The 10 weirdest movie endings of all time
What compels screenwriters to create a masterful script, take the time to construct memorable characters, and get the viewer hooked in, only to surprise the audience with a truly bizarre ending that makes no sense at all? Some people love it, but most people hate it, with Hollywood never quite being able to move past the idea of a truly surprising movie ending.
The ‘weird ending’ differs from the twist ending, too, with the latter providing viewers with a logical narrative turn that changes the whole events of the previous 80ish minutes of cinema. The best twist endings of all time include such films as David Fincher’s Fight Club, which sees the dual lead characters share a strange psyche or George Lucas’ sci-fi classic Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which revealed that the main villain was the father of the hero.
The ending of any given artistic medium can, indeed, make or break a particular movie, book or TV show, having the ability to shatter the suspension of disbelief and entirely destroy a film. Yet, ‘bad’ endings aren’t what this list will explore, instead, the focus is on weird endings, the ones that may be great or terrible but which lead you to scratch your head over screaming at the screen.
Take a look at the list below, which includes a number of iconic movies, such as the musical Grease and Alex Garland’s Men, in addition to a few lesser-known flicks, like Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive and the horror classic Sleepaway Camp.
The 10 weirdest movie endings:
10. Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)
There is little to be confrontational about when considering Randal Kleiser’s 1978 adaptation of the musical Grease. Built out of a happy-go-lucky songbook and rich with the kind of sun-shining performances that would catapult Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta into the stratosphere, and structurally supported by an impressive songbook, short of musicals just not really being your thing, the movie is a joy to behold.
However, one moment has left audiences scratching their heads for decades: the ending. While a certain amount of disbelief must be suspended when watching any musical – after all, singing the majority of the words on a script is the stuff of lobotomised nightmares, and the final scene of Travolta’s Danny and Newton-John’s Sandy driving off into the heavens in a flying car has always felt particularly strange.
9. Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983)
Sleepaway Camp is a sleeper cult horror classic. For decades, audiences have been captivated by the location of summer camp as the ideal setting for murder and menacing monsters. The same can certainly be said for Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 movie.
While it’s a wonderfully niche horror movie that tells the story of a shy young girl who is sent to a summer camp, only for violent events to follow her every move, it is somewhat let down by an extraordinary ending. The simple slasher structure soon falls away to reveal the young girl is both the killer at large and a man, all before a hissing sound plagues the airwaves and the movie suddenly ends. It is truly bizarre.
Surprisingly, the enigmatic villain also has one of the highest kill counts in horror history.
8. Serenity (Steven Knight, 2019)
Steven Knight directing a project is usually a sign of high-quality content. The man behind Peaky Blinders knows a thing or two about building suspense and delivering on a promise with his finales. But Serenity might be the most awful entry into his filmography thus far. This film sees Matthew McConaughey as Baker and Anne Hathaway’s Karen in a strange world where nothing is what it seems, yet life goes on as normal.
Baker is intent on landing a fish named Justice before scratching away at the fabric of reality. He falls down a rabbit hole of investigation and realises he must kill Karen’s abusive husband. That could be put down very simply. However, it is soon revealed that all of the events taking place are doing so inside a computer simulation of a young boy. The boy seemingly designs the fishing simulator to keep the memory of his war veteran father alive while killing his new stepfather.
7. Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021)
Everybody seems to forget about Valdimar Jóhannsson’s strange A24 horror flick Lamb from 2021, with the peculiar film quickly coming and going upon its release. Starring the likes of Noomi Rapace and Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Lamb tells the story of a couple living on a remote farm in Iceland who discover a mysterious newborn sheep and raise it as if it were a human child.
A weird concept, first and foremost, it’s not surprising that the strange ending rounded things off with uneasy aplomb. A massive and intimating human/ram hybrid ends up shooting the lead male character dead after emerging from the fog of the desolate wasteland, taking the lamb (who now wears a knitted jumper) back into the wild with him.
