5 Movies With Twists I Really Didn't See Coming

Who doesn’t love a good twist?

I might just be called a bit thick after revealing this list, but here are five films where I genuinely didn’t see the twists coming - no spoilers.

And don’t Google these before watching them.

Frailty (2001)

Frailty is exactly the sort of film I love recommending to someone without explaining much - Bill Paxton directs and stars as a father who becomes convinced that God has given him a mission to destroy demons disguised as ordinary people, where his two sons are dragged into what follows, and the whole thing plays out with this increasingly uncomfortable question hanging over it - is he completely insane, or does he actually know something nobody else does?

Matthew McConaughey and Powers Boothe are both excellent here too, but Paxton is the real star.

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The Skin I Live In (2011)

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In has Antonio Banderas playing a disturbed plastic surgeon who has become obsessed with creating a new kind of artificial skin.

And then the film starts revealing pieces of information about the people around him, and once certain information is revealed, earlier scenes suddenly look completely different - it’s also beautifully made, where Almodóvar gives the film this polished, almost luxurious appearance while filling it with some horrible ideas.

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Forgotten (2017)

South Korea is ridiculously good at twists, so I’m deliberately avoiding the films that everybody recommends, but Forgotten deserves a place here, which begins with a young man moving into a new house with his parents and brother, before his older brother is kidnapped, then returns nineteen days later acting completely differently, before the film starts messing with your understanding of what actually happened.

I spent a good chunk of this film trying to work out where it was going, and I was nowhere near the answer, and you will probably want to go back afterwards and see whether you could have spotted what was happening.

You probably could.

I didn’t.

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The Perfect Host (2010)

The Perfect Host

This one caught me completely off guard because I thought I knew what sort of film it was going to be, but obviously I did not - John Taylor turns up at the home of Warwick, expecting to hide out there after committing a crime, and while Warwick seems like a strange but perfectly respectable host, the evening starts getting increasingly bizarre.

Then the film starts changing direction, then it changes again, and the best thing is that it keeps you guessing without becoming completely incomprehensible.

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Nine Queens (2000)

Two con artists meet by chance and decide to work together on what looks like a very lucrative scam, and from there, it’s basically a game of trying to figure out who is conning whom, and I mean really trying, where every little thing seems to matter, and I love films like this because they make you suspicious of absolutely everybody.

Ricardo Darín and Gastón Pauls are brilliant together, and the film has a wonderfully scruffy energy, and when you get to the ending, you can either sit there feeling smug because you saw it coming or, like me, realise you’ve been happily following along while the film has been playing a completely different game.

Either way, it’s a great time.

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