Twisting

These days, I go into almost every movie I watch expecting a twist ending. They seem to be more or less a requirement, and are at least so common that I'm more surprised when the film I'm watching doesn't try to pull the rug out from under me than when it does.

In the past week, I've watched two twisty movies, The Last Exorcism and Shutter Island, and while watching both I thought a lot about Inception, my favorite movie of the past year, as well as Departures, a 2008 Japanese drama that I watched recently. Neither of the latter movies involve twists, but I found both more surprising than the former.

The Last Exorcism's twist ruined the movie for me. Everything preceding it would have made sense in the real world. Cotton Marcus was a huckster, an unbelieving charismatic preacher clearly based on Marjoe Gortner (and the documentary made about him, which everyone should see). Nell, the ostensibly possessed girl, didn't really do anything that a real girl who was experiencing psychological trauma couldn't have done. It left the reality of Nell's condition to the viewer, who would undoubtedly project his or her own worldview onto the character. That's nice--it always is when directors don't over-explain their films. But the last five minutes of The Last Exorcism spend all that goodwill on a cartoonish twist that suddenly made me not care about any of the characters I'd spent the past hour getting to know (and in some cases, like).

Shutter Island, on the other hand, twists from the opening scene to the final shot. It throws so many "is this really happening?" moments at the viewer that I quickly stopped caring. I couldn't identify with any of the characters, because the movie wanted me to constantly question whether they were who they claimed to be, or whether they existed at all. It was so obvious that a big reveal was going to turn everything on its ear that it seemed like a waste of energy to get involved. Storytelling is, at its heart, the art of getting people to respond emotionally to characters they know don't actually exist. When your entire premise is that the characters in your story probably aren't real, you're not telling a story anymore. You're just trying to show how clever you are.

Really, Inception and Shutter Island are very similar movies. They both feature Leonardo DiCaprio as a man whose obsession with a lost loved one drives him into an unreal world. The difference, and the reason it's possible to care about his character in Inception but not Shutter Island, is that Inception, despite taking place largely in a world the movie tells you isn't real, goes out of its way to explain to you how things work in that unreal world, and unwaveringly abides by its own rules. Shutter Island has no rules, and as a result can't really surprise. Both movies mean to leave you wondering about what their final moments mean, but only Inception makes you feel like you could construct a reasonable answer if you retraced its steps.

Departures surprised me as well, but not with any twists. It surprised me because it played with my own expectations of movies, especially romantic dramas. Relationships develop in a way that real world relationships often do, and I suspected that they would continue to do so. But main character Daigo Kobayashi proves himself to be stronger, perhaps better all around, than most people, and things resolve in a way that is in retrospect predictable, but didn't feel that way as it played out. As with Inception, I could get involved because I knew the rules. The surprise wasn't in finding out they weren't the rules after all, but in finding out that they could be subverted with enough hard work.

When I think back to some of my favorite twist endings, like those of Psycho and The Ring, it makes me sad that they've become such a cliche. I'm sure they can be made meaningful again, but not until they stop being taken for granted.