Everyone loves a twist ending. I do, too, but only if it’s done correctly. Below I present two groups of films: one group of famous twist endings that, in my opinion, deserve their acclaim; and another group of twists that don’t.
Good Twist Endings:
- The Wizard of Oz (1939)
- The Sixth Sense (1999)
- The Prestige (2006)
Bad Twist Endings:
- Shutter Island (2010)
- The Usual Suspects (1999)
- Memento (2000)
I can feel the huffing and puffing already, especially over the denigration of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which is one of the most commonly requested movies I get for extended analysis, hence this essay. But I don’t have much to examine—at least with any admiration—, because Shutter Island and the other two on the second list, in my view, are artistic failures. I’ll spend this piece explaining why. For favorable contrast, I’ll intermittently refer to the films in the first group.
The core problem with Shutter Island is that almost the entire movie consists of irrelevant nonsense. The narrative of the film is set up as a mystery, and Scorsese leads us to become highly invested in that mystery, which is: what shady dealings on Shutter Island have led to the disappearance of dangerous murderer Rachel Solando? Our protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DeCaprio) dives into this puzzle, collecting clues and opinions from various island residents—clues that involve, among other things: Nazi experimentation, governmental testing of nuclear weapons, and scary new psychotropic medications.
But as the runtime drags on, these various potential conspiracies don’t seem to be bringing us much closer to the solution. And indeed, it turns out that they’re all for naught. There are no shady dealings. There is no Rachel Solando. There’s not even a Teddy Daniels.
The reason this is a terrible twist ending is that the revelation is a joke on us: we’ve wasted our time watching the body of the film. There’s no reason to re-watch Shutter Island, because now that we’ve seen its ending, we know we’ve been strung along by caring about the rest of it. A.O. Scott of The New York Times nails it:
“Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.”
Indeed it is a “contrivance,” because the fantasies of Andrew Laeddis that we observe over the course of Shutter Island are not in any way tied to the event that precipitated his madness: the murder of his children by his insane wife and his subsequent murdering of her. Instead, Laeddis conjures up random red herrings designed to avert him from reality. No meaningful analysis of these red herrings is possible, because they’re explicitly deployed by Laeddis’ psyche to be as misleading as possible—to have no traceability back to the truth.
Contrast this with the seminal twist ending of The Wizard of Oz (1939). As everyone knows, Dorothy Gale wakes up at the end of the movie: as the cliché goes, “it was all a dream.” But dreams aren’t random: they’re grounded in reality, and indeed, the colorful characters that Dorothy has dreamt appear to have been based on her actual family and acquaintances in Kansas. Thus, it’s fruitful to examine the connections between the dream characters and the originals: one might observe, for example, that Dorothy longs for a faraway escape (“Somewhere over the rainbow”) and accordingly dreams one up. But, previously unrecognized by her, she truly loves the quirky and odd personalities that she lives with Kansas, so they, not exotic strangers, populate her dream. No wonder that she eventually concludes, “There’s no place like home”: her fantasized escape was barely different from her current, humble life.
Andrew Laeddis in Shutter Island also has dreams, and these dreams also gesture toward reality, faintly hinting at the darkness of his past. But Scorsese doesn’t want us to know the big secret, so he spends relatively little time in the dreamscape. He prefers Laeddis’ fantasies and delusions, which by contrast have no connection to the truth. As a prominent example, Laeddis believes that Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) is his trusty detective partner, but in reality, this man is Lester Sheehan, Laeddis’ psychiatrist. Unlike in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no thematic connection between these two roles, no substance to analyze. One is real, one is made up—that’s it.
Scorsese is hardly the first to attempt a twist that renders his entire movie a waste of time. Another wrongfully celebrated film is Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1999), which consists of a story told by a character named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) about a gang of street crooks who are tricked and sabotaged by an uber-criminal named Keyser Soze. But Kint, as it turns out in the movie’s finale, is Keyser Soze.
Oh boy. This one is even worse than Shutter Island, because whereas Shutter Island consists of the protagonist’s delusions, The Usual Suspects consists of the protagonist’s intentional lies, such that after the twist we have no idea what actually occurred before it. Every single thing we have seen is now liable to have been whimsically fabricated by Kint/Soze.
This becomes palpably clear on re-watch toward the end of the film, when Kint recalls seeing a dark figure on a boat, assumed to be Soze. Duly reflecting his version of events, we see the dark figure onscreen. But since this figure obviously never appeared to Kint, all of what we have seen is now felt to be useless, since it also reflected the story told by the lying Kint in service of his evading arrest.
Reinforcing this, Kint/Soze is picked up from the precinct by a friend, who was seen in Kint’s story as Soze’s lawyer “Kobayashi,” the man who brought the crooks together. But we now know that this man isn’t called “Kobayashi.” So…if his name was a lie, was his supposed role in the job one, too? Was he even there? We can never know.
