10 movies with cruel twist endings

Your mileage may vary with plot twists. When they work, they can really work. When they don’t – well, there’s a reason why the plot twist often has a bad reputation. For every “Luke, I am your father,” there are 10 more The Village-level twists (yes, I’m still salty the monsters weren’t real – they had such cool designs!). Some people just don’t enjoy having the rug pulled out from under them. 

Now, I understand: writing is an art. Like with any other finished project, you want your art to leave a mark on your viewer. And that’s precisely what each of these films does – while some of these plot twists might have worked better than others, they each left audiences speechless by the end of their runtimes.

1. Atonement (2007)

Atonement stars James McAvoy and Keira Knightley in a romantic war drama set in World War II-era England. Though their relationship is star-crossed for multiple reasons – McAvoy’s Robbie is far below Knightley’s Cecilia in social class – the two seem magnetically drawn to one another. Over the years, they weather incredible hardships to try and be together.

Until the end of the movie reveals that, actually, quite a lot of the film is a fictionalization by Cecilia’s sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave). See, as it turns out, Briony facilitated the final rift between Cecilia and Robbie, and they never got to reunite, with the two of them dying young.

2. Buried (2010)

Green Lantern’s Ryan Reynolds stars in this survival thriller about a man, named Paul Conroy, who finds himself buried alive by terrorists. The movie plays out as Paul desperately awaits rescue while stuck inside of a coffin. With a Blackberry at his disposal, Paul is given updates by the rescue team as they try to reach him.

By the end of the film, it’s down to the last seconds, with sand rushing into Paul’s coffin and threading to suffocate him. Luckily, it seems as though rescuers are about to pull him out. That’s when it’s revealed that rescuers have found the location of a different, long-dead man. Paul is given some words of comfort as he listens on the phone, his life slipping away. Pretty brutal.

3. Remember Me (2010)

As someone who grew up with an adolescent sister in the late ‘00s, I’m very familiar with Robert Pattinson’s output from this era. And when I saw Remember Me, a film that has been having a resurgence on social media, I recall being nonplussed by the whole thing. 

That’s because Remember Me, for most of its runtime, is your standard coming-of-age romance film. Pattinson’s Tyler leads the cast in a small-stakes, personal drama. So when Tyler makes his way to his father’s (Pierce Brosnan) office at the end of the film, audiences didn’t expect for the big twist to be that the office was located in the World Trade Center, and that the film was a period piece all along, taking place on September 11, 2001.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what to write for commentary on that. It’s a decision that makes you want to hear what the people working behind-the-scenes have to say about it.

4. The Mist (2007)

The Mist is one of those horror adaptations that manages to outdo the original’s fear factor. The Mist was originally based on a Stephen King novella of the same name. When a tear in space-time unleashes Lovecraftian monsters, residents of a small town are forced to take refuge in a local grocery store.

In the source material, things end on an ambiguous note, if not a slightly hopeful one. In the film? After weathering the lawlessness inside the supermarket, Thomas Jane’s David manages to escape out into the world with his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) and three other survivors.

Finding the world in ruins and his wife dead, David and the other survivors realize their chances of survival are slim. Since he only has four bullets, David mercy kills the other survivors, including Billy.

That’s when the mist dissipates, revealing the United States military cleaning up the town. Just a few more moments, and Billy and the others would have been perfectly safe. David can only scream.

Coincidentally, King loved the ending more than his own.

5. The Descent (2005)

Shauna Macdonald stars as a young adventurer named Sarah in this horror film. When she and a group of friends go spelunking following the loss of Sarah’s husband, they encounter a bestial, goblin-like subspecies of humanity that has evolved to live in the dark. Their quest to escape these creatures and make their way back to the surface world forms the crux of the central conflict in the film.

Of course, not everything goes to plan. As the survivors whittle down, eventually only Sarah is left. As she makes her escape, however, it’s revealed that she hallucinated the entire sequence as a means of coping with her situation. Sarah’s last torch begins to go out as the darkness surrounds her.

