the twist

I watched a movie from the sixties this weekend called Charade. It stars Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, and James Coburn, among others. I enjoyed the movie largely because it shamelessly twists the plot about five times throughout the story. I expected about half of the plot twists because I was looking for them, but a couple took me be surprise even with me looking for them.

I am a complete sucker for an unexpected plot twist. The more unexpected and the more it shifts the perspective of the audience, the better. This is why I like The Village the most of M. Night Shyamalan's movies, even though I have heard a lot of people can it as his worst. This is why Psycho is probably my favorite movie. This is also why I greatly enjoyed Identity, The Sixth Sense, Stay, Saw, The Others, and the old French version of Diabolique.

I think the reason I like plot twist movies is that I tend to get bored with a storyline if I know where it is going. I love to try to piece together in my head what specifically is going on, then find out how right or wrong I am at the end of the movie. The twist usually gives initially benign elements of the story greater meaning, so it allows me to go back to get a better understanding of what is going on. It is pretty common that the twists give the movie a deeper point to contemplate as well.

So, it can be relatively easy to predict whether I will like certain movies based on how much the plot turns on itself. This is very much in constrast to how difficult it is to predict the plot twists themselves.