10 Brilliant Movie Plot Twists That Don't Actually Make Sense
1. Incendies - 1 + 1 = 1
Nothing can prepare you for Incendies' big twist. The movie revolves around two Canadian twins searching for their father and brother after their mother, Nawal, dies. Their investigation takes them to the war-torn Middle Eastern country where the mother grew up. They discover she had another child who she was forced to give up, and that their father was a prison guard who r*ped their mother.
Years later, once she had emigrated to Canada, the mother recognizes her son at a swimming pool, able to identify him by a tattoo he got as a baby, but when he turns around... she sees the face of the man who assaulted her. This shock gave her a fatal stroke, and the horrified twins discover that their father and their brother are one and the same.
It's an amazing twist, though some did criticize the movie's final act for the avalanche of coincidences - the meeting at the swimming pool was particularly unlikely, for example - and taken in a literal sense, the revelations and coincidental meetings are pretty improbable, but it does still work in the context of the movie itself.
Incendies evidently takes a lot of inspiration from Ancient Greek Tragedy, specifically the myth of Oedipus, where a man ends up killing his father and marrying his mother through a series of terrible coincidences. It's not realistic, but recognizing the film as more of a mythical piece, it absolutely works. Besides, what are a few coincidences when a twist is this powerful?