really land, it requires careful foreshadowing. One of this year’s big Oscar pictures—we won’t say which—comes to a conclusion so completely out of the blue you’ll feel like you missed a reel.
It’s cinema: anything can happen. Monkeys can sing, fly or rampage through New York, no problem. But you have to hint to the viewer that such a thing might be possible.
An old Malcom McDowell film—again, we won’t say which—ends with the revelation that he is, in fact, a robot, or an alien, or an alien robot, we’re not sure. Nobody saw that coming, because it doesn’t make any sense.
Keep your secrets
Hitchcock had it right when he banned all latecomers from Psycho screenings. Filmmakers, and those who sell and consume their work, need to protect twists at all costs. This means: no spoilers in the trailer, please, and no telling your friends what happens—big shout out to my brother, who delighted in ruining the ending of Seven for me, the dick.
The same goes for reviewers. Audiences are sophisticated. If you tell them there’s a twist, even without saying what it is, they’re likely to guess it.
And as the makers of Seven realised, there’s no point putting the surprise bad guy third on the cast list.
Make the film work without the twist
If people don’t care about your characters, nobody will want to sit with them for 90 minutes before you drop the big one. The Shawshank Redemption—one of the few perfect twist movies because we have all the info and yet can’t piece it together—works because we feel deeply for Andy Dufresne.
Ditto The Sixth Sense. Although it’s slightly easier to guess the twist—and some clever clogs say they did—the characters are already stuck in a bad-enough situation without any of them being dead.
Be real
The twist has to be happening—so no it was all a dream/trip/computer simulation/multiple disorder shenanigans please. As Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) puts it in Adaptation: “The only idea more overused than serial killers, is multiple personality.”
French horror Haute Tension aka High Tension aka Switchblade Romance famously took the piss by having the killer and the victim turn out to be the same person—an actual joke made in Adaptation.
In fairness, some things work better on the page than the screen. Atonement and Fight Club are both great books and great films, but the twists feel like a swizz when we see them with our own eyes, asking us to invest in people and events that aren’t real.
Be original
We’ve all see the one about the evil twin/unreliable narrator/time-traveller who ends up chasing themselves a million times, so think outside the box.
Christopher Nolan is a master of misdirection—his Memento is another near-perfect twist movie—but The Prestige hinges on two clanging clichés: secret twins and it was all magic.
Perhaps he thought everyone watching would be so busy thinking, “I wonder who that silent bloke who looks like Christian Bale is” and, “I wonder where David Bowie’s accent is meant to be from” they wouldn’t notice.
Go big or go home
The perfect twist should be unguessable but, after it’s happened, feel inevitable. The examples are few and far between, but they also represent some of the most ambitious films ever made.
Chances are, nobody watching Planet of the Apes in 1968 had a clue that the events were unfolding on a future Earth, but in retrospect where else could it have been?
But don’t—and I can’t stress this enough—go as far with a twist as Remember Me. This—ironically, mostly forgotten—romance sees the love affair between Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin cut short when… he dies in 9/11.
In this case, you’ve gone too big—go home.
