One good thing about ranking the best twist endings of all time is that there needs to be a focus on older/classic movies that are really worthy of being all-timers, and so they’re all well-known and from films released at least a couple of decades ago. This makes spoilers kind of acceptable, but they will be here, regardless, so if you see the title of a movie you’ve not seen, just don’t read about what the twist involves. The images generally won’t give too much away, either.
Also, the focus here will really be on great twist endings, not great plot twists in general. The Crying Game won’t be here, which has its plot twist near the halfway mark, and neither will Fight Club, which reveals its big revelation near the start of the third act, rather than near the end of it. If a movie has a massive twist in the last scene or two, or it’s the last big piece of information the audience receives before things wrap up, then it can be counted as a twist ending for present purposes. The groundwork has been laid. Hopefully the groundwork’s been read and acknowledged.
10
‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920)
Possibly obligatory, since it was such an early twist ending, but The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari deserves a shoutout for what it represents regarding the concept of twist endings, within cinema history. Much of the film plays out as an extended flashback, with the truth about the state of the storyteller being revealed at the very end, which calls into question much of what he’d been saying up until that point.
If a movie nowadays pulled this whole unreliable narrator thing and had an ending in a mental institution, it might not seem as mind-blowing, but The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did it before it was cool, so to speak. It did it, like, decades and decades before it was cool. It’s easy to respect this silent film as intense for its time, and ultimately influential as far as psychological drama/thriller/horror movies were concerned.
9
‘Se7en’ (1995)
Image via New Line Cinema
As mentioned before, Fight Club has one hell of a twist, but it happened a little too early on for it to 100% count as a twist ending. But a few years before Fight Club, David Fincher directed Se7en, and this one very much did have a twist ending… not so much who the killer was, even if it was a surprisingly famous face (not a twist in-universe, though), but how the killer gets what he wants by the end.
He’s basing all his murders on the seven deadly sins, and he gets one of the two main detectives to kill him by revealing he’s murdered the detective’s wife, and that if the detective kills him, that will be the final killing (wrath). The detective does. The bad guy wins. It’s miserable, but genuinely one of the most shocking endings of all time, or at least of the relatively famous/popular movies that have been willing to go this dark.
8
‘Oldboy’ (2003)
Oldboy works as both a thriller and something of an action movie for much of its runtime, even if there’s a central mystery that motivates much of the narrative. Things begin feeling claustrophobic, with the main character imprisoned out of nowhere for 15 years, with an understandable psychological unraveling in that time, and then he’s just as suddenly released from his imprisonment.
He goes out in search of who might’ve done such a thing and wants to know why, largely so he can get revenge,but then he learns he’s part of someone else’s vengeance-fueled plan, owing to a misdeed he did when he was young. And what’s revealed right near the end regarding a young woman who was helping him with his whole quest for vengeance… it’s pretty intense, to say the least.
7
‘The Others’ (2001)
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