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The Ending Changes Everything / Live-Action Films

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Note: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, that means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning; only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.

Times where The Ending Changes Everything in Live-Action Films.

Movies/franchises with their own pages:

By Creator:

  • David Mamet is well known for his big twists, which call into question large chunks of the previous plot:
    • In House of Games, the heroine realizes that none of the cons in which she participated were real. They were all one giant con on her.
    • In State and Main, the main character perjures himself in court and instantly regrets it. It turns out that the whole court scene was just a play designed by the local love interest to give him a chance to rethink his choice before the real court case begins. The Simpsons parodied this scene, and Lisa admits that it's almost insultingly far-fetched.
    • In The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet returned to the topic of conmen. It turns out that most of what happened in the first half of the movie was an elaborate con, but even after the hero thinks the con is over, it's still going.
    • Redbelt tries this, though not as well as previous films. After suddenly being snubbed and ripped off by some Hollywood types, the main character desperately tries to figure out what's going on. He finally discovers that it's all about a laughably impossible scheme to fix Mixed Martial Arts matches.
  • M. Night Shyamalan is famous for his Mandatory Twist Ending, many of which are designed with this in mind.
    • The Sixth Sense: Crowe is a renowned child psychologist who is shot by a deranged former patient in the opening scene. A Time Skip has him meet with Cole who reveals that he can see dead people. It's revealed in the end that Crowe was Dead All Along, killed in the opening scene, and only Cole can see and talk to him. This redefines his entire role in the movie as you realize that many plot points, like his attempts to communicate with his distant wife, are not as they seemed.
    • Unbreakable: Elijah mentions partway through the film that he has been researching various local disasters hoping to find someone who survives miraculously unharmed, which included the main character David in a train crash. At the end it's revealed that he orchestrated many of those disasters, including the train crash, in the hope of finding a superhero.
    • The Village (2004): A gravestone suggests the film takes place in the late 1800's, it's revealed to actually be the modern day and the isolated village was an attempt to live peacefully away from the rest of society.
    • Split: The movie plays its main story relatively straight, although features some relatively unexpected supernatural elements with the character who has a Split Personality. The ending shows David from Unbreakable watching a news report on the events of the film, which changes the movie as it is also following the rules established by the earlier movie.

By Series:

  • In After.Life, Liam Neeson plays a mortician named Elliot who claims to have the ability to speak to the dead. Throughout the movie, he talks to the main character (who is dead) in hopes of getting her to move on with her life. It turns out in the end that he was lying and that the main character was alive the whole time. However, there have been foreshadowing for both options on whether he was lying or not. With lots of those moments pointing towards the former. And one large hint that he has been doing it for a long time.
  • Anti Matter: A woman named Ana begins to have difficulty forming new memories, is unable to eat but never feels hungry, and has other bizarre symptoms after a teleportation experiment. Her research partners who were working on the teleportation machine with her seem strangely unconcerned when her room is broken into by a person wearing a chimpanzee mask who steals her work, and they later seem to be gaslighting her and keeping secrets from her. She becomes convinced that she lost her soul when she was teleported. It turns out she was accidentally duplicated during a teleportation test, and we have been seeing things from the point of view of the duplicate. She cannot form new memories and feels no hunger because she isn't a real person, she is just an echo of the real Ana made of light. The real Ana and her partners were hiding this from her because she kept forgetting she was a duplicate and getting distressed by the revelation.
  • In the 1980 sci-fi musical The Apple: In the very end, Mr. Topps - never mentioned until minutes before he arrives - appears in a Rolls Royce and takes all hippies to heaven or a new planet (or both). This means: 1.) Up to this point, you could interpret this film as an anti-commerce message when Bibi is corrupted by Bugalow's business, but is not necessarily a stand-in for hippy culture. With this ending, the movie completely takes sides in favor of the hippies and portrays them and their love/peace-cause as unambiguously good. 2.) All of Alphie's visions are to be taken literally (Bugalow is not metaphorically the devil but literally, Bibi does not take the forbidden fruit metaphorically but literally, etc.) 3.) Alphie and Bibi are no longer the main characters of the movie but the hippies - not introduced until very late in the film and receiving about zero character development or being spotlighted on their culture - are and get an eschatological meaning. A sequence where Mr. Topps creates the world and Bugalow falls from grace in the beginning of the movie was planned but never filmed.
