One of the best ways for a movie to make sure you remember it is to pull the rug out from under you just when you think you've got everything figured out. Everyone remembers a twist ending.
These 13 films, all watchable on Netflix, feature very memorable unexpected turns. Or do they? (They do)
Oh and don't worry, there are no spoilers...
Wild Things
Not so much a story with a twist ending as a series of twists knotted together into a story of double-crosses, triple-crosses and crosses of such high multiple that we completely lost count. It starts as a story about two girls (Neve Campbell and Denise Richards) accusing their teacher (Matt Dillon) of rape. Then everybody - really, everybody - turns out to have very different motives. Sometimes more than one.
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The Vanishing
When Jeff's (Kiefer Sutherland) girlfriend Diane (Sandra Bullock) goes missing he becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her. Eventually he's approached by her kidnapper (Jeff Bridges), who promises to tell him what became of Diane, but only if Jeff will go through everything Diane suffered. But will he meet the same fate as Diane? Will he? WILL HE?
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Shutter Island
Leonardo DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal who heads to the psychiatric facility Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a female patient. When a huge storm blows in Daniels is trapped on the island, stuck in the middle of a case that gets bigger and bigger and odder and odder. Martin Scorsese has a ball with the tension the location offers and expertly untangles a very knotty mystery.
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Seven Pounds
After his carelessness causes the deaths of seven people, including his girlfriend, Tim Thomas (Will Smith) vows to help another seven people find new joy in their lives and thereby atone for his sins. But his plan turns out to be far more tragic than it first appears, because fixing seven lives means breaking another.
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Secret Window
Johnny Depp loves an eccentric. One of his prime oddities is the author Mort Rainy in Secret Window, who is confronted by a furious stranger (John Turturro) who insists that Mort copied his novel and means to take his revenge. The plagiarism rivalry escalates into murder and terror, until it becomes clear that a copied book is the least of Mort's concerns.
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Robot & Frank
An elderly jewel thief (Frank Langella) is given a robot servant to help him live alone. It's the curious relationship between the old man and the emotionless lump of machinery that makes the movie work, but it's the surprise ending that will probably have you weeping discretely into your popcorn.
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Flight Plan
Following the death of her husband, Kyle (Jodie Foster) boards a plane to New England with her daughter for the funeral. But halfway through the flight Kyle wakes up to find her daughter missing and no way to prove that she was actually ever on the flight, so that everyone on the plane thinks she's gone completely doolally with grief. As Kyle determines to find her girl and prove she's not mad it becomes evident that some people on the plane know a little more than they're letting on.
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Primal Fear
Edward Norton made his name with this movie, playing an alter boy accused of the murder of a respected Archbishop. To say why he's so great in the movie would almost ruin it, but suffice to say that this is a movie in which guilt and innocence switch places repeatedly, building to a genuinely shocking conclusion.
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The Others
A classic ghost story, The Others has Nicole Kidman as a war widow trapped in a remote stately home with just her two light-sensitive children for company. Or are they her only company? Strange noises and the arrival of some very spooky servants suggest that there is something else living in the house with them and that it wants to be known.
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Oldboy
If you haven't seen Park Chan-Wook's iconic mystery thriller then the parts you are probably already aware of are the moment the lead actor, Cho Min-sik, eats a live octopus or the extraordinary scene in which he fights a corridor full of bad guys using just a hammer and a lot of determination. But the part of this film that really stays with you is the conclusion to a story of a man who's locked away for years with no idea why, then sent on a nightmare journey that makes those years of incarceration seem like paradise.
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The Mist
The ending to this monster horror was changed from that in Stephen King's original story. Some fans didn't warm to it but others, including King himself, thought it gave an extra dimension the original didn't have. Whatever you think of the new conclusion to this living nightmare in which a strange mist envelopes a town and brings some very odd creatures with it, it's an ending you definitely won't see coming and that you won't forget easily.
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Identity
Put ten strangers in an isolated location, in a rainstorm, and things are probably going to get a little weird. So it proves in this whodunnit, in which a group find themselves stranded at a motel and are then quickly plucked off by a murderer in their midst. But this is not simply a story of who did it. To say any more would ruin an ending that will definitely take you by surprise.
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Dot The I
What starts off seeming like a romantic drama takes many dark turns until it becomes something completely different. Natalia Verbeke plays a young woman about to be married. On her hen do she's dared to give one last kiss to a stranger of her choice. She chooses Kit (Gael Garcia Bernal), who it turns out is not quite a stranger, at least not to Natalia's fiance...
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(Images: AllStar)
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