6. Men (Alex Garland, 2022)
Men stands as an artistic creation defying singular interpretation from director Alex Garland, leaving viewers pondering the intricate occurrences in Jessie Buckley’s Harper. Bedevilled by myriad variations of the same face, notably Rory Kinnear’s often grinning visage, the film evolves into surrealism as this face sprouts leaves, unveiling a womb perpetually birthing itself. The return of Harper’s once-married husband (Paapa Essiedu) from the dead hauntingly adds another layer of poignant complexity.
Its ending is just as perplexing. In the pivotal moment, each iteration of Rory Kinnear undergoes a surreal “rolling birth” sequence, according to writer/director Garland. Through a CGI-formed passage beneath Kinnear’s grotesquely inflating torso, successive entities emerge, cascading from the exterior to the interior of the house like a peculiar human slinky.
5. Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011)
Featuring Michael Parks, Melissa Leo, John Goodman, and Nicholas Braun, Smith’s intriguing 2011 film unfolds in Middle America. It follows teenagers lured by an online invitation, only to be ensnared by religious fundamentalists with a sinister agenda. Darker than Smith’s typical comic-book-inspired works, Red State showcases the filmmaker’s capacity for serious, albeit fantastical, drama.
The boys finally break free from the religious group, only to be caught in a deathly fight between the police and the group. Blood rains down upon them, and hints at an apocalypse are quickly muted by John Goodman’s ATF Special Agent Joe Keenan. It means that the film doesn’t really reach any large conclusion and just simply ends with a whimper; considering Smith’s alternate ending for the movie, this feels like the dampest of squibs.
4. Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You was one of those colourful indie dramas that captured the imaginations of audiences when it was released in 2018, thrilling thousands across the world. Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Omari Hardwick and Terry Crews, the film was a satire set in alternate present-day Oakland where a telemarketer discovers a unique key to success.
Yet, by the end of the film, you’d be forgiven for thinking the movie had anything to do with telemarketing, with it turning out that people are being turned into horses in one big message about labour and capitalism.
3. Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)
These days, you can be sure to rank the Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve among the greatest sci-fi directors in modern cinema, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Christopher Nolan and James Cameron, but this wasn’t always the case. Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, Villeneuve was pretty unknown, emerging in 2013 with Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which told the story of a man who sets out to find his exact doppelganger.
A movie all about identity and the ‘self’, it is almost impossible to explain Enemy to the uninitiated, but, put simply, the film ends with the protagonist coming home to his wife, only to discover that she has been transformed into a giant spider.
2. Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997)
The 1997 Robert Zemeckis sci-fi Contact is a pretty notorious version of a great movie falling at the last hurdle with a truly misjudged conclusion that fails to convince the audience. With Jodie Foster at the helm, the movie tells the story of a scientist who, after years of searching, finally finds proof of extraterrestrial intelligence in the form of radio waves, sending her on a cosmic journey of discovery.
Much like the previous entry on this list, Contact is a complex, beautiful movie which is difficult to condense, but the gist of the ending sees Foster’s character come face-to-face with an alien, only to discover that it’s her deceased father. Whilst it has been argued that the alien is only taking the form of the deceased man, the execution makes for a truly ‘WTF’ moment.
1. Dead or Alive (Takashi Miike, 1999)
What list that explores the weirdest aspects of movie history would be complete without an entry from the eccentric Japanese enigma Takashi Miike. His 1999 film Dead or Alive is one of his most beloved feature films, a seemingly run-of-the-mill action movie that tells the story of a yakuza and a Japanese cop who separately wage war against the mafia, only for their eventual collaboration to set the world alight.
The whole movie is a pretty standard, albeit a totally over-the-top affair, until the ending goes totally mental, in line with Miike’s style, with the duel between the two lead characters leading to one of them pulling out a magical orb which destroys the whole planet. It’s pure cinema.