  • The Korean film Bloody Reunion ends when we find out that the narrator is the murderer, and she made up the entire story, and all the bad things in the flashbacks actually happened to her, not the other guests.
  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is presented with the Framing Story of a man telling a story of how his fiancée went tragically insane and how his best friend was assassinated by the mad Dr. Caligari. The Twist Ending reveals that both the storyteller and his companion are inmates in an insane asylum, and the whole story has been a mad justification fantasy that presents its teller as the blameless hero and his doctor as a diabolical, motiveless tormentor.
  • Circus Kane: Tracy initially seems like a run-of-the-mill Final Girl who ultimately becomes the last survivor of Balthazar Kane's Circus of Fear-themed death house, but the ending reveals that she's not innocent. Far from it; in fact, she had been Daddy's Little Villain the whole time, and had been her own father's partner in crime so that the whole operation could be transferred to her management.
  • Counter Investigation: The 9 year old daughter of police chief Malinowski is raped and murdered, and after a hasty police investigation with little evidence, Daniel Eckman is arrested and convicted. Eckman proclaims his innocence, and Malinowski begins a counter-investigation to find the real killer, the main focus on the movie. Eventually, it is proven that another known child murderer was in the area at the time and Eckman is let out of jail. Then it is revealed that Eckman actually was guilty. Then it is revealed that Malinowski knew Eckman was guilty the whole time and deliberately did the investigation to get Eckman released so that he could kill him with his own hands in revenge.
  • Cry_Wolf does this at the end when it reveals that Dodger was the Big Bad all along. She was in an affair with Mr. Walker, and was furious after finding out that he was seeing Becky on the side, and so she plotted to kill the two of them. She was the one who killed Becky in the opening, and the rest of the film, including the fake Serial Killer story, the prank, the staged "killing spree", and Owen shooting Mr. Walker, was part of her plan to kill Mr. Walker as well, getting Owen to think that he was the killer.
  • Korean horror Dead Friend (also known as The Ghost) is played out as a generic horror flick, until the final scene where it is revealed the ghost who has been killing off Ji-won's (the main character's) friends IS in fact Ji-won. In a flashback it is shown that Ji-won had inadvertently caused the death of a girl before the movie began. The audience is led to believe this girl is the ghost and that she wants revenge. However, it is later revealed that she and Ji-won switched bodies just before the girl died, so the girl is actually the protagonist we have been following throughout the movie and Ji-won is the ghost.
  • Den of Thieves: The ending shows that Donnie was the real master mind behind the heist. He recruited Merrimen and his crew intending the set them up to take the fall, while he and his crew made it off with the 30 million.
  • The ending of Destroyer (2018) reveals that Erin arriving at the crime scene was in fact the final scene, not the first. Everything that followed has in fact been a flashback. The body is actually Silas and Erin is the one who shot him. Once More, with Clarity allows the viewer to assemble everything in the proper order.
  • In Ex Machina, Ava betrays Caleb and leaves him locked in Nathan's underground lab, presumably until he dies of dehydration. For all of his morally questionable actions, Nathan was actually telling the truth about Ava: she actually was faking her attraction to Caleb in order to escape.
  • Fight Club: The guy he met on the plane who seemed to be the brains behind everything that happened turned out to be the main character's split personality, putting into question everything that happened during the whole movie.
  • Everything single horrible thing that happens to Michael Douglas's character in The Game (1997) - losing all his money, getting drugged and sent to Mexico, snapping and shooting his brother - is part of his surprise birthday party. Seriously. Or you could argue that the party at the end is a dying hallucination as he commits suicide for actually killing his brother. Either way, nearly everything in the movie is proven to be a staged incident.
