The 10 Best Twist Endings on Netflix

Ever since M. Night Shyamalan invented the twist ending in 1999, it's been a staple of action, thriller, and horror movies. Here are the ten best movies on Netflix that pull the rug out from under you and make you say things like "I knew that was gonna happen," even though, come on, you definitely didn't.

The Invitation

The brilliance of The Invitation is that it's essentially two movies: a horror movie about a cult performing an awful ritual, and a story about a man whose past sends him unraveling to the point of a complete mental breakdown. We don't get our answer as to what's really going on until it's late in the game, and it's worth the wait.

47 Meters Down

The twist in 47 Meters Down is telegraphed early on, but it will still catch you off guard. It's a mean, nasty twist that upends what we think we've been watching, and it does it at the absolute worst time, too.

The Boy

The Boy rules, and its silly, pulpy, gothic brilliance relies on the use of established horror tropes to build assumptions around this haunted doll movie until an entirely new threat is introduced at the eleventh hour. It's as fun to watch the second time once you know what's really going on.

Raw

A straightforward story about a French cannibal discovering her sexuality (and taste for human flesh)—well, as straightforward as that can be—gets an almost mythological ending that elicits as many gasps as it does dark laughs. Not for the faint of heart, though.

The Village

When I first heard about the twist in The Village, when I was 13, I thought, "That's dumb, there's no way that actually happens," but it does! Now I think it's still dumb, but also I love it for its unrepentant big swing in the third act.

Seven

Brad Pitt screaming about a box is obviously this movie's legacy, but its easily guessed twist still remains one of the best, most horribly inevitable reveals in film history.

Cloud Atlas

This movie has, like, nine endings, and a couple of them really nail the landing, delivering new context to what we've been watching the entire time. Worth the three-hour wait, mostly.

The Signal

The Signal is a perfectly serviceable sci-fi horror with a dumbass twist that's as bold as it is entirely unearned. They can't all be perfect genius endings, you know?

Killing Ground

Really, the twist in Killing Ground isn't so much that something unexpected happens, but more that what we're afraid will happen happens exactly as we feared, and then some. This slow-burn movie reaches a conclusion that's as dark and as extreme as it gets, and forces us to watch the whole time.

The Sixth Sense

By now you almost definitely know the twist here, but it's still cool. Also Donnie Wahlberg is in this movie! A twist unto itself.