10 Best Movie Twists You Genuinely Never Saw Coming
2. The "Flashbacks" Are Actually Visions Of The Future - Arrival
Denis Villeneuve's masterful sci-fi drama Arrival begins with a devastating montage chronicling linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) raising her young daughter, who dies at just 12 years of age due to an incurable illness.
The visual language of the scene suggests that this tragedy unfolded before the movie's alien invasion story, but as we learn near the end, that's not the case at all.
While interacting with the aliens (or "heptapods"), Louise begins to learn their strange language, and is told by one of the heptapods that they offer a "weapon" to help humanity.
Louise realises that the alien weapon they speak of is their language itself, which allows those who learn it to change their brain's linear perception of time. And so, it's revealed that Louise's flashes of her late daughter aren't memories - they're premonitions of the future to come.
With that, Louise comes to appreciate the heartbreaking agony that, despite knowing her daughter's doomed fate, she will conceive her regardless with new love interest Ian (Jeremy Renner), and that Ian will eventually leave her after finding out she knew what would happen.
It's one of cinema's all-time greatest noodle-baking depictions of determinism, while cleverly toying with how we as viewers understand the visual vocabulary of film.