Another analogous failure to Shutter Island is Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). Like Shutter Island, Memento features a narrator with severe perceptual limitations who aims to avenge the murder of his wife, and in both films, the twist is that the protagonist, in fact, killed his own wife. (Borrowing a bit, eh Martin?) Nolan’s premise is more sound than Scorsese’s, though, because he exposes Leonard Shelby’s (Guy Pearce) limitations from the start, subsequently building toward unveiling what those limitations have been hiding from the character and from us. This should allow for emphasis on the telling of an actual story that we can invest in and not get punked for caring about.
But alas, Memento punks us anyway, falling into the same trap as Shutter Island. The solution to the puzzle is that there is no puzzle. We’ve longed to discover the identity of the murderous “John G,” but—sike!—there is no John G: we’ve been watching a wild goose chase. Like Shutter Island, Memento uses a protagonist with an infirm grasp on reality to misdirect us for two hours, building suspense for the answer to a question that, it turns out, needn’t have been asked.
This approach digs both films’ screenplays into deep holes, out of which there is only one way to climb: painful verbal exposition. The finales of both movies, therefore, consist of disappointing monologues told by supporting characters that spell out for us (by necessity) what in the world has been going on.
To be fair, in Shutter Island, there’s at least a plot-related justification for the character delivering the monologue, as Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) wants to impart these revelations to Laeddis for therapeutic benefit. But in Memento, there’s no such justification: the supporting character, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), simply explains the truth to Leonard for no apparent reason, starting, as he very well could have foreseen, a process that culminates in his own death. It’s a huge storytelling letdown. Nolan, it seems, has bit off more than he can chew with his innovative narrative structure, working both backward and forward to reach the all-important fulcrum of…a supporting character being unbelievably stupid.
Contrast these droning finales with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), one of the best twists in film history. No verbal exposition whatsoever is needed for this famous reveal, because the story we are invested in actually happened. The protagonist has perceptual limitations (“They see what they want to see”), but they’re not so great as to negate either what we have been watching on the screen (a la Shutter Island and The Usual Suspects) or the central drama of the film (a la Shutter Island and Memento).
This means that Shyamalan doesn’t have to pull the whole rug out, as the others do. Instead, he merely shows clips from before, which now have massively altered significance. For instance, he repeats the shot of Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) grabbing at the dinner check too late—but now we know why his wife got to it first. This is how authentic shock and amazement is created: it feels believable, given Shyamalan’s direction, that Malcolm didn’t realize he was dead. We saw what happened, and things seemed legit to us, too.
Unlike the three negative examples I’ve discussed, the bulk of The Sixth Sense’s runtime isn’t wasteful. It contains an interesting and dramatic arc: Cole’s acceptance of his gift, which grants Malcolm redemption for failing Vincent Grey. It also sets up honestly the arc that the twist will eventually complete: Malcolm’s struggle with regret over letting work get in the way of his marriage. Thus, re-watching The Sixth Sense is genuinely worthwhile, even when we know the twist in advance. I’ve been critical of the film (and Shayamalan’s entire body of work) for other reasons here, but credit where credit is due.
It appears that Nolan learned some lessons from Shyamalan. We can infer this because Nolan tried another big twist in his 2006 film The Prestige, and it’s far more successful than the one from Memento. (The Sixth Sense came out only a year before Memento, so it’s reasonable to assume that Nolan had only absorbed its influence after Memento’s release.) Nolan’s surprise, this time, is that Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) has been sharing a life with an identical twin, an arduous and painful endeavor for both men undertaken for the single-minded purpose of enabling impressive magic tricks. This shocking truth is the most extreme example yet of the desperate measures to which the competing magicians in the film go to best each other, so the twist adds to the central thematic drama, rather than nullifying it. Therefore, as with The Sixth Sense, we continue to appreciate the full storyline, and we benefit from seeing The Prestige again, even with all the knowledge the twist bestows.
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I think I’ve laid out a pretty sharp demarcation between the two groups of twist-featuring films I provided in the beginning of this piece. Nevertheless, most moviegoers enjoy all of these six films, so it’s worth speculating on why we enjoy twists so much in general, even when they come at our own expense and add nothing to the movie’s themes or meaning.
I suppose it’s because it’s fun to be in on something. It’s fun to leave the theater with a secret—a secret known to only those who have seen the movie. It’s fun to observe, firsthand, a newbie gasp as you did: although I’ve repeatedly noted the pointlessness of re-watching the negative examples in this piece, I admit that seeing a friend’s confusion turn to understanding (when you’ve understood all along) can be a real thrill.
These enjoyments, though, are out of the realm of art or even the realm of entertainment. Their value is more akin to practical jokes, to the gag-type pleasures of the world. Recommending Shutter Island, The Usual Suspects, or Memento is like offering a handshake with a buzzer attached to your palm; watching these films for the first time is like going in for the shake and getting zapped yourself. Is it fun? For many, yes. But is it greatness? Is it genius? Let’s not get carried away.
–Jim Andersen
For more about Christopher Nolan flicks, check out my explanation of Inception.
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