10 Awesome Movie Twists You Never Saw Coming

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is an unusual film for the director, seeing as it not only doesn't involve a ton of mobsters, but it also has one of the greatest twists ever made, and that's not something the director is well-known for. Despite this, the man delivered, and it didn't hurt that Leonardo DiCaprio is a ridiculously talented actor.

In the film, DiCaprio plays a U.S. Marshall searching for a man who went missing on an island, which is home to a mental institution. The quarry they seek is a murderer, who escaped from the hospital for the criminally insane, and DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels becomes obsessed with finding his man.

As he searches, his obsession takes him to deep and dark places, and as he goes further into the depths of the hospital, he ends up dealing with his own demons stemming from his combat experiences during World War II, and the murder of his wife by Andrew Laeddis, "The most dangerous patient on the island."

It's all pretty cut and dry, but then Scorsese pulls the rug out from beneath the audience's feet when it's revealed that he is Laeddis, and he was the one who killed his manic depressive wife after she drowned their children.

Everything that occurred previously was staged by the doctors in an inventive therapy meant to snap him out of his delusion. From that point, the audience is forced to rethink everything they saw up to that point, and the close association with Laeddis' journey makes it clear the truth was apparent the whole time.