“Now You See Me” is a very engaging movie about four magicians who pull off baffling heists. At the end of their journey, the magicians are offered entrance into The Eye, an ancient group comprised of only the most talented magicians. When they agree to join, they step onto a moving carousel and disappear.
While the moment is filled with drama, it suggests that the magicians completed their audition in the form of their many tricks and are now members of The Eye, who fight for the greater good of all people.
Memento
Director Christopher Nolan loves a good twist, and Memento is no exception. Instead of following a successive timeline, the movie moves in a backward sequence to show Leonard trying to unravel the mystery of his wife’s killer, Sammy Jankis.
At the end of the film, which is really the beginning of Leonard’s journey, we find out that Leonard is Jankis and his memory loss issues allowed him to create a mystery in order to cope with his own guilt. He keeps solving the mystery, only to forget and start the process of working the case all over again.
American Psycho
While the American Psycho movie is a little confusing, the book offers a bit more clarity. In short, Patrick Bateman is going through a severe mental breakdown, so his entire narration of events is unreliable. That’s why Bateman eventually finds out that he never went on a killing spree, though he’s completely convinced that he did.
While the movie is meant to leave a little gray area that opens up the possibility that he did actually kill someone, the most logical conclusion is that Bateman’s mental breakdown is over and his narration is somewhat reliable again.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Since the movie was written by Charlie Kaufman, it’s pretty easy to know going in that “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” was going to leave us feeling confused. It begins with a young woman going to meet her boyfriend’s parents during a winter storm and gets weirder and weirder as time goes on. The woman’s name constantly changes, time flips back and forth, even things like backstories, outfits, and sets change on what seems to be a whim.
It turns out the whole thing is a fantasy of a lonely high school janitor...and the movie seems to end with the janitor killing himself, but nothing is on screen, and the final scene is the boyfriend giving a long speech from another movie.
The Thing
The seminal horror flick “The Thing” will make it hard to trust your friends. It’s an exploration of paranoia and loneliness set inside of a terrifying scenario. As an alien creature wrecks havoc on the team of researchers in the arctic, it transforms into friends and foes at the drop of a hat, which not only creates some wonderfully disgusting scenes but makes every character fear for his or her life.
In the end, as the survivors fly away in a helicopter, it’s never made clear whether or not the alien menace was actually destroyed. To the characters - and the viewers - it’s all-too-possible for the creature to still be alive.