Twist & Shout

No spoilers, unless you haven't seen The Sixth Sense. In that case, child please...

I recently watched Gus Van Sant's, Promised Land, a character piece revolving around the environmental debate surrounding fracking. Interestingly, Promised Land has a twist that comes late in the film. The movie didn't seem like the type of film that would have a twist, and my initial reaction was, "Oh, a twist. Didn't see that coming. What a pleasant surprise."

However, that pleasant feeling quickly evolved into annoyance. The twist created too many questions, questions with answers that weren't fulfilling, answers that didn't make enough sense. The twist was too square for the movie's round hole.

Twists are difficult. They have to be a complete surprise, yet leave the audience sinking back into their chairs saying, "Ah, it was there all along. I'm such a dummy. A happy, happy dummy." Once the twist is revealed everything that came before and after it must fit together perfectly. Plot, characters, motivation. It all still has to flow seamlessly, even though everything has changed. Nothing tricky about that.

When I think of a film with a great twist, I always think of The Sixth Sense. It just works perfectly. Every scene has a hint that Bruce Willis is dead. It all makes, well, sense. You don't ask questions, nothing has changed, though everything has changed. You're suddenly watching the movie through a completely new set of eyes, yet everything still looks the same. Quite a feat.

When a twist goes wrong, it murders every good thing you had going in your movie. Those well-developed characters we've been admiring for 90 minutes, who the hell are they? The clever plot, oh, that was cute. The climactic dialogue, I can't hear it because all I can do is sit in the darkness of the theatre trying to figure out if I'm really, really stupid because the twist doesn't make sense. Most of the time it's the twist that's stupid. But I won't come to that conclusion until I'm angrily gripping the steering wheel on the ride home, cursing at that dude who just cut me off.

If you're contemplating putting a twist in your story, make sure you know what your twist is before you start writing. Layer it into every possible scene. In the end, the twist must feel like the story was designed around it, not the other way around. It should never feel like a device added in the third draft in an attempt to spice things up. I'm certainly not saying that Promised Land was guilty of this, but I found it to be a lesson of a twist not working in complete harmony with the movie that came before and after it.