The director Edgar Wright thinks people are “unnecessarily tough” on: “I enjoy it”
The idea of a big twist at the end of a movie is anything but a new one, you can go all the way back to 1957’s Witness for the Prosecution if you want to see one of the best examples, but as Edgar Wright will back up, it was arguably 1999’s The Sixth Sense directed by M Night Shyamalan that made them fashionable again.
Personally, I remember managing to avoid hearing about the reveal at the end of the Bruce Willis shocker when it came out, so that when it arrived, my jaw dropped with the rest of the cinema, and I can recall the collective gasp as the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Done effectively, there’s nothing quite like a twist that sends your mind racing back to the start to see things from a new perspective.
Another film that arrived not too long after The Sixth Sense and which mirrored it in terms of ghostly goings on was the fantastically creepy Nicole Kidman spookfest The Others from 2001, written and directed so skillfully by Alejandro Amenabar, who managed to use misdirection and audience assumption to keep the secrets hidden until the final moments.
Aside from people keeping quiet when they’ve already seen a film with a twist, creating an effective one is no easy feat, as Wright told the Post-Credit podcast: “It’s a tricky one [writing twists]. I feel like people are unnecessarily tough on M Night Shyamalan because they sort of say, ‘Oh, it’s all about the twist!’ And, it’s like… why not? I don’t care if that’s his thing, I enjoy it. I actually thought the twist in Old was actually really good, I liked it. I thought the final five minutes was like, Yeah, I’m in! I’m in, man.’”
Wright displayed some of that passion in his 2021 movie Last Night in Soho, the retro horror-thriller starring Anya Taylor-Joy, which uses a similar reveal at its conclusion, rapid cut scenes and a growing sense of dread, raising the veil on our understanding of what had played out over the previous couple of hours.
Wright added: “I like films that give you something like that, and I particularly like films that, sometimes you get it in old thrillers from the 60s and 70s, where it seems like the film is over, and you go, ‘Huh, I guess it’s done,’ but then there’s an ‘and then…’, and then the finale kicks in. I like the fact that you think it’s done and then something else is coming.”
Shyamalan, in some ways, created a rod for his own back with The Sixth Sense, because it was so effective and so wildly popular that movie fans, even some 25 years on, expect a similarly world-flipping twist to arrive at the end of all of his films, even if they aren’t set up to support it. His Mel Gibson sci-fi Signs, for example, doesn’t have a twist per se but does have a sudden, heart-stopping reveal; one of the most effective jump-scare moments in recent cinema.
So even if his subsequent films don’t always have what can be described as twists, Shyamalan still usually manages to work in some kind of surprise that dominates your memory of the movie, as he showed with Old, The Village and his most recent movie, Trap.
Fans of the director will be excited by what he has coming up soon; he’ll direct a TV series called Magic 8 Ball about a group of people dragged into supernatural events, plus he has completed filming on a film called Remain, a psychological thriller that he wrote with The Notebook’s Nicholas Sparks. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, it’s due for release on October 23rd of this year.
Meanwhile, if you like twists and want to experience two of the best in recent memory from different mediums, try Alex Michaelides’ novel The Silent Patient, and the astonishing Inside No.9 episode ‘The 12 Days of Christine’.
