Spoiler warning: This article reveals the endings of all 10 movies, including their biggest twists and final scenes.
A good ending can make you want to watch a movie again immediately. A particularly cruel one can leave you staring at the screen, wondering why you trusted the director in the first place.
These movies manage one or both. Some hide their answers in plain sight. Others take a story that already seems pretty strange and push it somewhere you would never have guessed. We’re ranking them by how startling their final stretch is and how much that ending changes the movie you’ve just watched.
The short version: The Mist takes our top spot for sheer cruelty, with Oldboy close behind. For an ending that practically dares you to explain it to someone who hasn’t seen the movie, there’s Sorry to Bother You.
10. Planet of the Apes (1968)
The Statue of Liberty reveal has been reproduced so often that it’s easy to forget what it actually does to this story.
George Taylor spends much of Planet of the Apes trying to survive a world where apes rule and humans are treated as animals. When he finally reaches the coast with Nova, the ruined statue tells him where he really is. This is Earth, long after humanity has destroyed its civilization.
Suddenly, Taylor’s belief in human superiority looks painfully foolish. The species he has been defending helped create the nightmare he wants to escape.
Charlton Heston’s reaction makes the ending work even when you know what’s coming. Taylor has survived captivity, persecution and a desperate escape, only to discover that the home he might have hoped to return to is already beneath his feet. There is nowhere else to go.
9. The Sixth Sense (1999)
Knowing the twist in The Sixth Sense is practically unavoidable now. Watching how carefully M. Night Shyamalan gets there is still a pleasure.
Malcolm Crowe died after being shot in the opening sequence. The child psychologist helping Cole understand his ability to see ghosts is one himself. When Malcolm sees his wedding ring fall from his sleeping wife’s hand, he finally understands why she has seemed so distant.
The reveal sends you back through every conversation. Scenes that appeared to show a failing marriage suddenly become scenes of a woman grieving alone.
That sadness is why the ending lasts beyond the surprise. Malcolm has been trying to make up for failing one patient by helping another, without realizing that his own life has ended. He gets to help Cole, then say goodbye. For all the movie’s frightening images, its final revelation is remarkably tender.
8. The Others (2001)
Nicole Kidman’s Grace is certain that strangers have invaded her house. She is right about their presence and wrong about almost everything else.
Grace and her children are dead. The people they fear are the living occupants, trying to understand the spirits haunting their home. The séance reverses the entire situation, forcing Grace to remember that she killed her children before taking her own life.
What makes this so upsetting is how long the film lets us share her perspective. Her rules, fear and determination to protect the children seem understandable inside that dark house. Then the ending reveals the tragedy she cannot bear to acknowledge.
Even after the truth comes out, the family remains attached to the home. Knowing what happened doesn’t free them from it.
Our The Others 4K review takes a closer look at the film and its Criterion release.
7. Fight Club (1999)
Finding out that Tyler Durden and the narrator are the same person would be enough for most movies. Fight Club still has buildings to demolish.
The revelation forces the narrator to confront his responsibility for Project Mayhem. Tyler hasn’t been dragging him into someone else’s dangerous ideas. He has been building the organization himself.
After a violent confrontation with his imagined counterpart, the narrator survives and Tyler disappears. But that personal breakthrough doesn’t stop the explosives. He and Marla hold hands as the targeted buildings collapse outside.
It’s an absurdly romantic image under the circumstances, helped enormously by the Pixies on the soundtrack. The narrator finally manages a moment of honesty and connection while the consequences of his behavior fill the windows. Whether you read it as liberation, catastrophe or both, it’s difficult to imagine a more fitting goodbye to these two.
6. The Prestige (2006)
Christopher Nolan gives each rival magician a secret, and both are much uglier than a hidden compartment.
Alfred Borden is an identity shared by identical twins. They alternate between Borden and his disguised assistant, Fallon, sacrificing ordinary lives and relationships to preserve their illusion. One brother is executed; the other survives to confront Robert Angier.
Angier has gone further. Tesla’s machine really does duplicate him. His act depends on one version drowning beneath the stage while another appears to accept the applause. The tanks reveal the cost of repeating that performance.
