10 Brilliant Movie Endings That Give You The Finger

There's a saying that you don't always remember a story, but you'll nearly always remember how it ends. The ending really is one of the most important parts of any narrative, and an unsatisfying ending that seems to flip its audience off is always a recipe for a disaster, right? 

Not necessarily. 

In many cases, an unsatisfying or anticlimactic ending is a poor choice but sometimes, believe it or not, such a conclusion can be a great device. These following ten movies, all of which are generally accomplished works, are testament to this. In various different ways, they give viewers the finger but they subverted expectations in a way that actually enhanced the overall film.  

These flicks attack their audience in a variety of ways. Some subvert expectations with deliberate anti-climaxes, others leave mysteries forever unanswered and one, a certain, recent masterpiece, features a flashforward that symbolically critiques its audience and, by turn, modern society. 

The thing that unites them all is that their frustrating endings made them better and reinforced their themes and messages, thus suggesting that the old adage 'Give the people what they want' isn't always the right way forward...

Horror has always been a genre reliant on tropes, and nowhere more so than within the slasher film. This Canadian Art-House horror takes the subgenre and flips it on its head in more ways than one. 

First up, it is shown from the killer's perspective and the teenage victims are mostly periphery figures. Secondly, unlike the overwhelming majority of slasher films, it actually wraps things up and doesn't hint at a sequel. 

In the last fifteen minutes, the focus switches to a young woman named Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) who flees Johnny (Ry Barrett), the movie's undead killer, and eventually gets picked up by a female driver (Lauren-Marie Taylor). For the next little while, viewers will be waiting nervously for Johnny to burst out of nowhere or for this creepy woman to attack Kris, but it never happens. Instead, Kris is driven away to apparent safety and the closing shots imply that Johnny retrieved the supernatural locket he was searching for and has returned to his peaceful slumber. 

So yes, it's a totally anticlimactic ending but it's anticlimactic in the very best kind-of way, as it rejects the idea of a sequel-bait ending, a tiresome trope that's always plague slasher cinema. It's a real shame that a sequel is now in the works. It would've been much better to leave it like this.