We Love to Wonder if the Butler Did It

To pull off a surprise ending, a filmmaker must have the skills of a magician.

“The whole deal is misdirection,” said John McNaughton, director of the especially twisty “Wild Things.” “You’re doing something very obviously with your left hand while you’re slipping something out of your pocket with your right. It is a sleight-of-hand deal going on.”

Simultaneously fooling and satisfying the audience is a rare feat, which is one reason M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” became such a smash. Not only did the ending zing you, but the surprise made the rest of the movie that much more meaningful and moving. You wanted to see it again to catch all of the “clues”; so many people did that “The Sixth Sense” became the 10th-highest-grossing film of all time in the United States.

But it’s one thing to pull a rabbit out of your pocket when nobody’s expecting a trick, and quite another to do so with all eyes fixed on your hands. How many people do you know who saw “The Sixth Sense” long after it opened and then smugly told you, “I figured it out”?

Every viewer of Shyamalan’s new film, “Unbreakable,” is that kind of potential know-it-all. This time we’re watching every move, bending our gaze around every corner, trying to ferret out the hidden revelation before it smacks us upside the head.

The movie’s marketing encouraged the game, playing up the Shyamalan-”Sixth Sense” connection while presenting glimpses of the plot amid a fog of mystery. The ads teased us with the line “Are you ready for the truth?”--a question asked by Samuel L. Jackson in the trailers even though it never actually appears in the movie. If Shyamalan could have stunned us amid such scrutiny, he would have achieved a cinematic stunt worthy of Houdini.

“I enjoy that people are anticipating it,” Shyamalan said. “Filmgoers in the year 2000 are super savvy. The guy gets the girl, the bad guy dies--all that stuff is ingrained. Knowing that and knowing they know that, it’s really fun to play with expectations: Everyone’s thinking it’s going here, so let me go in that direction and meanwhile go in another direction, but they’re not paying attention to that, and really the movie is about something entirely different.”

To some grumbly moviegoers and critics, the “Unbreakable” revelation thwarts expectations by not being all that revelatory. The real story seems like it’s just about to get going when the movie abruptly ends.

Shyamalan said the effect was intentional, aping a comic-book ending.

“The play on it was you thought you were seeing the whole story, and really all you saw was Chapter 1,” Shyamalan said. “That was part of the fun of it.”

Does that mean the point was to set up a Chapter 2? “Oh, no, I’m doing something else right now,” he said.

“Unbreakable” isn’t the only recent movie with an anticlimactic final twist. Last year’s provocative “Fight Club” culminates in a lulu of a revelation that makes much of what preceded it seem nonsensical. The compelling intrigue of “What Lies Beneath” is diluted by a mundane betrayal toward the end.

The final double-crosses of the little-seen (and deservedly so) “Goodbye, Lover” had so little to do with what we had learned about the characters that the filmmakers might as well have thrown darts at the players’ photos to determine who would wind up as the bad guys. The same could be said of the “Scream” movies, except there the randomness is considered part of the joke.

“The trouble with a lot of trick endings is that they’re inconsistent, with characters and situations,” said veteran New York Observer film critic Andrew Sarris.

Scenes Shouldn’t Exist Just to Fool Audience

One rule that’s paramount in pulling off a surprise ending: Play fair. A scene shouldn’t be designed solely to fool the audience; if the story is narrated by one character, we shouldn’t witness anything he doesn’t see or imagine, especially if it’s just there to knock us off course.

McNaughton recalled being infuriated by Alan Parker’s “Angel Heart” for what he saw as cheating in the storytelling.

“When I got to the end and retraced the steps how they got there, I was furious because they were dishonest with the audience,” he said. “There were things early in the movie that, if they told it honestly, you would have figured it out.

“To pull that surprise off, you have to earn it by laying the story out, and at those key moments, you tell the audience the truth. When you really do surprise the audience without cheating them, then it’s earned.”

To Sarris, the quintessential great surprise ending concludes the first film he reviewed for the Village Voice: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller “Psycho.”

“I had no idea at all what the surprise was, and I was scared out of my wits,” Sarris said. “After that I began appreciating it artistically.”

“Psycho” actually included two major surprises: the infamous shower killing of star Janet Leigh’s character just a third of the way into the movie and the climax that reveals the identity of Norman Bates’ mother. In an effort to preserve these shocks for viewers, Hitchcock and the studio barred audience members from entering once the film had begun.

But the key trickery took place in the filmmaking. In his 1967 booklong interview with fellow director Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained how he used an overhead camera to shoot Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates carrying his mother down stairs without making audience members wonder why the movie wasn’t showing her face.

“I didn’t want to cut, when he carries her down, to a high shot because the audience would have been suspicious as to why the camera has suddenly jumped away,” Hitchcock said. “So I had a hanging camera follow Perkins up the stairs beforehand, and when he went into the mother’s room I continued going up without a cut. As the camera got up on top of the door, the camera turned and looked back down the stairs again.

“Meanwhile, I had an argument take place between the son and his mother to distract the audience and take their minds off what the camera was doing. In this way the camera was above Perkins again as he carried his mother down, and the public hadn’t noticed a thing. It was rather exciting to use the camera to deceive the audience.”

The trick ending was a rarity for Hitchcock, who preferred suspense to surprise; he reveals the key twist of “Vertigo” ahead of time so the audience can focus its anxiety on how the Jimmy Stewart character will react when he discovers the truth. In contrast, Agatha Christie mysteries such as “Witness for the Prosecution” and “Murder on the Orient Express” are built around surprise endings, so the movies (and books) tend primarily to be guessinggames.

Then there are puzzle movies such as “The Usual Suspects” and David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner” and “House of Games,” which aren’t whodunits as much as whatsgoingons. In Mamet’s case, viewers are made aware that they’re the marks in a confidence game and would be disappointed if they weren’t ultimately fooled.

The best surprise endings jolt the head and heart, and the movies that do so share one important quality:

“If a movie isn’t interesting in itself moment by moment, it won’t work,” McNaughton said. “It’s got to be a good movie regardless of the trick ending. If the rest of the movie is just a necessary passage in order to get to dessert, then that dessert better be really good.”

To Shyamalan, surprise endings are simply a matter of saving the best for last.

“The last scene in the movie is the most powerful scene in the movie,” he said. “That’s the kind of structure I like, and the fact that we’re calling them ‘twists’ is not really how I think about them. They’re more the escalation of revelations during the movie and the conflicts. The greatest ones are at the very end, the last moments of the movie, so you’re feeling the most as you walk out.”