Both men get what they wanted from their tricks, at a price that makes their rivalry seem grotesque. On a second viewing, Borden’s inconsistent behavior becomes especially painful. The people closest to him have been trying to understand one man when they were dealing with two, and neither brother was willing to tell them.
5. Saw (2004)
The answer has been lying on the bathroom floor.
After spending the film trying to work out who put Adam and Dr. Gordon in their traps, we appear to have a culprit in Zep. Then Adam finds a recording that reveals Zep was another unwilling participant, acting under threat of death.
And the supposedly dead man between the prisoners gets up.
It’s John Kramer, the real Jigsaw, who has been inside the room the entire time. He leaves Adam chained in the dark and closes the door.
The sequels would make the mythology increasingly complicated, but the original ending needs very little explanation. James Wan directs our attention toward the people who can move, speak and threaten each other. The motionless body becomes part of the scenery. Watching that scenery stand up is still the franchise’s best trick.
4. Sorry to Bother You (2018)
If someone told you how Sorry to Bother You ends before you watched it, you might reasonably assume they were describing the wrong movie.
Boots Riley’s workplace satire follows Cassius Green as his talent for telemarketing brings him closer to a very wealthy, very unpleasant world. Eventually, he discovers that WorryFree is turning humans into horse-human hybrids called Equisapiens to create a more exploitable workforce.
That revelation is wild enough. Then Cash begins transforming himself, exposing the lie behind Steve Lift’s assurances about the powder he gave him. The closing sequence brings Cash and the other Equisapiens to Lift’s home.
The company wanted workers it could control, and now those workers are at the boss’s door. It’s funny, disgusting and furious all at once. The human cost of getting ahead has become horribly literal, and Cash doesn’t get to undo what happened simply because he finally made the right choice.
3. Se7en (1995)
John Doe surrendering should feel like progress. Instead, it means he is ready for the detectives to play their parts in his last murders.
A delivery brings a box containing Tracy Mills’ head. Doe tells her husband, David Mills, that he killed her out of envy, then reveals she was pregnant. Mills shoots him, becoming the wrath Doe needed to complete his design.
David Fincher never shows the contents of the box. Somerset’s reaction, Doe’s calm explanation and Mills’ anguish tell us enough. The awful suspense comes from understanding the trap while watching a man lose any ability to resist it.
Doe dies, but the detectives have not defeated him. That distinction makes this ending so difficult to shake.
GVN also covered Se7en‘s 30th-anniversary 4K release, which brought Fincher’s thriller back for another round of uncomfortable viewing.
2. Oldboy (2003)
For much of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Oh Dae-su believes the mystery is why someone locked him away for 15 years. Learning what his release was meant to accomplish is far worse.
Mi-do, the young woman he has fallen in love with, is his daughter. Lee Woo-jin has manipulated their relationship through hypnosis and an elaborate revenge scheme. What seemed like a source of comfort after Dae-su’s imprisonment was part of his punishment.
The film then leaves us with another disturbing question. Dae-su seeks hypnosis to erase his knowledge of the relationship, but his final expression doesn’t give us a clear answer about whether it worked.
Even the possibility of relief feels unbearable. Forgetting would let him continue living inside the deception. Remembering would mean carrying a truth he desperately wants to keep from Mi-do.
Our Oldboy 20th-anniversary review looks at why the film remains worth revisiting beyond its notorious reveal.
1. The Mist (2007)
Frank Darabont lets the car run out of gas before he takes away everything else.
David Drayton and four other survivors, including his young son, have escaped the supermarket but can see no way out of the mist. With only four bullets left, David kills the others, believing he is sparing them from the creatures outside. There is nothing left for himself.
He steps out, expecting to die. Instead, the military arrives, clearing the creatures and rescuing survivors.
Help was coming. That is the entire horror of it.
The ending denies David even the belief that his decision was necessary. Thomas Jane’s reaction does the rest, turning a monster movie into something almost impossible to sit with. This takes our top spot because the surprise offers no clever solution to admire. It leaves one man alive with knowledge he cannot escape.
GVN’s The Mist 4K review covers the film’s color and black-and-white presentations, should you feel ready to put yourself through it again.
Which movie ending would you put at No. 1?
DC Fanboy! Superman is the greatest comic book character of all time. Favorite movies are Man of Steel, Goonies, Back To the Future
