20 Amazing Movie Plot Twists That Never Get Talked About
The plot twists that deserve to be on everyone's lips.
Plot twists can make or break a movie. At the worst of times, they can be fatally misjudged and ruin everything good up to that point, but when filmmakers get them right, they can elevate everything about the story and characters.
Of course, we all know those legendary plot twists that have been talked about to death - Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Usual Suspects, to name just a few - but what about those deliriously brilliant plot twists that just don't have enough good words spoken about them, for whatever reason?
That's certainly the case with these 20 movies, each of which delivered cinematic rug-pulls that were by turns shocking, ingeniously clever, and phenomenally performed. Yet you'll rarely hear them discussed much in online film circles today, each of these movies flying a little below the radar despite their general cinematic excellence.
But if there's any justice in the world, the following features will all get their time in the sun and be discovered by a whole new generation of younger moviegoers. Here's hoping.
20. Faraday Gets Framed For The Bombing - Arlington Road
Arlington Road is one of the most nimbly crafted, downright tense thrillers of the 1990s, revolving around a college professor, Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who comes to believe that his neighbours, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), are actually part of a terrorist cell.
The are-they-aren't-they of it all resolves in the climax when we learn that Faraday's suspicions were indeed correct, yet anything but a happy ending is awaiting him after this discovery.
In the climax, Faraday tries to prevent the Langs from blowing up the FBI HQ, and is in turn tricked into driving the very car into the building which contains the actual bomb. The bomb goes off, killing Faraday and many inside the FBI HQ, before a closing newscast reveals that Faraday was blamed for the bombing, his motive believed to be revenge for the previous death of his FBI agent wife in the line of duty.
The Langs pulled off a perfect frame-up job, then, tragically leaving Faraday's son Grant (Spencer Treat Clark) an orphan who believes his father was a terrorist, just as the Langs ship off to another neighbourhood to repeat the same scheme again. Brutal isn't even the word.