# Does anyone else NEVER guess twist/surprise endings? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 5, 2010, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358 "2010-03-05T00:17:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Pushkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee59a6/32.png) [@Pushkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pushkin)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/41 "2010-03-08T00:13:43Z")
> [@Cuckoorex](#): > > Like others upthread, I let myself get caught up in the narrative most times I guess that’s what it is. Sometimes I forget even character names and can’t keep up with the conversation in the pub or house afterwards, but I know I’ve enjoyed myself watching it. ---
**Author:** ![norinew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/eb9ed0/32.png) [@norinew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/norinew)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/42 "2010-03-08T00:28:33Z")
> [@Mahaloth](#): > > Exactly. I had no idea Sixth Sense had a twist ending when I saw it in the theater, and the ending blew me away. > > I might have guessed if I knew there was a twist. With this movie, I ‘knew’ there _was_ a ‘twist’, but my sisters who had already seen it and insisted I see it too, were careful not to spoil it for me. I didn’t guess the twist until his wedding ring fell on the floor, and I went 'holy shit, he’s dead!. I saw this movie with my hubby. Now, me? Meh, average intellect, at best. Hubby, his family is full of geniuses, and he’s one of them! He didn’t guess it either! IF a movie has a twist, I don’t _want_ to guess it until the movie reveals it. ---
**Author:** ![Charley](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/97f17d/32.png) [@Charley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charley)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/43 "2010-03-08T13:14:09Z")
I’m another one who can’t get the twist, even if I know there is one. I will catch myself looking for it, but I usually get it wrong in some fairly fundamental way. For example in the _Sixth Sense_ I got to the same scene as **norinew** but my reaction was holy shit! **she’s** dead! which makes no sense at all in the framework of the movie. I also thought the twist for _The Village_ was that she wasn’t blind at all and even now, I’m not sure - that wasn’t part of it, was it? I only saw it once, thought it was meh, and it was a while ago. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/44 "2010-03-08T15:24:36Z")
If I’m actually watching a good movie, then I won’t really worry about twists coming up and I just take them as they come. In a few cases, I saw a bad twist coming, then discarded it as “No, they wouldn’t do that, really?” Now, in The Village, I guessed the twist from the trailer. I then confirmed it and didn’t bother with the movie. ---
**Author:** ![D\_Odds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/d_odds/32/2882_2.png) [@D\_Odds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Odds)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/45 "2010-03-08T16:19:08Z")
> [@Linty\_Fresh](#): > > Like **KneadToKnow** , I don’t think too much about the twist at the end, mostly because I like to be surprised. FWIW, I know many very intelligent people who watched **The Sixth Sense** , and _none_ of them figured it out, so whoever said _that_ is full of shit. > > I didn’t get the ending to **The Usual Suspects** , but I’m pretty sure it’s because the ending didn’t make any sense. My brother says he figured out **The Sixth Sense** , but not **The Usual Suspects**. I am just the opposite. I figured out (guessed might be more appropriate) **TUS** not knowing that the reveal was supposed to be the big surprise ending. I was expecting a different surprise. I didn’t watch expecting to guess early on what the ending would be, it just happened. ---
**Author:** ![Arcite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/67e7ee/32.png) [@Arcite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arcite)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/46 "2010-03-08T20:24:43Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > I guess twist endings when I can see the mechanics of the twist beforehand. For instance, the killer in _Murder at 1600_ is obvious one you apply the Rule of Conservation of Characters. I also spotted the twist in _The Prestige_, mostly because the director gave it all away (he probably had to; and, to be fair, the evidence had to be portrayed somehow). See, I didn’t spot the twist in _The Prestige_ and didn’t think the director gave it all away. Of course, once you find out, you can look back at the movie and realize that what you were seeing was consistent with the surprise was eventually revealed. But to me, that’s not the same thing as saying there were “clues.” “Clues” to me point to something definite. What you see instead in these twist movies usually are a lot of little glimpses of things that don’t get much camera time, don’t have attention drawn to them. How is one suppose to know tha they’re clues, or what they’re clues to? They could mean _anything_. > [@Gustav](#): > > Movies have… a kind of language. And once you learn the language, bad twists are nearly impossible to miss. When the camera lingers an extra 5 seconds at a seemingly insignificant electrical socket, you know someone will be electrocuted. If someone is casually mentioned to have a weakness to something, you know it will be his downfall. When random friend is introduced by name and given an intro despite having no obvious role in the movie, you know he’s gonna turn out to be the one pulling the strings. You would think so, and maybe this was true in old mysteries where “the butler did it,” but to me, these cliches are long gone, and movies (or books, or TV shows) with twists usually intentionally keep everything ambiguous. For example, for a while I was watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent on a regular basis, and I could _never_ guess the killer. It surprised me every episode. It was never the first seemingly “evil” person they showed you. They intentionally portrayed all the characters in this morally ambiguous light to keep you guessing, and to me, it worked every time. > [@Pushkin](#): > > Yup, I’m the same. Of those films you noted, those that I had seen with no prior spoilers surprised me with their ending. Add to that Old Boy as mentioned above. > > I’m never too sure what I’m supposed to have seen or picked up on somehow to enable me to see the twist coming. Is it cliches, previous works by the writer/director? This is what I wonder about too. People who say they guess twist endings usually talk about cliches, but it’s hard for me to see how any of the movies we’ve mentioned have involved cliches. “The butler did it” would be a cliche to me. I mean, if I was watching an old movie about a murder with a butler in it, I would assume the butler did it. But you never see that anymore. I mean, in one of the Shutter Island threads, one of the OPs said something like “I’m sick of seeing this particular twist.” To me, that sounds like you’re sick of seeing this, after all those _past_ movies about an investigator investigating an insane asylum, who at the end turns out to be an inmate of the asylum, and what we’ve been seeing were his illusions being played out. Oh, wait. There _aren’t_ any such movies. Unless there have been, and I’m not familiar with them. So, maybe the problem for those of us who can’t guess twists is that we simply haven’t seen enough movies? Maybe the good guessers are movie buffs who have seen every movie that ever came out, and can recognize common plot devices better than we can? Or maybe we just lack some ability to categorize different types of twists, so that two twists which seem very smiliar to some people don’t seem similar at all to us? > [@norinew](#): > > With this movie, I ‘knew’ there _was_ a ‘twist’, but my sisters who had already seen it and insisted I see it too, were careful not to spoil it for me. I didn’t guess the twist until his wedding ring fell on the floor, and I went 'holy shit, he’s dead!. But isn’t that pretty much the moment of the big reveal in that movie? That’s’ when I realized it too. My memory’s hazy, since I only saw it once, when it was in theaters, but IIRC, As soon as the wedding ring drops, Bruce Willis looks down and sees the gunshot wound in his abdomen, hears Haley Joel Osment’s voice saying “they don’t know they’re dead; they only see what they want to see,” and realizes he’s a ghost? So I didn’t think it was possible to not be aware of the twist after that. > [@Charley](#): > > I’m another one who can’t get the twist, even if I know there is one. I will catch myself looking for it, but I usually get it wrong in some fairly fundamental way. For example in the _Sixth Sense_ I got to the same scene as **norinew** but my reaction was holy shit! **she’s** dead! which makes no sense at all in the framework of the movie. > > I also thought the twist for _The Village_ was that she wasn’t blind at all and even now, I’m not sure - that wasn’t part of it, was it? I only saw it once, thought it was meh, and it was a while ago. This is what I’m talking about. Even when I know there’s a twist, I think, “it could be _anything_.” You’ve given good examples of things which I might have thought were just as likely to be the big secrets in those respective movies. People are saying they correctly predict twists five minutes into the movie. At that point, how can you possibly know anything? How does even knowing there’s a twist help? Even if there are explicit clues, they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. To take the example that makes me look the dumbest, because almost everyone else guessed it–The Village–I would no more have predicted that the village was actually in the present day, than I would have predicted that the girl wasn’t really blind, or that the village was actually on an alien world, or that the village was actually a cover for William Hurt’s bootleg operation, or that the monsters are really good, normal human beings and the villagers are actually evil people who plan to harm them, or that the whole thing was a dream in Joaquin Phoenix’s mind, or any of 50 other possible twists I could sit here and come up with. ---
**Author:** ![Gustav](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/919ad9/32.png) [@Gustav](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gustav)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/47 "2010-03-08T20:51:14Z")
> [@Arcite](#): > > You would think so, and maybe this was true in old mysteries where “the butler did it,” but to me, these cliches are long gone, and movies (or books, or TV shows) with twists usually intentionally keep everything ambiguous. For example, for a while I was watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent on a regular basis, and I could _never_ guess the killer. It surprised me every episode. It was never the first seemingly “evil” person they showed you. They intentionally portrayed all the characters in this morally ambiguous light to keep you guessing, and to me, it worked every time. Yeahhh, but those shows cheat, man. They simply don’t give you enough information to be able to identify the villain until the big reveal. If you watch an episode of Criminal Intent a second time you’re not going to be able to pick up any subtle clues that you should have caught the first time around. That’s not a twist, it’s just a straightforward story. And, as you say, if nothing else you _know_ it’s not the first “evil” guy they show you. It’s usually the first helpful guy they show you. ---
