10 Movie Plot Twists So Subtle You Totally Missed Them
6. The Fake Investigation Actually Worked - Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island quite ingeniously tees up one obvious plot twist in an attempt to prevent audiences from guessing the more subtle one fielded out immediately afterwards.
At the end of the film, we learn that U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is actually a man named Andrew Laeddis, who created an alter-ego to escape the truth, that he murdered his manic depressive wife (Michelle Williams) after she drowned their three children.
The events of the movie have actually been part of an elaborate roleplay intended to snap Andrew out of his Teddy persona and bring him back to reality, and at film's end, he momentarily seems to have left Teddy behind.
However, in the movie's final scene, Andrew appears to slip back into his delusions, and is carted off to be lobotomised.
Yet there's more to that ending than the treatment simply failing.
The sly second twist heavily implies that the treatment didn't fail, but that Andrew intentionally feigned slipping back into his Teddy persona in order to be wilfully lobotomised and again escape the devastating knowledge of his family's demise.
In the chilling final scene, Andrew even asks Dr. Sheehan (Mark Ruffalo), "Is it better to live as a monster or to die a good man?," suggesting a degree of agency in whether he decides to accept his horrific past as Andrew, or willfully be rid of it.