The Descent actually has two endings. Due to concerns that it was too depressing, the ending was cut in the American release, so Sarah does manage to escape the cave, though she’s horribly traumatized. This ending is present in the original, extended release, and this is the one that’s considered canon to The Descent Part 2.

6. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

George A. Romero practically kickstarted the modern zombie genre with this one – although the undead are called “ghouls” here – but the zombie genre isn’t exactly known for its sunshine-and-daisy sensibilities.

In this tale of horror, Ben (Duane Jones) must survive the unquiet dead while holed up in a farmhouse with other survivors. Things are contentious, as human nature often is, and naturally, the alliance doesn’t make it to the end of the film, when it’s just down to Ben.

As the horde surrounds the farmhouse, Ben hears armed men taking them down. Attracted by the sound, Ben finds more humans – who promptly mistake him for a ghoul, shooting him dead, and adding him to the growing bonfire.

What makes this so interesting is its commentary on race in the horror genre, and in America. Ben, a rare Black leading man of the era, could survive the dead – he couldn’t survive other humans. Ultimately, Ben dies anonymously and with little care for his life. The injustice of it all gets you thinking.

7. Brazil (1985)

Not that you’d expect a black comedy about a totalitarian government to end on a happy note. Brazil is one of Terry Gilliam’s finest works – the film follows the story of a lowly government employee, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce). Thanks to a clerical error, Sam gets caught up in a government conspiracy involving two men – one named Tuttle (Robert De Niro) and one named Buttle (Brian Miller).

At the end of the movie, with Sam strapped to a torture chair, members of the resistance manage to break in and free him. As you might have expected from other entries on this list, that’s not what’s actually happening, and Sam has actually been tortured into insanity. 

8. Ghostland (2018)

Also known as Incident in a Ghostland, Crystal Reed and Emilia Jones share the role of Beth, a survivor of a home invasion, throughout different points in her life. About 15 years before the main – or so it seems – narrative, Beth, her sister Vera (Taylor Hickson, Anastasia Phillips), and their mother Colleen (Mylène Farmer) were held captive and assaulted by two intruders.

Now grown and hoping to move past the trauma, Beth hopes to forget what happened to her. Her sister still struggles with that night, however, going so far as to hide herself away in a padded room. Eventually, it’s revealed that it’s actually Beth who’s severely in denial.

Yes, this whole time, Beth had actually been hallucinating her adult life. To dissociate from the horrors being inflicted on her family, Beth created an entire fantasy life where everything she ever wanted had come true. Vera’s situation is, however, enough to break Beth out of it and spur her into action.

9. Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Drag Me to Hell is a Sam Raimi picture – of course it’s gonna be a little twisted. This supernatural horror story stars Alison Lohman as Christine Brown. After being cursed, Christine is told her soul will be dragged into the fiery pit in just three days.

Over those three days, Christine tries increasingly desperate measures to remove the curse. Eventually, she’s able to discover that one of the objects in her possession is cursed with demonic influence – if she can pawn it off on someone else, the curse will be lifted from her.

Just as Christine thinks she’s broken the curse, however, the ending reveals that the object is still in her possession, meaning that she didn’t actually, before she ends up getting dragged away. Roll credits.

10. Goodnight Mommy (2014) 

In this Austrian film, Lukas and Elias Schwarz star as twin 10 year-old boys, also named Lukas and Elias. When their mother (Susanne Wuest) comes home from a plastic surgery appointment, her face bandaged, the boys begin to suspect their mother isn’t the same person.

In addition to an apparent coldness towards Elias, she refuses to acknowledge Lukas. Well, there’s a reason for that – Lukas had apparently died some time ago, and Elias was simply hallucinating his presence. The mother tearfully tries to get Elias to realize this, but it’s too late – Elias burns down the house with his mother inside. 

Goodnight Mommy would later receive an English-language remake in 2022, starring Naomi Watts and Cameron and Nicholas Corvetti, whom you might recognize from The Boys. The plot’s pretty similar in that do-ver, with just a few minor differences.

About the author