Every M. Night Shyamalan Twist, Ranked (and Spoiled!)

If the headline didn’t already make it clear, the following post is going to spoil the endings of a whole bunch of M. Night Shyamalan movies.

When you go into an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you know that not everything is as it seems. Not all of his movies end with narrative-shattering twists, but most of them do, and his most iconic third act reveals altered movies, and the way we think about them, forever. Because we love Shyamalan’s movies, because we love a good twist, and because we love to rank stuff, we’ve decided to rank every Shyamalan twist, from The Sixth Sense and beyond.

Now, this isn’t a ranking of every Shyamalan movie, since not all of them have what you’d call a twist in them. His early features Praying With Anger and Wide Awake are not twist-based. After Earth, the sci-fi movie starring Will and Jaden Smith as far-future human refugees on an inhospitable version of our planet, is just a straightforward adventure. And the only twist in The Last Airbender was that the movie was terrible. But everything else, starting with his most iconic film and up to the present, has featured some sort of climactic reveal that changes everything for the characters.

This is also not a ranking of the movies’ quality, since ScreenCrush already has one of those. Instead, we’ve ranked the twists based on impact and sheer cleverness, tracking just how much of the story they change, and whether they change it in a satisfying way. Not every twist is rewarding, or cool, or even necessary, while others are so iconic that the quotes show up on T-shirts and mugs. We’ve taken all of that into account while putting this list together — and even put a twist of our own at the end.

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