Ben Affleck names the greatest twist ending in cinema history: “Startling and magnificent”
Realistically, there are only two ways a twist ending can go: it can either knock the wind right out of an audience’s sails and leave their jaws on the floor, or it can ruin the entire movie in an instant.
It’s one of the hardest acts of screenwriting to pull off because it’s such a fine line to tread. There have to be enough clues peppered throughout the story so it makes sense contextually, but either relying on too many red herrings or failing to signpost it at all can make it come off as forced or unnecessary.
Few people have proven it better than M Night Shyamalan, who made a late-film twist such an integral part of his arsenal that he eventually became a parody of himself, but that still doesn’t rob The Sixth Sense of the gut-punching impact it had on the moviegoing public the first time they saw it.
Ben Affleck has been in a couple of pictures with a twist of their own, and the results have varied. David Fincher’s Gone Girl turned itself upside down by revealing that Rosamund Pike’s Amy Dunne had faked her own disappearance to frame her husband, whereas Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic was nonsense.
As far as the actor and filmmaker can see, though, one of cinema’s most famous rug-pulls can’t be bettered, and he’s not wrong. It may not be the greatest twist ever conceived, but when it happened, most people, apart from the amateur sleuths who’d already figured it out, sat there piecing together all of the information and realised the wool had been pulled right over their eyes from minute one.
“The Usual Suspects is a terrific movie,” the two-time Academy Award winner accurately noted on behalf of Alamo Drafthouse. “That’s another one that’s kind of a crime, antihero movie, except one where you’re forced to re-evaluate the entire movie at the end of the film, which is kind of startling and magnificent, in terms of a cinematic feat.”
The Academy clearly agreed, since noted wrong ‘un Bryan Singer’s labyrinthine thriller won both of the Oscars it was nominated for. Christopher McQuarrie’s original screenplay got its flowers for dropping a bombshell in the audience in its final moments, while fellow wrong ‘un Kevin Spacey claimed the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ prize after Verbal Kint revealed that the infamous Keyser Söze was a fabrication.
The easiest way to gauge how much impact a twist ending has made on popular culture is how much it’s referenced in other media, and with The Usual Suspects getting the parody treatment in Scary Movie and being referenced in everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Derry Girls, it’s left a lasting mark.
Affleck was hardly alone in needing a moment or two to digest the Söze revelation, and more than 30 years later, he’s still amazed that McQuarrie’s script even managed to pull it off.
