Twist Endings That Redeem Movies
Shocking Surprise Finishes of Mist, Skeleton Key, Fallen, Arlington
Jun 11, 2008
The Mist Ending
For the bulk of its duration The Mist is an average Stephen King knockoff. At the end Thomas Jane’s character David Drayton and four other survivors (including his son) assume they are doomed, the mist seems impenetrable, they’re out of gas, and larger and larger monsters continued to pass by. So Drayton murders everyone save himself (there weren’t enough bullets left) steps out of the car and cries. Just then the mist evaporates, revealing an army restoring order. Writer-director Frank Darabont’s ending is such a bold and powerful moment it almost erases the memory of the fairly inept film that preceded it.
The Skeleton Key Ending
A twist that only gets more ingenious as you continue to think about it, in The Skeleton Key a typical gothic scare-fest is subverted when it turns out those poor abused slaves whose souls the audience had presumed were haunting the house were in fact the real villains of the story. Through a body-swapping magic the slaves had first swapped bodies with the children of their masters, resulting in the children being inside the slaves bodies when they were lynched. Then at the end Kate Hudson’s protagonist Caroline performs the body-swapping ceremony herself, tricked into thinking it will deliver her from evil by the slaves (now in the bodies of an elderly woman and a young lawyer, characters Caroline had interacted with the whole movie). So Caroline enacts the magic that causes her body to be swapped. She is left mute and unable to communicate what has happened to her, and the slaves live on, now with the female slave in the body of young Caroline.
Arlington Road Ending
Both Skeleton Key and Arlington Road were written by Ehren Kruger, and he uses essentially the same gimmick in both films. Arlington Roadtrudges along as a paranoia thriller, with Jeff Bridges’ Michael Faraday character unsure whether he is being paranoid or not about his creepy neighbor Oliver Lang (played by Tim Robbins). Michael continues investigating Oliver, eventually becoming convinced he is a terrorist. They confront one another and Michael manages to “escape” Oliver. He drives to FBI headquarters, where he knows an agent, convinced a truck in there carries the bomb (after “discovering” Oliver’s plan). Once inside he finds the truck is empty. He races back to his own car and opens the trunk only to discover it is he who carries the bomb. Michael acted as the suicide bomber himself, accidentally, because he investigated all the clues Oliver had left for him.
Fallen Ending
A criminally underrated and unseen Denzel Washington film, this supernatural noir seems very derivative until the ending. At the beginning of the film Denzel Washington’s character Detective Hobbes says in voiceover, “Let me tell you about the time I almost died.” Yet by the end of the film Hobbes has lured the demon Azazel (who can move his spirit from body to body) out into the woods in human form. There Hobbes kills Azazel’s human form, at the time his best friend Detective Jonesy (played by John Goodman) and smokes a poisoned cigarette. Azazel possesses Hobbes, only to discover Hobbes has just poisoned himself. As he dies alone, it would appear Azazel’s soul is doomed to vanish without a host. But once Hobbes dies a cat runs through the woods, a living entity. Azazel possesses the cat’s soul and wanders off. We hear again the voiceover, “I said I was going to tell you about the time I almost died.” and realize it was Azazel, not Hobbes, saying that line at the beginning of the movie.