**Author:** ![Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troy_mcclure_sf/32/4150_2.png) [@Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Troy_McClure_SF)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/48 "2010-03-08T22:11:04Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I do not usually try to out-think a movie and try to guess what the ending will be. I much prefer to let it take me where it’s going to take me. Yeah, me too. Though I knew something was up with **SI** , because there were some quick but very obvious shots that made it clear Something Is Up Here. The invisible glass later on in the movie was the most glaring, but there were a few shots early on that I would’ve assumed to be continuity errors if it weren’t Scorsese. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/49 "2010-03-08T22:29:54Z")
> [@Arcite](#): > > This is what I wonder about too. People who say they guess twist endings usually talk about cliches, but it’s hard for me to see how any of the movies we’ve mentioned have involved cliches. “The butler did it” would be a cliche to me. I mean, if I was watching an old movie about a murder with a butler in it, I would assume the butler did it. But you never see that anymore. I mean, in one of the Shutter Island threads, one of the OPs said something like “I’m sick of seeing this particular twist.” To me, that sounds like > > you’re sick of seeing this, after all those _past_ movies about an investigator investigating an insane asylum, who at the end turns out to be an inmate of the asylum, and what we’ve been seeing were his illusions being played out. Oh, wait. There _aren’t_ any such movies. Unless there have been, and I’m not familiar with them. I haven’t seen _Shutter Island_ and never had any intention to, so I don’t know if I would have guessed the twist or not. But it does strike me as pretty darn cliched. If you think about things as narrowly as your spoilered remarks indicate then I can see why you wouldn’t recognize this as a cliche, but it’s not that the entire plot is a cliche but rather that It was all in his head! The protagonist is crazy!is one of the oldest twists in the book. It’s been done again and again, albeit with some variation on the basic theme. Additionally, your description of _Shutter Island_ does sound pretty close to a famous silent film that would be well-known to film buffs although probably not to the general public. I’ll name some specific films that use this twist behind a spoiler box here:_Fight Club_ and _A Beautiful Mind_ are two very well known modern films in which the main character suffered from delusions that are for most of the movie presented to the audience as if they were real. This is enough of a cliche that it was parodied in _Adaptation_, where Donald’s stupid-sounding screenplay is a mystery thriller in which all the characters turn out to be different personalities of one crazy person. It’s also suggested, although never actually made explicit, that Donald may not be real himself but is a delusion/alternate personality of his brother Charlie. In 2003 there was also a French horror film, _High Tension_, that was criticized on the Internet for a particularly nonsensical use of the old “character turns out to be a delusion” trope. And going all the way back to 1920, in German expressionist classic _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_ the ending reveals that the narrator is a patient in a mental hospital and that the horrifying story he has been telling is (probably) an account of his own paranoid delusions. > [@](#): > > \*So, maybe the problem for those of us who can’t guess twists is that we simply haven’t seen enough movies? Maybe the good guessers are movie buffs who have seen every movie that ever came out, and can recognize common plot devices better than we can? Or maybe we just lack some ability to categorize different types of twists, so that two twists which seem very smiliar to some people don’t seem similar at all to us? \*Probably a little of both. If you haven’t seen a broad enough selection of films then a twist that’s an old hat to a film buff may seem fresh and new to you. Some people may also be better at recognizing general similarities while others are focused more on the details. Just to invent a silly example, a twist that would make one person say “Oh, it’s going to be the old ‘the butler did it’ twist! I can’t believe they’d resort to such a cliched ending!” might leave another person thinking “I never would have suspected that the killer would be the chamber maid! If it had been the butler I’d have seen that coming a mile away, but the maid? Totally surprising!” That said, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think they’re better at guessing plot twists than they really are. They may remember the few times they’ve guessed a twist and forget the many times they were surprised, they may guess part of the plot but not the whole thing (there are a couple of posts in this very thread where people say they guessed “the twist” in films with multiple twists), they may retroactively count a fleeting suspicion as “knowing” what the twist would be, or they may later misremember what they were thinking while watching the movie. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Scrivener](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@The\_Scrivener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Scrivener)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/50 "2010-03-09T17:36:43Z")
I truly suck at guessing twist endings, and even in guessing that there will be a twist ending. But I’ll cut myself some slack WRT those films that are so incompetently and dishonestly patched together that the so-called “twist” is nothing more than an insult to one’s intelligence – _Haut Tension/High Tension_, I’m referring to you! I think it was Roger Ebert who wrote off this pretentious French slasher flick as not only having a plot hole big enough to drive a truck through it, it actually _did_ drive a truck through it. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/51 "2010-03-09T17:48:39Z")
