HOWZAT

Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons (May 14) is the eagerly awaited and, rumour has it, superior sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (May 15) is guaranteed to raise hackles and eyebrows — as it did in Cannes last May — with its wild and bizarre shifts of time and place. All three films are expected to be primed with lethal twists.

A poll of colleagues was remarkably consistent about which films had the best twists: Great Expectations (when Pip discovers that his entire fortune, privilege and place in society has been paid for by an ex-convict, Magwitch); Rebecca (the scene in the boathouse when de Winter reveals to his new bride that he absolutely hated his dead wife); Blade Runner (when we realise Harrison Ford is a robot); The Shining (when Wendy, Jack’s wife, realises that he is insane; the book he has been writing is one line written hundreds of times: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”); The Usual Suspects (Kevin Spacey is pulling the strings); The Prestige (double twist: Christian Bale is his own twin and Hugh Jackman has managed to clone himself), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (the “narrator” of this silent movie turns out to be telling the entire story from inside a mental institution); The Others (Nicole Kidman realises that she and her children are dead); and The Empire Strikes Back (Darth Vader is revealed as Luke’s father).

The actor David Morrissey was not the only one to laud the ending of Jacob’s Ladder. “Your heart breaks when you realise the whole film is in fact a soldier’s [Tim Robbins] dying thoughts in Vietnam,” he muses. “But my all-time favourite twist is in The Wicker Man when Edward Woodward finally clocks that he has been lured to this Scottish island because the locals want to sacrifice him. Brilliant. The modern twist I’ve enjoyed best is in Shane Meadows’s film Dead Man’s Shoes. I actually shouted out loud in the cinema when I realised that the brother was a ghost.”

There can be great pleasure in being in on a twist, says Morrissey, as in Sunset Boulevard: “The twist is the opening shot, a voice from a dead man in a swimming pool, and then he tells us how he got there.” The rest of the film unpeels how he got there: he starts and finishes the film dead.

Hitchcock, of course, picked up bundles of votes. The critic Mark Cousins nominated the scene in Vertigo in which Kim Novak’s dual role is unmasked (as loving wife and heartless future mistress of James Stewart). But he also argued the brilliance of the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. “His movies have the biggest twists of all because they stop, and then restart,” explains Cousins. “They are reincarnated: that’s the influence of Buddhism I reckon.”

Cousins adds: “We experience films with twists in two parts. The first, before the twist, when we see them innocently, without the full knowledge, and then the second part, after we’ve eaten from the tree of knowledge and then we rewind the films in our heads and see it again. The worst twist in recent memory was the revelation that Charlize Theron was a superhero in Hancock. Rather than rejuvenating the movie, it sucked the entire life out of it.”

The screenwriter Peter Morgan is far more ambivalent about twists. “While there’s something undeniably satisfying about watching a well-constructed reversal, or a ‘hairpin-bend’ twist, more often than not they are cheap and contrived, and you leave the cinema feeling as if you’ve been mugged. Plot and understanding is a gladitorial arena: a power-based battleground where writer and audience are in a constant battle for supremacy. A good writer can afford to let an audience play with an open hand.

“But hairpin-bend reversals are the ultimate expression of a writer exerting total control over a viewer. It is a high-wire act in terms of trust. If you can pull it off, great. If you fail, you expose your insecurity as a storyteller. The harder a narrative is to follow, the more the balance of power favours the writer. The more even the balance, the freer a viewer is to judge the rest of the writer’s work, his characters and the way he shapes the dialogue.”

Those misgivings apart, Morgan names The Sixth Sense, Rosemary’s Baby (there really are devil worshippers living next door to poor Mia Farrow), and Psycho (in which Norman is revealed as the voice of his dead mother) as films with classic-twist moments.

I ask Stephen Woolley, producer of Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game, about what makes the perfect twist and particularly that iconic moment when Dil reveals all, indeed far too much, out of pure love, to a horrified Stephen Rea.

“The reason the twist in The Crying Game works is that, like Psycho, it is really a double twist,” reckons Woolley, who I’ve tracked down on set in deepest Africa. “Most audiences know there’s a surprise coming. They believe the shock moment is the death of Forest Whitaker — like Janet Leigh in the shower — and so the real ‘reveal’ [when Dil reveals her penis] is a double whammy, just as when Anthony Perkins is revealed as his own dead mother! Killing off Forest Whitaker was a totally novel twist at the time. He was a main character.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010