12 Dire Plot Twists From Recent Hollywood Films
2. It's All A Video Game - Serenity
Serenity concerns Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), an island fisherman who's approached by his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway), who asks him to kill her abusive new husband Frank (Jason Clarke). Eventually, it turns out that this is actually a video game programmed by Baker's son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh); Baker is an avatar for Patrick's late father, who died in Iraq.
This was a very interesting idea, but Serenity pulled it off disastrously and is basically a bewilderingly awful, misjudged film to rival 2017's The Book of Henry.
For starters, the twist is very blatantly hinted at numerous times before the actual reveal, while Serenity never realises how silly it really is and plays things like Baker talking to a character called The Rules (Jeremy Strong) as if they're the most natural things in the world.
It gets worse the deeper you go. Patrick has programmed a game in which his dead father does sex-work and shags an avatar of Patrick's mother, which is weird enough, but the game mainly seems to be a way to live out his fantasies of murdering his real stepfather. Once Baker kills Frank in the game, Patrick murders his stepfather in real life.
Yes, a young boy killing his stepfather is Serenity's idea of a triumphant ending. Everything surrounding this twist is misjudged, disturbing, atrociously written, messy and just awful.