The tone of a movie is usually established at the very beginning; only on rare occasions do motion pictures make a unexpected shift in mood from the tone that was set at the start. We're not referring to a film switching between sad scenes, happy scenes, tense scenes, and scary scenes - that's a given. We're referring to those instances which cling to a complete tone overhaul, one that takes a movie out of its comfort zone and forces audiences to reconsider what "type" of movie they were watching in the first place. As mentioned above, though, such a thing is a rarity: Hollywood movies, especially, seem afraid to verge too far out of one tonal territory and into another, for fear that audiences will be made to feel confused or uncomfortable. And though there are notable examples of movies that switched tone halfway through to great success, it's not a widely practised occurrence. What can be even more odd than a tone switch, however, is an ending that comes out of nowhere and robs you of your expectations entirely. That's to say, if you start out watching a fun movie of the feel good variety, you automatically tend to assume that the ending will stick to that mold. And for the most part, you'd be right. But it doesn't always happen, of course, as witnessed by the movies we've collected here, all of which played themselves completely differently for the sum of their runtime, up until it was time for their sudden, unexpected endings - all of which seemed to come out of nowhere with a sense of tragedy that couldn't really be anticipated...
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
