Movies and traditional narratives make the audience feel familiar with the world of the story and make them believe certain truths or “rules” about the tale they’re immersed in. A plot twist throws everything the audience thought they knew out the window. Generally, writers add plot twists to give the audience a sense of shock and unease. They want them to question what they thought they knew about the film’s world or even their assumptions about the real world.

A successful twist has to be believable at the same time. When the viewer reflects on plot points that happened before the twist, the revelation should make sense. Not all movies with plot twists pull this off, but they do tend to shock us and get some kind of reaction out of the viewer, whether it’s satisfaction, wonder, or frustration. These are some of the most memorable twists that changed a film’s narrative and took it to the next level. Please beware! This article is full of spoilers that reveal twists best discovered on your first viewing.

Source: The Most Shocking Plot Twists in 2022 Movies, Ranked

22 The Sixth Sense

M. Night Shyamalan was thrown into the limelight after The Sixth Sense stoked audience appetites for a shocking twist. The story follows a child psychologist who took a break from work after dealing with anxiety caused by a home invasion. He gets back into his career by helping a young boy who claims he can see ghosts. The now famous twist occurs when we find out the therapist is a ghost himself.

Related: Every Major M. Night Shyamalan Movie Plot Twist, Ranked

21 Inception

Christopher Nolan’s Inception is about a team of people who can take control of their dreams and invade the dreams of others. When they try to pull of the ultimate heist, “inception” or planting an idea in someone’s head, we find out a lot about the state of main character Cobb’s mind. The film’s twist is an ambiguous one. After watching a story that causes us to question reality and our perception of it, we’re left wondering if Cobb is awake or asleep when he gets his happy ending at the end of the movie.

20 The Village

This M. Night Shyamalan film features a controversial twist that had a mixed reception. The Village features an isolated 19th-century community that never leaves the safety of their town for fear of “Those-We-Don’t-Speak-Of”, group of fanged monsters in red cloaks who demand obedience and sacrifices of meat. The twist occurs when we find out the village actually exists in the modern day. The town was founded by a group of people who had experienced tragedies and formed the village to escape the pain of the outside world. “Those-We-Don’t-Speak-Of” are elaborate costumes used by the village elders to enforce the “stay inside” rule.

19 The Others

A classic ghost story, The Others stars a family waiting for the return of the patriarch who is fighting in World War II. They are cloistered in their lonely English manor house where they are tormented by invisible beings that the viewer assumes are ghosts. The twist turns the narrative on its head. The main character Grace murdered her children and herself in a bout of mania brought on from grief and isolation. They are the ghosts haunting the house and the unseen beings are the living inhabitants haunted by the family the movie follows.

18 Parasite

Parasite stars the ailing Kim family who leverage their matriarch’s job with the Park family to move into their decadent home and play at affluence for a while. The film is full of twists. The first occurs when we find out the former housekeeper hid her husband in the basement to take care of him. There’s not enough room for two families of parasites in the home so a bloody brawl break’s out at the Park’s son’s birthday party. The Kim family patriarch goes missing and the final twist is revealed when we find out that he hunkered down in the empty Park family basement.

17 Arrival

Arrival stars linguist Louise Banks who was chosen to decipher a message that an alien species projects in their own language. The twist works on a few levels. We find out that the aliens don’t communicate or understand time in a linear way. They knew the ending of the story at the very beginning. The twist reveals some truths about Louise and her life choices as well as the order in which we watched the film’s narrative play out.

16 Stars Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

The Star Wars franchise is famous for many reasons, but one of them is for delivering one of cinema’s biggest twists. The original trilogy of films stars Luke Skywalker as trains to defeat and terror of the galaxy, Darth Vader and his master, the evil Emperor. The second film of the trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, sees Luke come face-to-face with Vader and in a dramatic moment, Vader reveals to Luke that he is his father. The movie moment is often quoted in pop culture and is one of the most iconic cinematic moments of all time.

15 Avengers: Infinity War

The MCU did years and years’ worth of work to bring the franchise to this pivotal point that incorporates each superhero’s story into a face-off with Thanos in the final two Avengers movies of The Infinity Saga. Thanos is an alien searching for the Infinity Stones that will allow him to halve the galaxy's population in order to conserve resources. In a franchise like Marvel where we expect the heroes to save the day, audiences were left floored when Thanos achieved his goal and snapped half of their favorite characters out of existence. Thankfully, Avengers: Infinity War was followed up with Avengers: Endgame, which brought back most of the slain heroes in an conclusion to Marvel's Infinity Saga.

Related: The 10 Most Surprising MCU Plot Twists

14 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is based on the story of the Manson murders. The film’s protagonists are an ageing movie star and his stunt double. Eventually they end up at the site of the Manson murders and we may think we know how this story ends, but the film delivers some revisionist history. After a giant brawl involving a flamethrower, Sharon Tate’s life is spared and the Manson killers wind up dead.

13 Planet of the Apes

The original Planet of the Apes features a classic sci-fi twist. It stars a group of astronauts who crash-landed on an alien planet after light-speed traveling 2,000 years into the future. The planet is inhabited by a group of advanced primates who rule over a class of second-class humans. The film’s final twist is iconic. The last remaining astronaut stumbles on the Statue of Liberty, half submerged in sand, revealing that they never left Earth.

