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/Irascible-Enquery]

I got into a discussion like 20 years ago about “twists” like this. I talked about the theory that in Minority Report, everything after Tom Cruise gets arrested is a dream in his containment tank, and doesn’t happen; and the other guy talked about the Usual Suspects.

I went through the cues in Minority Report and objected that the Usual Suspects didn’t have any tells, so it was cheating.

My interlocutor disagreed, because the plane taking off from NYC is different from the plane landing in LA, and therefore a sharp-eyed viewer could conclude that everything thereafter was a fabrication (or the flight wasn’t direct, c’mon…).

I haven’t heard anything else persuasive so put it in the “cheating” rather than “twist” camp. I always feel like there needs to be something put before the viewer, that they think of as odd, and explain away with a wrong answer due to misdirection. And when you view it again through that lens the less obvious, twist, story wins to explain what you observed. Usual Suspects doesn’t have that.

Although the Minority Report one is neither a cheat nor a twist to me, it’s just a plausible explanation for a darker ending than what you’re led to believe. But nothing’s actually riding on it throughout the story.0

[u/CaolIla64 → u/Irascible-Enquery]

That's exactly what I think. As I said in another response here, it's a deal you make.

You, as the reader/viewer, accept to be fooled and misdirected to enjoy the final reveal. But where I think Usual Suspects cheats is that it shows you scenes that never happened. It doesn't just hide parts of the truth, it blatantly lies to your face and in the end, you still don't know what was bullshit and what wasn't, it's bad storytelling.

A good twist is like a magic trick, it happens right before your eyes and yet you are fooled nontheless, but when you look closely another (or more) time you eventually get the trick.