A climactic twist is one of the most audience-pleasing hooks in the book. It’s also quite the cheat code. Entire films can fail, but if the ‘ending’ is audacious enough, the perception can change. Suddenly all is forgiven.
Note the recent Yash-starrer Toxic, where the final twist elicited more discourse than the three Animal-coded hours that preceded it. These can become a bit of a cultural moment too: think of those ‘reveals’ in popular Bollywood movies such as Khakee, Fida, Ajnabee, Drishyam, Humraaz and Gangster. Pulpy potboilers like Mohra and Gupt were the ancestors. While twists are associated with whodunnits, the most memorable ones often define the psychology and intent of a story in the dying minutes. Here are five of the most notable examples.
Months before the ultimate twist of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Ram Gopal Varma’s eerie chamber thriller — set in one bungalow on a rainy day — didn’t quite get the acclaim it deserved. A film about a paranoid young woman who suspects two male visitors of being a serial killer on the loose drew on tense gender dynamics and feline atmospherics to hit us with arguably the most effective twist in Hindi horror cinema.
And this isn’t too long after “Kajol is the killer” became a meme in the pre-meme era; it speaks volumes about Anurag Kashyap’s screenplay, Varma’s filmmaking and Urmila Matondkar’s performance that the psychological drama remains hidden behind genre tropes. Manoj Bajpayee’s reptilian post-Satya aura and Matondkar’s penchant for playing obsessive ‘heroines’ were weaponised, and the result remains a rare feather in the hat of the Bollywood plot-twist canon.
To the enduring credit of director Sujoy Ghosh, actor Vidya Balan and editor Namrata Rao, the success of Kahaani refused to be reduced to its last-ditch twist. The ending is famous: the pregnant, lost protagonist, Vidya Bagchi, searching for her missing husband, is suddenly a not-pregnant and vengeful widow looking for the man who killed her husband.
But that isn’t the USP of the movie, simply because the rhythm and immersive film-making — the city of Kolkata, its cultural flavour, its social mechanisms, a quirky insurance-salesman-cum-contract-killer, the patriarchal veneration towards a woman in need of help — humanise the revelation. It’s the perfect example of how to craft the ruse while framing this ruse as the primary language of the film. You didn’t feel cheated because the journey was precisely the point. You could handle the deceptive flashbacks because you see what you’re conditioned to see.
It’s always tricky when a movie becomes known entirely by its climactic twist. More so when it’s the marriage of narrative escapism and mental illness. The title should have been a dead giveaway about an under-confident introvert who speaks to himself on the phone every night, but this revelation of Farhan Akhtar leaving voice messages for Farhan Akhtar is so campy that it’s cool (an upgrade of so-bad-it’s-good cinema).
It’s not a great story by any stretch of imagination, yet it’s extremely watchable for the sheer audacity of its film-school-like gimmick. It marks one of the rare instances where everyone’s favourite cinematic condition — dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder — turns an average movie into a source of endless debate and fascination. It’s basically the most literalised version of Tamasha, with the same female lead and editor.
Reema Kagti’s psychological thriller can make multiple lists (grief, Mumbai), but the twist of a ghostly character actually being a ghost adds to the personality of a bleak investigative drama. It helps that Rosie gets the full Kareena Kapoor Khan treatment; she’s mysterious and tragic and beautiful, evoking the more-than-meets-the-eye feeling without being overly supernatural. It’s the crux of a story about a haunted cop dealing with his own demons, particularly because she’s the only ‘movie’ part of a bleak and grounded film.
The trope of the golden-hearted escort in Bollywood is used to great effect, turning a moody crime drama into a curious portrait of morality and closure. It’s not just an effective plot device; it’s also a clever way of not letting the twist hijack the spirituality of the premise.
Sriram Raghavan’s black comedy about a pianist who pretends to be blind only to get entangled in a mess in which he really loses his eyesight is all kinds of twisted. It has so many plot twists that it lulls the viewer into expecting the unexpected. But the final shot, a casual kick of a can on the street, is what stays with the viewer; you think the pianist has learned his lesson after surviving a sociopathic widow and an organ-harvesting racket, but even his ‘sincerity’ is given a totem-in-Inception touch: is he still blind or not? Despite this man’s despicable nature, it feels like a hero-moment for a character who may have been in control of his own narrative. The best kind of thrillers leave us with trust issues without sacrificing the integrity of the story. That’s what Andhadhun, a cautionary tale about ambition posing as a wide-ranging crime drama, does; the personality of the protagonist is just as suspenseful as the premise.