  • The Jet Li movie Hero (2002) uses this trope by taking place almost entirely during an audience with the emperor during which the main character tells his story to the emperor in long flashbacks, after which the emperor points out a flaw in the claims. Based on the lies he discovered, the emperor tells the story again with some changes of what he thinks really happened. And with his lie exposed, the nameless hero then confesses the actual events and retelling the story a third time. And then everything changes again when he reveals that he never actually intended to kill the emperor since he realized the folly of the insurrection on his way to the palace and only wanted to explain his reasons before accepting his punishment for participating in a conspiracy. He also demonstrates that he could have killed the emperor at any point, after getting within 10 paces of him, even using his technique but turning his blade at the last moment.
  • The 2003 French/American horror film High Tension (known as Switchblade Romance in the UK) uses this to disturbing Mind Screw effect. Marie is a severely unreliable narrator, and a Psycho Lesbian, and the killer. This WAS somewhat foreshadowed in the beginning (the dream about Marie chasing herself, with footage from later in the movie; Marie being mentioned as never having a boyfriend) but this is in the realm of Fridge Brilliance; to most people it seems like a totally random and jarring Ass Pull bordering on Gainax Ending, due to several scenes that make no sense if she and the killer are the same person.
  • In the last half hour of House of Flying Daggers, it's revealed that virtually every character has been in some way lying about who they are or playing some sort of deceptive game. Mei, the beautiful and blind young Action Girl isn't actually blind, and was faking her identity. Leo, the officer who is seemingly loyal to the government, is actually a member of the rebel conspiracy who has infiltrated the government. Both the government and the rebels have multi-layered that the viewer was largely clueless about to try to draw the other out into a confrontation. Ironically, it's entirely possible that Jin, a government agent going undercover to find the House of Flying Daggers and is using Mei to do so (or so he believes, since she is using him on behalf of the Flying Daggers), might be the most honest character throughout the film.
  • Near the end of Identity, it's revealed that none of the people at the motel are real. They are only the figments of Malcolm Rivers's imagination, each of them a separate personality of his mind.
  • Irresistible (2006): You don't know if Mara (Emily Blunt) was in fact Sophie's (Susan Sarandon) prodigal daughter, or if she just stole the identity of her best friend Kate (who bears a closer resemblance to Sophie and her other daughters).
  • The Indian thriller film Kahaani follows a pregnant woman named Vidya trying to locate her missing husband, and getting caught up in a plot to find Milan, a terrorist that attacked a Metro 2 years earlier and looks exactly like her husband. The ending, however, reveals that she was lying the entire time: her real husband, who did not look like Milan, died in the Metro attack, she lost the baby back then as a result, and she was working with an ex-intelligence agent to find and kill Milan.
  • The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh. There's room for interpretation, but it's strongly implied at the end of the film that Leon never returned home, and the events of the film are simply Rosalind's lonely ghost imagining what might have happened had her estranged son come to settle the estate.
  • The Lazarus Effect: The ending shows the villain's Redemption Equals Death was all a Dying Dream by the Final Girl. The villain is alive, and the Final Girl is dead. This works well with the film's theme of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, as a magical explanation would make a great deal of what we saw accurate anyway, while a mundane explanation would call it into question.
  • Used to creative effect in Lovefield, a short film by Mathieu Ratthe. In the middle of a secluded cornfield, a man appears to be finishing killing a woman offscreen. Hurrying back to his truck, he grabs a towel and the audience presumes he's trying to cover up the body and perhaps dispose it in some way. Then just at the end, the man says "It's a boy," and a newborn baby appears in view. The woman who sounded like she was dying was in fact in the midst of delivering a child and the blood was just the afterbirth.
  • Lucky Number Slevin, in which it's revealed that the eponymous apparent patsy has planned out all the film's events thus far, working with the hitman who'd apparently been using him to play both ends against the middle.
