11 Subtle Details That Make Movie Twists Obvious

Alexandre Aja’s debut is a landmark in New French Extremity, the boundary-breaking movement which lead to the popularisation of “torture porn” horror in American horror cinema and facilitated the death of the interminable, sanitised post-Ring PG-13 remake trend.

It’s a taut, terrifying, and viciously violent slice of suspense cinema, peerless in its messy execution of an unsparingly brutal hunt-and-chase narrative.

For the most part. Then comes the infamous twist ending, an unlikely swerve so poorly planted it almost derails the entire film and, for some critics, was enough reason to ignore its finer moments entirely.

The hulking, faceless trucker meting out horrific fates to all he comes across is revealed to be a split personality of our hitherto hyper-resilient protagonist Marie, a slight and quiet young French woman who looks more built to wield a withering look than a ton-weight bookcase.

As silly as the twist is, it is actually fairly well-established throughout the film, with the cross-cutting of Marie and the Trucker’s masturbation scenes (albeit with very different endings), the mention that Marie has never had a boyfriend, and the early dream sequence in which she is depicted running from… Herself.

Subtle stuff there, Alexandre.