11 Subtle Details That Make Movie Twists Obvious

This one is a little more subtle than most, so any viewers who managed to see through Park Chan-Wook’s twisty, steamy melodrama deserve all the applause unfairly offered to anyone who pieced together Gone Girl’s mystery early.

There’s two hours left in the film, of course she’s not really dead! Anyway, moving on…

An adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Victorian mystery Fingersmith, The Handmaiden takes a few necessary (and a few more liberal) creative choices while bringing the story to the screen. Switching the setting and adding a more reprehensible antagonist (from the director of Oldboy? What a shock), the film nonetheless maintains the twisted love triangle of the original novel.

When pickpocket-turned-handmaiden Sook-hee is hired by conman Fujiwara, she believes her job is to convince the haughty Lady Hideko to marry him. Instead Hideko is far from the innocent guileless victim she plays and is actually ensnaring Sook-hee in a complex scheme while collaborating with Fujiwara too.

It’s a shocking midway plot twist, until you re-watch the film and realise Hideko’s entire innocent persona is clearly an act designed to fool Sook-hee and beguile her, with her calculated cluelessness leading Sook-hee to initiate a sexual “awakening” which leaves Sook-hee enraptured with her and happy to collaborate in her plotting.