  • Man on the Moon plays with this wickedly, given it's a Biopic. If the viewer interprets the final shot, which reveals that Bob Zmuda is not playing Tony Clifton at the latter's comeback concert one year after Andy Kaufman's death from cancer, to mean Andy really has faked his illness and death as he was considering and everyone around him at least initially assumes he is, boy does that change what came before it, extending to out-of-universe levels! (It also changes things from a Bittersweet Ending to a Happy Ending for Andy himself, at least.) However, for those who don't believe that He's Just Hiding the shot can just as easily be interpreted, as The Movie Spoiler did, as Tony now being played by "an admirer". That the viewer is left wondering what's real is about as Kaufman-esque a way to end a retelling of his life as can be imagined.
  • Masquerade (2021): There are two separate narrative strands in the movie: a young Casey-Rose hiding from art thieves who've broken into her home and murdered her parents and Sofia, and a grown up Casey (now calling herself Rose) planning revenge against the man responsible. The viewer's interpretation of events will be completely different on subsequent viewings.
  • Matchstick Men. Obviously, most of the film is a con. But when did it start? How much of it was planned, how much improvised? And just how much affection do Frank and "Angela" have for Roy? The film suggests answers for some of those questions, but some of them we just have to guess about.
  • Memento ends this way, when it's revealed that Leonard killed his wife's rapist before any of the events of the movie, and not remembering this, has been killing criminals with similar names. The man he kills at the start of the film (actually the end of the timeline) is the Dirty Cop inducing him to do this, toward whom he himself had planted hints. Raising even more questions, the dirty cop claims that the actual rapist did not kill Leonard's wife, but she committed suicide because she couldn't deal with Leonard's amnesia. His memory of "Sammy Jankis" is actually a twisted version of his own story that he conditioned himself to remember. However, since he is a dirty cop, it's unclear whether he's actually telling the truth or just trying to keep Leonard busy until he loses his memory again.
  • The Nature of the Beast stars Lance Henriksen as an uptight office drone and Eric Roberts as a charming drifter. It's established that one of them is a white collar criminal with a stash of cash and one of them is a serial killer. Roberts' character insists on accompanying Henriksen, using the fact that he "knows what's in his briefcase" as leverage. Every time Roberts sets his sights on a passerby, against Henriksen's pleas, that person winds up dead. In the end, it's revealed that Henriksen is actually the serial killer (with a briefcase full of knives) and Roberts the white collar criminal. Roberts has a death wish and is toying with a killer the whole time, driving him to indulge his murderous impulses against his will.
  • Nightlight seems like just another in a long line of low-budget Found Footage Films, and very derivative of The Blair Witch Project: a camera's-eye view of teens getting stalked through spooky woods by some faceless, malignant force. It's only the closing shot that reveals there was no camera: we've been seeing everything from the POV of the possessed flashlight one of the teens brought along, which is haunted by the vengeful ghost of her jilted friend who'd committed suicide. So what seemed like In-Universe Camera was actually Impending Doom P.O.V., a doom she's been hauling along with her.
  • The endings to A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and its remake. When exactly was Nancy awake and when was she sleeping?
  • The ending of Pizza reveals that the haunting was entirely a hoax by Kunal and Nikita to explain the missing diamonds.
  • Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Throughout the film, Neal and Del have difficulty getting along as they try to get back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. Towards the end, as Neal is finally back in Chicago, he takes the train home and starts thinking about having Thanksgiving dinner with his family, which segues into thinking about his time with Del, remembering a cryptic comment Del made: "I haven't been home in years...". Neal returns to the train station, where he sees Del sitting alone and he asks why he's still there, and Del admits he's been a homeless drifter after his wife Marie died eight years earlier. Neal, heartbroken from this revelation, invites him to his family's Thankgiving dinner.
  • The Prestige ends with a reveal that Christian Bale's character is actually a pair of twins, concealing this in order to perform magic tricks. Specifically, this calls into question which of the twins actually killed the wife in the beginning scene, whether it was truly an accident (and the possibility that he was telling the truth when he said he didn't know), and which one is dying for the crime, rightly or wrongly. It does, however, explain his odd behavior towards his wife. Fridge Brilliance and watching the dialogue again seems to imply that the twin who killed the wife is also the one who dies at the end. However, it's the other twin who said he didn't know, and while this is likely true, it raises even more questions.
