Our cornucopia of decade's end lists continues now with the Twist List: The best twist-endings and third-act mindf*cks from the last ten years. They're the cherries on your Manoj sundae, and they're after the jump.
The set-up: A group of ten strangers are stranded at a Nevada motel during a thunderstorm. Meanwhile, a psychopath awaits trial at a mental institution.
The twist: The strangers are all multiple personalities of the psychopath, each being killed off in his mind by the true homicidal personality: Timmy York, a quiet boy who had faked his own death earlier.
The set-up: Irish-Catholic Boston boy Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is raised by mobster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) to become a mole in the Massachusetts State Police. Meanwhile a force graduate (Leonardo DiCaprio) is convinced to become an undercover agent infiltrating Costello's inner circle.
The twist: Having executed a seemingly perfect crime with no witnesses, Sullivan returns home expecting to find his psychiatrist girlfriend Madolyn. Instead, Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) is waiting for him, and puts a bullet in his head.
The set-up: An insular Pennsylvania village in 1897 is stalked by a species of monster with whom they've had a long-standing truce.
The twist: The village was actually founded in the 1970s by a community seeking to eschew society and modernity. (The estate paid off rangers to keep humans at bay at the sky above it a "no-fly zone.") The monsters are merely the elders' way of scaring the children into not venturing out past the village limits.
The set-up: A young, neglected girl goes missing in a Boston working class area. A private investigator couple (Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan) are hired by the child's aunt to figure out what happened to her.
The twist: The kidnapping was faked by the child's mother's boyfriend. Police Capt. Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) is actually raising the child, who is alive and well, with his wife. They wanted a child, and figured this was a happy alternative to the girl living with her drug-addict mother.
6. Mullholland Drive (2001)
The set-up: A beautiful brunette car accident survivor with amnesia (Laura Elena Harring) and a fresh-faced blonde ingenue named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) room together in an old Hollywood apartment complex, become fast friends and lesbian lovers, and attempt to solve the mystery of the death of a woman in the same complex named Diane Selwyn.
The twist: It's ambiguous, but Betty wakes up in Diane's deathbed, looking exactly like her, despondent and desperately in love with Camilla Rhodes -- an actress played by a different person earlier in the film, but who now appears to be Harring -- who rejects her callously. Strange and confusing -- but it appears much of the movie was Betty/Diane's overdose-fueled hallucination.
5. The Others (2001)
The set-up: A mother (Nicole Kidman) lives with her two young children in an English country manor house after World War II. Their father hasn't returned from the war. The children share a disease which makes them extremely photosensitive, requiring them to be under constant supervision and to be moved from room to room in order to never experience direct exposure to daylight. They are tended to by a trio of mysterious caretakers, and are visited by ghostly apparitions.
The twist: The mother and children are actually the ghosts -- the children having been smothered during a psychotic fit by their mother. Their three caretakers are also ghosts. The ghostly apparitions, meanwhile, are actually a seance leader and the new inhabitants of the home.
4. Haute Tension (2005)
The set-up: Friends Marie (Cécile de France) and Alex (Maïwenn Le Besco) spend the weekend at Alex's family's house, where a psychotic murderer invades the home and kills the family.
The twist: Marie is the killer, and is in love with Alex.
The set-up: A family of three returns to the orphanage where the mother Laura grew up, with the intention of opening it as a home for disabled children. The son, Simon, meets another boy named Tomas who sets him on a scavenger hunt. Simon disappears, and the mother is haunted by a boy in a sack-mask who claims to be Tomas.
The twist: Laura returns to the home months later, where the ghosts of the orphans lead her to the cellar door she had inadvertently shut, trapping him inside.
2. The Prestige (2006)
The set-up: Two bitter rival magicians in early 20th Century London -- Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) -- outwit and confound one another with their teleportation illusions.
The twist: Borden achieves his by the use of a twin brother with whom he shared one life -- a secret known to no one, including their shared wife and mistress, each being the love of one brother. Angier, meanwhile, discovers the secret to cloning on a visit to Nikola Tesla's Colorado laboratories. His illusion drowns a clone once per performance.
1. Memento (2000)
The set-up: Leonard (Guy Pearce) -- an ex- insurance fraud investigator with a head trauma that prevents him from retaining memories -- searches for the man who raped and murdered his wife during a burglary; he uses a series of handwritten notes, tattoos, and photographs to guide him. It's told in reverse.
The twist: Leonard accidentally killed his wife, and was being manipulated into killing criminals by Teddy (Joe Pantoliano). Faced with the grim reality, Leonard chooses instead to ignore it, and tattoos Teddy's license plate on him -- keeping the chase going and making Teddy his next mark.
And finally, click on to find our Grand Prize-winning choice for Best Twist Ending of the Decade...
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