18 Movie Plot Twists That Explained Everything in Hindsight

In these cheap thrill days when everything is a dream and no one is really dead until the viewer witnesses their corpse being pulled apart like a pork roast, it’s easy to forget there’s an art to the plot twist. It can’t just come out of nowhere — that’s pure shock value, not good storytelling. It has to resolve the questions raised over the course of the plot, otherwise you might as well just string together a bunch of secret siblings/double identities/murderous babies and call it a movie.

Over on Reddit, u/Meiys_20181687 understands that. They asked r/movies, “What movie plot twist totally caught you off guard but made perfect sense?” and offered the example of Interstellar, “when Cooper navigates through the fourth dimension and communicates with his daughter using the bookshelf,” explaining that “it was a deeply stunning moment, yet in retrospect, it made the entire film fit together seamlessly.” 

More than 4,000 comments later, we picked out the best answers…

18 The Sixth Sense

17 Hot Fuzz

16 Knives Out

15 The Cabin in the Woods

14 Now You See Me

13 Fight Club

12 Split

11 Ender’s Game

10 Shawshank Redemption

9 Who Framed Roger Rabbit

8 Hitchhiker’s Guide

7 Parasite

6 Black Mirror

5 Lego Movie 2

4 Book of Eli

3 Fallen

2 Your Name

1 And Of Course, From Dusk Till Dawn