  • Primal Fear ends with The Reveal that the seemingly innocent altar boy who appears to have a violent split personality - and who has just been found not guilty of murder - is nothing of the kind; he's only been pretending to have a Split Personality, and the innocent personality, not the violent one, is fake.
  • Primer: The second act of the film involves the use of very limited Time Travel; in the third act Abe learns that his friend Aaron has already used the time machine to change the past. So during the entire aforementioned second act, Aaron had actually been Aaron-from-a-week-in-the-future, manipulating current events for his own ends.
  • In Psycho Beach Party it turns out it was all a dream in the main character's mind, that later got turned into a film where the main character then goes to kill some of the audience...so arguably you have to wonder when she got put away, who actually died, who was the actual murderer...and it raises so many questions.
  • Rabid Dogs: The three robbers die but so does Maria. The protagonist then steals their getaway car and money and drives away with his sick child in it. Then it turns out the child is someone he kidnapped and he ends up calling the mother for ransom!
  • The Rachels opens with the death of Rachel Nelson after she apparently fell off a balcony, and then the first half of the film is a look at the events leading up to her death before looking at how her "best friend", Rachel Richards, basically tries to exaggerate their friendship and her grief about what happened to win simpathy. The insight of their mutual former friend, Roxie (who used to be the third Rachel of the titular group), reinforces the idea that Rachel R. pushed Rachel N. off the balcony and now intends to use the publicity for her own reputation. However, the final scene reveals that Rachel R. and Roxie were both present when Rachel N. fell off the balcony, and while Rachel R. just walked away, Roxie explicitly stayed behind to watch Rachel N. fall. Rachel R. even explicitly claims that she pushed Rachel N. off just to get the fame of being a killer while taunting Roxie that she's the more twisted of the two as she waited just to watch Rachel N. fall.
  • Razor Blade Smile has a vampire trying to kill her creator and destroy the evil conspiracy he's created, and ends with them battling to the death - only for her to pull the killing blow and start chatting amiably. The entire plot has been a decades long roleplay for a murderous vampire couple who amuse themselves by pretending to be in conflict and manipulating humans.
  • Reincarnation (2005): Nagisa, the Final Girl, is straightjacketed in a sanitarium and being taunted by a creepy old lady about being possessed by the murderous Professor Omori; she screams and cries and thrashes...then begins laughing, proving that she is possessed. Roll credits.
  • In Shutter Island, we learn at the end that the protagonist isn't a cop anymore; just a delusional mental patient. Everyone he's met, including his partner, has been playing along with this delusion in the hope that it'll let him get over his trauma and the apparent conspiracy was all in his mind. Not only that, but he killed his wife after she killed their children; it was this incident that caused his psychotic break and he's been blocking it out.
  • Excessively used in the American remake of the horror movie Silent House, after being chased around the house by a mysterious burly man, and her father and uncle get attacked by the man and taken away, she finds out from a woman who claims to be her child hood friend that her father and uncle used her and the main character in child pornography and that the mysterious woman was the killer the whole time. Then it turns out the woman doesn't exist and that the main character was the killer. THEN, after killing her unrepentant father and sparing her repentant uncle, it turns out neither of them exist. Maybe?
  • The Skeleton Key builds everything up to make it look like Violet is planning to sacrifice Ben and Caroline in a ritual to give her immortality. It turns out that this is only half right. The ritual is a transfer, not a sacrifice, and "Violet" and her husband are actually two former slaves named Mama Cecil and Papa Justify, who have been using the ritual to swap bodies with younger people. "Ben"'s fear of "his" wife is because he's actually the family's young lawyer - Papa Justify moved from the Ben body to the lawyer's before the movie began, and the lawyer in the Ben body is understandably traumatized and trying to warn Caroline. The ending also changes the way a lot of seemingly trivial comments come across, such as Violet complaining that the nurse sent to look after Ben is not black (Mama Cecil comments at the end of the movie that she'd wanted to move into the body of a black girl) and asking if Caroline had any tattoos to see if her body was acceptable. It also adds a sinister layer to the romance between the lawyer and Caroline, since it's revealed that Papa Justify was only doing it so that he and Mama Cecil could continue to live as a married couple in their new bodies, without anyone suspecting something is off.
