12 Recent Films That Fell Apart In The Final Act
These movies were good... until they weren't.
Having a satisfying final act is such a vital thing to get right in any movie. After all, audiences don't always remember an entire story, but they'll usually remember how it ends.
Sometimes, a stronger final act can single-handedly save an entire film - just ask Malignant. The less positive flipside of this is those films that are doing well for much of the run-time but fail to pay off all of that build-up in a satisfying way in the final stretch, making them a retrospectively disappointing viewing experience.
Sadly, there are so, so many examples of this throughout cinema, with Danny Boyle's initially great but latterly underwhelming Sunshine being an epitomizing example of this, and it's not like this problem is going away either. Plenty of films from the last few years have also undone themselves with weak final acts, and the following 12 films are all examples of this.
Some of these films were undone by bad plot twists, others were far too anticlimactic compared to the rest of the film and some just foundered thanks to generally poor writing. Nonetheless, all these movies ultimately fell apart in the final stretch, and it was anything but enjoyable to watch.
12. Watcher
2022 was a year that delivered one great horror film after another all the way through and while Chloe Okuno's Watcher didn't get the same level of mainstream attention as things like X, Barbarian or Nope, it really deserved to.
Watcher tells a seemingly familiar story - an American named Julia (It Follows' Maika Monroe) in Romania becomes unnerved when a man (Burn Gorman) across the street won't stop watching her and soon suspects he's a serial killer - with so much panache that it starts to feel entirely fresh. Maika Monroe is great in the lead role, and Okuno's direction masterfully builds suspense, echoing Hitchcock in the best sort of way.
Unfortunately, after two acts of beautiful build-up the finale doesn't work nearly as well. After some double bluffs it turns out that, yes, the man across the street is a killer after all and yes, he tries to kill Julia at the end. This all just felt far too predictable - why couldn't another character have turned out to be the killer instead? - and this part of the film is considerably less frightening than the earlier scenes were.