Underdog movies with twist endings12/24/2023 I don't buy the allegory, but I'll take the hot mess. The village's hermetic existence makes precisely as much sense as Old's rock-blocking coral, but here the illogic adds to the movie's appeal, making the mannered performances and stately aesthetic look retrospectively hysterical. Personally, I think the film's a well-photographed bore, and I will always treasure how loudly my 2004 theater audience laughed when the car showed up. Defenders peg The Village as a lacerating tale of American self-delusion and nostalgia cresting into horror. Ivy's early-American existence is a lie, dreamed up by anxious '70s parents who opted to raise their children in a simulacrum of a safer past. Then she journeys through the woods.and finds out she's actually in a "Twist Ending" movie. This colonial fable about a remote community tormented by monsters initially seems to be one of Shyamalan's "Act 3 Twist" movies, when Bryce Dallas Howard's blind Ivy finds out the malevolent forest creatures are actually the settlement's elders in disguise. It doesn't have the best twists, but it has the most of them. The sheer volume of WTFery makes Glass special, even if the heroic glow it gives Jackson's mastermind seems to retroactively justify his mass murders. In some ways, this ending kneecapped its own movie, trapping vibrant personalities in a long wind-up to a deconstructive Illuminati-infused tale. That footage maybe ushers in a new era of global super-people? Oh, and the Unbreakable train wreck also killed the father of McAvoy's disordered baddie. Glass releases footage of the super-fight via posthumous video dump. Those rug-pullers get their own rug pulled. Deep breath: Paulson's shrink represents a vast global conspiracy that has spent, like, all human history snuffing out superpowered individuals. There's nothing modest about the finale, though. That downbeat finale could reflect reduced circumstances: Glass was reportedly self-financed by Shyamalan to the tune of $20 million, $53 million less than Unbreakable's budget from several inflation cycles ago. After teasing a battle at Philadelphia's tallest skyscraper, all three men wind up dead after a scuffle in the mental hospital's parking lot. Their peculiar warden is Sarah Paulson's psychiatrist, whose methods, legal authority, and motivation make no sense. Jackson's titular antagonist, who spends half the movie in an apparent fugue state. Bruce Willis' Unbreakable strongman and James McAvoy's Split murderer get imprisoned alongside Samuel L. I obviously prefer that twist, but for sheer self-destructive filmmaker bravado, I applaud how this 2019 follow-up subverts any epic-saga catharsis. Shyamalan built a backdoor franchise out of 2016's Split. Where to watch Knock at the Cabin: Amazon Prime Video It's secretly a darker riff on Lady in the Water: Regular people find themselves on a divine mission, but now there's no triumphant magic eagle, and most everyone dies nasty. Give Knock at the Cabin credit for masking Armageddon behind an impressive slow burn, lingering on the possibility that Leonard and his compatriots could be internet conspiracy theorists or devious plotters. All Leonard's prophecies come true via goofy falling-plane CGI, which leavens the stakes of the final spousal homicide everyone involved pretty much knows their sacrifice will save the world. He offers a dark warning: One of them must die, or humanity will perish.Īs with Old, this adaptation of Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World replaces its source material's brutal ambiguity with a stridently un-ambiguous final act. If Dave Bautista spends a movie saying the apocalypse is going to happen, is it really a surprise when the apocalypse happens? The buff melancholiac headlines as Leonard, an oddly endearing home invader who holds a vacationing family hostage. Not the first Shyamalan film where the twist is the worst part, not the first Shyamalan twist that depends on an elaborate covert organization.ĭave Bautista, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in 'Knock at the Cabin'. The only survivors to escape swim through offshore coral, which somehow blocks the rocks' blackout-inflecting mental force field. Turns out, a pharmaceutical company uses the beach's cell-deteriorating rock formations to conduct off-book medical trials, fitting decades of biological observation into unwilling subjects' rapidly-declining final days. The moody source comic, Sandcastle, didn't bother with a why. Shyamalan's breezy beach-horror fantasy is a standout vacation-bubble thriller from the COVID era, trapping a dynamite cast on a stretch of coast that ages everyone two years per hour. A film that dares to ask: "How is this totally implausible thing happening?" then dares to answer: Because a well-funded conspiracy has an impossible plan full of plot holes.
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