10 Movies That Cleverly START With Huge Twists

2. Knives Out

Knives Out Christopher Plummer
Lionsgate

Knives Out was sold as a classic whodunnit, leading most viewers to expect a murder mystery with a simple-ish layout: a crime is committed, a detective investigates, and the culprit is revealed after a handful of twists and turns.

But writer-director Rian Johnson - a huge fan of whodunnits - is well aware of all the trappings and expectations surrounding the genre, and so, he chose to do things a little bit differently when crafting his latest movie.

The film revolves around the untimely death of wealthy novelist Harlan Thrombey, and, while watching, you assume that we won't find out who killed him until the final couple of scenes. But surprisingly, we learn what happened much earlier than that, when a lengthy sequence near the beginning of the film shows us that Harlan's nurse, Marta, doomed him with an accidental overdose.

Sure, Harlan's death isn't as straightforward as it first seems - and Marta isn't entirely guilty - but it was thoroughly surprising to be given so much information up front, a clear indicator that Knives Out would be far from a conventional murder mystery.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!