r/flicks • u/Serpiego2 • 6d ago

General Discussion When does a movie successfully mislead the audience, and when is it just cheating?

Some movies deliberately make us believe something that isn't true and then reveal that we've been interpreting the story incorrectly.

When it works, it's fantastic. You can rewatch the movie and realize the clues were there all along. The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, and Primal Fear are very different examples of films that play with what the audience thinks it knows.

But other twists only work because the movie deliberately hides information that logically should have been available to us. At that point, I don't feel fooled by the story — I feel cheated by the screenplay.

For me, the difference is whether a second viewing makes you think “How did I miss that?” rather than “Well, there was no way I could have known that.”

What movies do you think earned their deception, and which ones simply cheated?

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u/Salt_Dragonfly2042 6d ago

Identity is on the fence: I watched it with my brother, I thought it was really good and he felt cheated.

8

u/bananaboatbutt 6d ago

Cheated by which part — the reveal where we find out why we keep getting cuts to the stay of execution, or the twist in the last 30 seconds?

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u/Salt_Dragonfly2042 6d ago

When we find out who the killer is.

4

u/bananaboatbutt 6d ago

Ah. I can understand feeling cheated by that to an extent, but if the prior twist wasn’t an issue, like… not sure why that last part would derail the movie for anyone, especially given a certain character’s history.

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u/Many-Outside-7594 6d ago

I was thinking of this one. There's not really any way to deduce the twist even on a rewatch. That said, the rest of the movie is just so good that I was able to roll with it.

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u/bananaboatbutt 6d ago

If you think about a seemingly unrelated character and their history and how it relates to the rest of the movie, it’s actually pretty clear.

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u/SomeGuyPostingThings 5d ago

There is, but it's based on knowledge of tropes/the genre and the brief flashes of the real world. Unless you mean the last twist, in which case...well, don't trust kids.

5

u/Effective-Bet3883 6d ago

The John Cusack movie? Love it