"Luke... I am your slightly unwieldy narrative device."
Fancy another movie list? Of course you do! And here comes Premiere magazine to oblige with the 20 best ever plot twists. All the obvious ones are in there, from The Empire Strikes Backto The Crying Game; it's also good to see the cult classics like Soylent Green and Oldboy get some recognition for their fiendish narrative devices. Citizen Kane is also featured, but does the revelation of Rosebud's significance really count as a twist?
It seems to me that the plot twist is less heavily used as a narrative device than in the mid-to-late 90s, when David Fincher directed two twisty films one after the other (The Game and Fight Club) and both The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects made audiences gasp with their revelatory concluding plot shifts. In these days of the net, of course, it's much more easy for the surprise to be spoiled (and yes, this piece contributes to that process, so consider yourself warned). The twist may also have become a little corny: Sixth Sense writer/director M Night Shyamalan went on to use the device with such regularity the audience would have been more surprised by a plot which progressed in entirely linear fashion.
Yet there's something uniquely pleasurable in a plot twist; rewinding the film in your mind for the clues you missed, the seemingly unimportant details which now have a retrospective significance. That is if the twist is handled well - if not it makes you feel like you've just wasted the preceding two hours, as fellow viewers of Fincher's The Game will surely concur.
So what's your favourite - and least favourite - cinematic plot twist? And by the way, I'm actually your grandmother and by clicking on this piece you automatically signed up to the "I love James Blunt Society" ... bwah ha ha ha!
(By the way, to ruin even more films for yourself, check out our quiz on plot twists, here.