12 Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Psycho takes place at the creepy Bates Motel. A woman named Marion Crane is murdered by the mentally ill mother of the motel’s mother, Norman. While we are given many hints that there’s something really suspicious and off about Norman, audiences were shocked to discover that the murderer was actually Norman himself. He murdered his mother years before and developed a split personality that led him to believe he’s mother, even disguising himself as her.

11 Fight Club

The unnamed narrator of Fight Club is a bored and disaffected office worker whose life changes when he meets the charismatic Tyler Durden. Tyler teaches the narrator how to feel alive again. One of his methods is through bare knuckle fist fights. The two of them start a secret underground fight ring and as life becomes stranger and the tension ratchets up, we find out that Tyler never existed. He’s just a facet of the narrator’s dissociative identity disorder.

10 Memento

One of Christopher Nolan’s first notable films was Memento. The protagonist Leonard suffers from retrograde amnesia after his wife was murdered during a home invasion. He writes and tattoos clues and facts on himself so he won’t forget crucial information he can use to solve her murder. Tragically, we find out that Leonard’s wife didn’t die in the home invasion. Leonard himself killed her after it occurred.

9 Donnie Darko

A piece of a plane crashes through teenager Donnie Darko's bedroom and then he’s visited by a rabbit-like creature named Frank who warns him of a coming apocalypse. Frank continues to haunt Donnie, inspiring him to do crimes that will prevent the apocalypse. The twist occurs when Donnie is transported back in time at the moment of the apocalypse where he dies when the plane pieces fall on his bedroom.

8 The Prestige

Rival magicians clash in a historical film set in 19th-century London in The Prestige. Robert Angier and Alfred Borden are racing each other to perform the perfect illusion. The two are neck-in-neck pulling off tons of spectacular performances and the truth about how they did it is shocking. Borden has an identical twin that allowed him to use his body double to pull of his stunts, meanwhile Angier used a Nikola Tesla invention to clone himself.

7 The Cabin in the Woods

Comedy and horror don’t usually go hand-in-hand, but The Cabin in the Woods pulls it off with aplomb. The film plays with typical tropes from this genre and brings together a group of stereotype smashing heroes who rent out a cabin and get picked off by a wide array of monsters. The first twist occurs when we find out “the Director” chose each member of the gang to purposefully fill roles for a ritual sacrifice. This movie actually piles twists on top of twists when the ritual fails and the whole world seemingly ends after a large, fiery hand emerges from the Earth's surface.

6 El Orfanato

Horror master, Guillermo del Toro shocked audiences with this satisfying ghost story called El Orfanato or The Orphanage in English. The main character Laura moves into a converted orphanage on the coast of Spain where her son Simon starts talking to a new “friend,” a small child in a disturbing sack mask named Tomas. After Simon vanishes, Laura is certain Tomas and his other creepy orphan friends have something to do with it. In a classic case of unreliable narrator, we find out that Laura herself was responsible for Simon’s death after she accidentally trapped him in a hidden basement where he fell and broke his neck.

5 Interstellar

Christopher Nolan delivers more twists and turns in his epic, Interstellar. The film stars a group of cosmonauts on a mission through space and time to save planet Earth. They jump timelines and realities on a search for a habitable planet Earth. The film stars Murph, daughter of a cosmonaut as searches for the answer to an equation that will allow mass numbers of people to leave Earth for their new home. Murph find the answers she’s searching for with the help of a ghostly presence that gives her clues through her book stacks. The twist occurs when we find out that the mysterious force is Murph’s dad, caught in a time warp.

4 Knives Out

The film Knives Out borrows tropes from whodunit classics in the style of Agatha Christie while delivering some humorous spins. Harlan Thrombey is a famous thriller writer and the patriarch of a dysfunctional unhappy family. When he’s murdered, leaving behind a large fortune, every family member is a suspect. After examining plenty of likely suspects, the truth is that Harlan killed himself. He was motivated by compassion for his kind caretaker, Marta. She accidentally gave him a deadly dose of morphine, so Harlan slit his own throat to spare her from prison.

This reveal happens fairly early on in the film, and the threads continue to unravel as more and more twists and turns lead to the real mastermind behind the grisly string of events.

3 Last Night in Soho

Ellie is a fashion design student who loves the style and glamor of the 1960s. After renting an old apartment belonging to an old woman, Ellie finds that she can time travel and embody a woman named Sandie who lived in her apartment during the '60s. At first, Sandie’s life is fun and thrilling. She is more confident than Ellie and she’s the perfect muse for the fashion she wants to create. But Sandie’s life becomes darker, and Ellie discovers that Sandie was murdered by her lover-turned-pimp.

As Ellie becomes obsessed with finding justice for Sandie, she falls down a dark rabbit hole that eventually reveals that Sandie is still alive and she’s murdered a long list of johns. Last Night in Soho's reveal is even more shocking when we find out that Sandie is Ellie’s landlady, Mrs. Collins.