  • In Sleepaway Camp, it's obvious early in the story that Angela is the killer. The real twist is that "Angela" isn't Angela. The real Angela died in the boat accident at the start of the film. "Angela" is actually Peter, Angela's brother, who was taken in by their insane aunt and raised as "the daughter [she] always wanted." Although this is actually hinted a few times during the movie (starting with the fact that we're never actually shown which sibling survived), most viewers would've blown off a lot of the clues as simply part of Angela's odd nature.
  • The 2008 Chilean film Solos (English title Descendants) looks like a conventional Zombie Apocalypse movie, albeit told from the novel perspective of a young girl left alone to wander the desolated city. Curiously, the zombies themselves don't seem to pay her or the other roaming children she meets any attention, but the human military seems determined to experiment on or kill them. It's only when you see freakin' Cthulhu arise from the ocean to defend the children from their pursuers that you realize it's a Cosmic Horror Apocalypse, not a Zombie one, and the few adults not rendered undead by emergent unnatural forces want to study or kill the kids because they're turning into Deep Ones: adapting to the new Eldritch Abomination-ruled world.
  • Some Like It Hot: In the Billy Wilder classic, much humor is made of the fact that Osgood is in love with "Daphne" and doesn't know she's really a man. Except, the iconic last line, spoken by Osgood after The Reveal, is a wholly unsurprised "Nobody's Perfect." So, the joke was really on "Daphne" because Osgood knew Daphne was a man all along.
  • Near the end of the Giallo film Spasmo it is revealed that most of the strange events of the film were an elaborate attempt to trick the main character Christian into believing himself to be insane and commit himself to a mental hospital, which was all set up by his brother Fritz, although the plan got out of control when one of his minions decided to simply kill Christian instead. The twist turns into a double twist when at the very end it turns out that that Christian really is insane and has been killing people and not remembering it. Christian has a heredity mental illness and Fritz was trying to trick him into thinking he was insane before he went insane for real to stop him from hurting anyone but was already too late. Christian commits suicide by letting the boyfriend of one of his victims shoot him when he realizes what is going on. The one thing that isn't explained until the very last scene is the mutilated manikins that keep showing up throughout the film. It turns out Fritz has the same mental illness and deals with it by pretending to kill manikins.
  • Stage Fright (1950) ends by revealing that the flashback that takes up the first ten minutes of the film was a fabrication by Jonnie, and in fact he, not Charlotte, killed Charlotte's husband, and rather than Charlotte trying to frame him he had been trying to frame her. This was controversial at the time, with some critics finding it a betrayal of the audience's trust.
  • Star Wars:
  • Popularized by the film The Usual Suspects. A police prisoner, Verbal Kint, is being interrogated about a ship explosion the previous night. His interrogator Agent Kujan believes that the explosion was caused by Dean Keaton, a crooked cop, but Kint tells how a diabolical mastermind called Keyser Soze was behind it all. Eventually, Kint relents under Kujan's pressure and admits that Keaton was Keyser Soze all along. Just after Kint is released from custody, however, Kujan realizes that Kint has been spinning a gigantic lie using objects around the office as inspiration. It's suggested that it was Kint himself who is Keyser Soze and Kint was simply playing a role the whole time. This is all foreshadowed in the beginning, when Kujan states that cops almost always find what they expect to find. Kujan expected Kint to be a weak patsy protecting Keaton, so that's the role Kint played.
  • The Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters featured both an Unreliable Narrator and Real After All, leaving the viewer to wonder how much was truly supernatural, and how much was merely the delusions of the insane protagonist.
