He fights the surgeon, and in the struggle, the protagonist/antagonist is poetically killed by a falling statue. After spending nearly two hours with these characters, and after watching countless attempts by the surgeon to woo Helena and inflict more abuse on her, a deus ex machina savior arrives for her in the form of a friend and colleague played by Bill Paxton with outrageous hair. The Twist: Boxing Helena revels in what is probably the most cliche twist structure in history-the infamous “it was all a dream!”-and manages to do it more dishonestly and pointlessly than any other film I’ve ever seen. So you’re literally left with a living torso of a woman that this insane surgeon is attempting to wine and dine. As he nurses her back to health, Misery-style, he eventually has to amputate her legs and then her arms to get her to stop resisting his advances. Naturally, being deeply in love, he does what any of us would do: Abducts the injured woman and performs surgeries on her in his home rather than calling the hospital. It’s a truly weird concept: A surgeon obsesses over a beautiful woman named Helena, who then just so happens to be involved in a life-threatening hit-and-run accident in front of his home. This strange little Sundance “mystery thriller with horror elements” arrived at the height of the post- Fatal Attraction/ Basic Instinct craze for erotic thrillers, during a time when Hollywood thought that just about any film could be successful as a soapy-looking drama with plenty of sex and nudity. ![]() Here, then, are five films that make the jump from twist to lie, in chronological order. If the ideal outcome of any twist is for the audience to say “Of course! How could I have missed that?”, the outcome of the twists in the films below should be viewers shaking their heads and asking “Can you believe this bullshit?” They’re frustrating to us because they represent collapses in a movie’s internal logic, or plot holes that screenwriters or directors simply shrugged at and assumed no one would notice. Would that be a surprising bit of shock value? You’re damn right it would be, but it would also be a betrayal of all the time and effort the viewer has invested in believing what turned out to simply be a lie.Ī twist becomes a lie, then, when the film doesn’t bother to provide its audience with the necessary tools to form a sensible theory in advance, or when the reveal completely collapses under the assembled weight of its own coincidences, improbabilities or outright contradictions of reality. If simply being unexpected was the mark of a great twist ending, then the best film would be a two-hour romantic dramedy where the female lead suddenly pulls off a rubber mask in the last five minutes to reveal that she’s been a bug-eyed alien the entire time. This is widely misunderstood by the general filmgoing audience, who all too often associate the quality of a twist ending with whether or not it was “unexpected.” That quality is missing the point entirely, as providing an unexpected ending that makes no sense is incredibly easy to do. In short: If there’s no way to suspect or at least conceive of a twist ending in advance, then it’s more or less impossible for it to be satisfying. In ancient Greek, this concept was defined as anagnorisis, “the hero’s sudden awareness of a real situation.” These are storytelling devices literally thousands of years old that you’re so often seeing trampled in modern cinema, because the key element of the twist, of the anagnorisis moment, is that it needs to be fair to the audience by reflecting the truth of what they’ve already seen and perceived on the screen. Let me explain what I mean by both of those terms.Ī true “twist,” typically of the third-act variety, presents itself as the payoff to a filmmaking mystery, or as a revelation that changes our basic understanding of everything that has come before. In short: There are all too many viewers in any given audience who seemingly can’t discern the difference between a film “twist” and a film lie.īut I’m getting ahead of myself. It presents itself as a soul-deadening form of apathy-an apparent lack of value placed on whether an ending makes sense on a fundamental level. There is a certain segment of the filmgoing population, and even a camp within the film critics themselves, who are seemingly happy to accept any and all possible outcomes from a movie.
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