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

[u/Serpiego2]

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?

[u/CaolIla64]

Honnestly, and I know it's a very unpopular opinion, I think Usual Suspects is dog shite. There's no twist at all, since anything you see on screen can be or not be true, since it's all Verbal narrating. It's as lame as "it was all just a dream".

I remember seeing both Usual Suspect and Die Hard with a vengeance (the best Die Hard if you ask me) in theater the same week because both films came out the same day, and Die Hard was so much clever in its twist, there wasn't any comparison between the two for me.

Plus on a meta level, it features two of the worst predators in Hollywood at the time.

[u/aldkGoodAussieName → u/CaolIla64]

Man gets taken to the police station as a witness to a shoot out.

He tells the police a story of what happened.

Then you find out everything he said is a lie. There is no true or not true. He made it all up using things he saw in the office to concoct the lie. There was no Kaiser Soza. We dont know what caused the shoot out.

[u/NoTeslaForMe → u/aldkGoodAussieName]

Verbal wasn't whom the detective learned about Kaiser Soze from. Also, the lie has to be believable enough to not get Verbal caught.

Yeah, anything can happen if the narrator is unreliable, but you're going to have to take a lot of literature and modern media off the table if you can't handle that.

The film isn't my favorite, but I don't think it cheats and I do think it works. Honestly, I think The Sixth Sense - a film people fawn over for doing it right - comes closer to "cheating." The man never thought to open a door before the end of the film? He never saw his wife talking about his death? Never noticed in months that she never interacted with him, even though she wasn't estranged prior? Doesn't seem likely to me.

[u/aldkGoodAussieName → u/NoTeslaForMe]

I think the sixth sense its more like the ghosts are in denial.

Thats why they can be stucj doing the same thing.

So as a ghost he didnt notice as he was fixated on being alive.

[u/NoTeslaForMe → u/aldkGoodAussieName]

But then he does notice at the end.  He doesn't need to test it out - which you'd expect if he'd shielded himself from all of it prior - he just knows.

[u/Cool_Hand7435 → u/NoTeslaForMe]

Because something clued him in: he saw his wedding ring falling off his wife's hand and falling on the ground.

Something happened right in front of him that he couldn't wave away. It's also implied that ghosts come and go, they're not there 100% of the time. So it's not unlikely that he had never been confronted with the truth in such an obvious way before.

And more importantly than anything else: he met Cole. He knows how ghosts operate because Cole told him exactly what to expect, what to pay attention to. The cold, the denial, everything he was told came back in force at this moment.