Movies with the darkest of twists

Happy endings really are not for everyoneHappy endings aren’t for everyone. While a perfect conclusion where everyone is happy, the good guys are triumphant and evil is vanquished is usually the order of the day in Hollywood, sometimes things just don’t work out that way. Sometimes the ending is so bleak that it makes you question everything. Soylent Green is people – Soylent Green (1973) The movie transports us to the distant year of… 2022, into a sci-fi dystopia where the Earth is polluted beyond repair. Environmental disaster, shrinking natural resources and an ever-expanding population, has led to extreme poverty. The only sustainable food source that exists is a highly processed wafer, supposedly made of plankton, called Soylent Green. Charlton Heston plays a detective who investigates the murder of the businessman who heads the Soylent Corporation. By the end, he makes a horrifying discovery: Soylent Green is actually made from other humans. It was a solution proposed by the super-rich so that they wouldn’t have to share resources and could keep people working. In the final scene, a gravely wounded Heston delivers the movie’s iconic line, screaming and delirious: “Soylent Green is people!” Jacob never left Vietnam – Jacob’s Ladder (1990) Tim Robbins stars in this horror/psychological thriller about Jacob, a soldier in Vietnam who finds himself in brutal combat but suddenly wakes up on a train in New York. As Jacob tries to make sense of his fragmented memories and terrifying visions, he keeps witnessing otherworldly phenomena and monsters hiding in plain sight. By the end of the movie, we learn the shocking truth: Jacob and his unit were being experimented on, and everything that happened was just his brain refusing to give up and die. In the heartbreaking final scene, we see that Jacob never made it back to New York and actually died in combat. Edward Norton was guilty all along – Primal Fear (1996) Richard Gere plays defence lawyer Martin Vail, who takes the case of Aaron Stampler, a shy altar boy accused of murdering a powerful archbishop. During the course of the trial, Vail makes a disturbing discovery: Aaron actually suffers from dissociative identity disorder, and when he feels threatened, another personality takes over to protect him: the cold, calculating and murderous Roy. Thinking that Aaron is a victim of his own brain, and in an attempt to save him, Vail manages to win a favourable verdict, only to be confronted by a final revelation: there was never an Aaron. Roy tricked him and used both him and the justice system to commit murder and get away with it. Leonard killed his wife – Memento (2000) In this Christopher Nolan classic, Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man who, after a brain injury, is unable to form long-term memories. To help himself remember, he tattoos information on his body and writes notes, trying to remember enough to catch his wife’s killer. The story plays out in two different sequences, very much mimicking Shelby’s condition: the audience is thrust into a situation without knowing what happened immediately before. During his search, Leonard makes a shocking discovery: he killed a man he believed was his wife’s killer a year earlier, and since then, he has been manipulated into killing other people. The serial killer never left the building – Identity (2003) I love Identity. This is one of those films that never got the recognition it deserved when it first came out but still holds up today! In the film, a mass murderer named Malcolm Rivers is sentenced to death when new evidence, in the form of journals, comes to light. At the same time, ten strangers are stranded at a motel during a storm. John Cusack plays Ed Dakota, an ex-cop turned limo driver who is involved in an accident and ends up at the motel for the night. When the guests start being murdered, Ed realises that one member of the group is not who they seem. By the end, Ed realises what has been happening: both he and the rest of the guests are not real. They represent Rivers’ different personalities, as he suffers from dissociative identity disorder. Ed dies, but before that, he manages to kill the psychopathic personality responsible for Rivers’ murderous spree. The only one left is the kind-hearted prostitute Paris, now Rivers’ dominant and only personality. In the real world, the psychiatrist assigned to the case declares Rivers legally insane, stays the execution and arranges for him to be transported to a mental institution. On the way there, we learn that one of the personalities faked its death and was actually the killer. Rivers murders everyone in the van and escapes, presumably to continue his killing spree.