  • The remake Total Recall (2012) drops the ambiguity and sticks with a happy ending, but the Extended Cut of the remake puts some of the ambiguity back in. The message that Quaid finds in Hauser's apartment shows Quaid/Hauser portrayed by Ethan Hawke instead of Colin Farrell, and the tattoo he received at Rekall is missing at the end.
  • The Uninvited (2009), a Foreign Remake of A Tale of Two Sisters (see above) appears to be a typical horror film with the protagonist Anna seeing the ghost of her dead mother seemingly accusing her new stepmother (who was the mother's nurse before marrying Anna's father) of killing her. There's even a moment where her boyfriend comes into her room in the dead of night after failing to show up at the designated meeting spot earlier. She tries to hug him and realizes that his spine is broken. He then, with his body twisted, tries to walk to her, as she runs away screaming. Finally, her stepmother, whom she and her sister Alex think is a Black Widow, appears to drug Anna and threaten to put her back into the mental hospital. Anna wakes to to find the stepmother's body in the dumpster with Alex holding the knife. Their father arrives, and, horrified, reveals that Alex died along with their mother before the start of the film. Anna is the one who accidentally caused the explosion that killed them (after seeing her father cheat with the nurse) and went insane, imagining Alex to be alive and her mother and boyfriend's ghosts haunting her. She was also the one who pushed her boyfriend off the cliff but blocked it out. The only thing no one can figure out is why Anna thought that the stepmother was a black widow. The final scene reveals that one of her friends in the mental hospital was the real black widow.
    • Anna thinks she is a black widow because the stepmother wasn't using her real name. This was only because she was on the run from an abusive boyfriend and had to change her name to elude him, something tragically common in many cases of Domestic Abuse.
  • In Unknown (2006), the film's conclusion reveals that James Caviezel's character is actually an undercover cop, who had infiltrated the kidnapping ring and was about to bust them when a toxic gas rendered both kidnappers and kidnappees unconscious and amnesiac. And then the very last scene twists the twist, by revealing that he'd also been sleeping with the wife of the kidnapped millionaire, and had incited the rest of the criminal gang to abduct the man so he could murder him and set the gang up to take the fall.
  • In Unknown (2011), Liam Neeson plays Dr. Martin Harris, a scientist who came to Berlin with his wife for a biotechnology conference. He gets in a car accident, wakes up in the hospital after a four-day coma and finds that another man has completely taken over his life. Harris' wife believes the other man, who seems to know everything Harris knows, is her husband. The Reveal is that Harris is a deep-cover assassin who was on a mission to kill someone at the conference, but now believes his own cover story as a result of the brain damage he suffered in the car accident: Harris' "wife" is actually his partner, and the other man was a backup assassin who took over the role of "Dr. Harris" when the protagonist disappeared.
  • The ending of Upgrade reveals that the hyper-intelligent AI computer chip implanted in Grey Trace, which gave him movement back after thugs killed his wife and paralyzed him, actually planned the whole thing in a plot to take over his body and become human.
  • The Wailing ends with Il-Gwang, the shaman who had been helping Jong-Goo, was somehow on the same side as the evil spirit/devil that was tormenting his daughter.
  • Wild Things: Pretty much all the characters are revealed in a series of twists to be allied with one another, then revealed in another series of twists to be secretly betraying one another. Even when the movie is over, the writers throw in several more twists during the closing credits just for fun.
  • The 2003 version of Willard. The finale goes from the title character screaming while killing his turncoat rat to him screaming in an insane asylum. He has bite marks on his face, but it's not clear if anything else in the movie actually happened or if he simply has an obsession with rats, and his damaged mind created a fictional history for his wounds.
  • In Witness for the Prosecution, after Leonard is acquitted for murder, Christine reveals that she engineered the critical surprise evidence which she presented (in a perfect disguise and accent) to get Leonard off for the murder he really did commit. Then Leonard returns all Smug Snake to gloat at bamboozling Sir Wilford with Double Jeopardy shielding him from justice. Fortunately, he immediately overplays his hand and pays the price.

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