It’s hit or miss with me. I saw the endings to Unbreakable, Fight Club and Shutter Island coming but the Sixth Sense, The Village and others managed to flip things on me. That being said, just because the ending doesn’t surprise me doesn’t mean I dislike it. Fight Club (the movie primarily, but also the book once I got around to reading it) is one of my favorite pieces of fiction. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/52 "2010-03-10T05:52:29Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > I’m one of those people. I NEVER expect or foresee surprise endings. I’m also the type of person who doesn’t pick up on symbolism in a book unless someone points it out to me… That lion in Narnia? Not your basic lion. Just tryin’ to help. > [@](#): > > it also gives you the ability to re-watch the movie ‘for the first time’ again. So does an ability I’ve recently developed. I can re-watch a movie and not know that Rosebud is the sled. And it helps me do the same for detective stories, too. I can read an old favorite and won’t be thinking that Colonel Chutney was killed in the conservatory with the sled. I call this newfound gift _“Pushing Sixty”_. ---
**Author:** ![DragonAsh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/db5fbb/32.png) [@DragonAsh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DragonAsh)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 10:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/53 "2010-03-10T10:17:40Z")
Well, it’s one of the reasons I hate a lot of the popular TV shows these days. 24, Lost, Heros etc. - the hype drives me crazy. \“You won’t believe the unbelievable plot twists that will keep you on the edge of your seat!!!” \ Well, gee thanks for telling me that I should just simply ignore everything for the next 50 minutes, because you’ll just pull some stunt in the last five minutes flipping everything around. Don’t jerk me around trying to get me to think that so-and-so is the evil criminal for 15 minutes, because now I know that more often than not it’s just a plot set up. Unless you get uber-tricky, and do a double-double plot trick, and actually make the first bad guy look like a good guy, until you show that he was the bad guy all along! I find it tiring and annoying. Movies like Usual Suspects were fantastic because they didn’t need outrageous plot twists to have a surprise ending. Just great story-telling, fantastic editing and amazing use of camera angles and music: you can see a scene the first time, and then the second time you see it (in the montage scene at the end when it’s dawning on the detective what just went down), it has a totally different feel. _That’s_ good film-making. Having the main character seemingly shoot his co-worker, then an episode later showing that actually, he put her in a bullet-proof vest before-hand, is lazy film-making. ---
**Author:** ![sandra\_nz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eada6e/32.png) [@sandra\_nz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sandra_nz)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/54 "2010-03-10T10:42:08Z")
I love being surprised by a movie so I try to sit back and enjoy the ride rather than be actively dissecting the movie as I watch it. I was actually really disappointed when I worked out the twist of **Sixth Sense** , although I went to the movie not knowing there was a twist. It was the scene where the husband and wife go to the restaurant that did it for me. Realising it actually took me out of the movie and I didn’t really enjoy the rest of it, which was a shame. ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/55 "2010-03-10T12:36:41Z")
I love being surprised by a movie or book so it disappoints me when I see the twist in a movie. Unfortunately if you read much about movies and writing it all becomes pretty obvious, whether you like it or not. Ideally nothing appears on screen that doesn’t serve to help the story so things that seem pointless rarely are. My best/worst effort was ruining _The Bone Collector_ by working out the ending while watching the titles but many movies can be unraveled by the single meaningless line. I too knew the ending of _Shutter Island_ very early on but thought that it was a good thing because, had it not been telegraphed, the twist would have been very disappointing. I thought the real slap in the face was the last few lines of dialogue. But that seems typical of Dennis Lehane to me - _Mystic River_ and _Gone Baby Gone_ both get to points in the story where I thought, “no it can’t be going to end like this…” So he is my current hero in terms of providing a twist albeit moral rather than plot related. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/56 "2010-03-10T14:33:26Z")
> [@don\_t\_ask](#): > > My best/worst effort was ruining _The Bone Collector_ by working out the ending while watching the titles but many movies can be unraveled by the single meaningless line. I know that some people claim to have figured out the twist of _Identity_ while watching the opening credits. To these people I say, “When do you eat your popcorn?” ---
**Author:** ![ministryman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f6c823/32.png) [@ministryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ministryman)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358/57 "2010-03-10T19:32:33Z")
Because most humans cannot process all of the information being presented onscreen (facial expressions, lighting, presence or absence of a character, clothing and/or backgorund changes) at one time, many “twists” escape them. Kevin Spacey in Se7en: He wasn’t listed in the opening credits, but then appears in the film. Red Flag! It took me seeing Saw IV to realize I unfairly dismissed Saw III as being crap, having seen but missing the significance of a HUGE “plot hole” that was explained in Saw IV AND V. OTOH, I go to movies to be entertained, and if I spot the twist too early, it ruins the rest of the film. To “smart people” who see the twists coming from a mile away, STFU and let the rest of us enjoy the movie in peace. Pat yourselves on the back later. We’re soooo impressed with your skills. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-anyone-else-never-guess-twist-surprise-endings/531358.md?page=2)