10 Movies That Totally Surprised You When They Ended
5. Memento
Christopher Nolan's Memento is a downright ingenious thriller touting a tricky yet fascinatingly satisfying narrative structure that makes Pulp Fiction seem positively straight-forward by comparison.
The film alternates between black-and-white and colour sequences, the former moving forward in time while the latter move backwards, until they finally meet in the middle of the story at the end of the film, tying everything together.
And though by this point we have all the context we need to understand that Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) used his own amnesia to frame Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) for his wife's murder, on its own terms it's such an odd, unconventional, and unexpected stopping point for the story.
As Lenny pulls up in front of the tattoo parlour to have Teddy's license plate tattooed, he asks, "Where was I?" and Nolan suddenly cuts to black - a pitch perfect ending that brilliantly bottles the temporal disorientation of the entire story.
Even if you could see what Nolan was going for building up to this moment, it still caught just about everybody off-guard.