10 Best Crime Movie Plot Twists, Ranked

One of the best parts of watching crime movies is when the story takes a left turn and delivers a brilliant plot twist no one sees coming. Throughout history, only the horror genre has done it better, and the best crime movie twists are often equal to any surprising ending in a horror film. The earliest crime dramas were mostly straightforward gangster movies from the 1930s, but when film noir took form, it changed everything.

By the time the 1990s crime movies arrived, filmmakers wanted to do more than tell the story of crime dramas and thrillers that were just about good guys and bad guys clashing. The moral shades of gray and the shock at what was coming in the end were driving forces behind what made many of the best in the genre so beloved. When a movie surprises even the most ardent movie-going audience, it helps it stand the test of time.

It is also important to understand that if the twist ending has become public knowledge over the years, it was, at one time, still a shocking moment for audiences. These movie twists are both shocking endings no one sees coming and moments that turn the entire movie on its head, forcing immediate rewatches. Obviously, there are spoilers here since these will reveal the twists at the end.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Reservoir Dogs was Quentin Tarantino’s breakout directorial debut, and it was a movie that told the world he had arrived. His career remains one of the most impressive in Hollywood history, and it was all obvious from this debut. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, the movie is about a diamond heist gone wrong. Each surviving criminal, all using colors as code names and most as strangers, realizes one of them might be a mole.

The big twist comes at the end, after the criminals mostly turn on each other and a gunfight breaks out between the bad guys. Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), who has been shot and whom Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) has been protecting, finally admits he is an undercover cop. The twist is revealed earlier in flashbacks, and that leads to the end where the audience waits to see how Mr. White will react.

L.A. Confidential (1997)

L.A. Confidential is a 1997 movie based on the crime novel by James Ellroy. Directed by Curtis Hanson, the movie is set in 1950s Los Angeles, where three very different LAPD officers investigate multiple murders at the Nite Owl coffee shop that unravel into a web of corruption, vice, and Hollywood scandal. All the cops seem corrupt on one level, even the one who claims to play by the rules.

However, while it seems like any of these cops could be the ones who go bad in the end, the real villain is not one that viewers might have expected. The twist reveals that Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), the respected mentor figure, is the mastermind behind the criminal enterprise. He shockingly murders Jack Vincennes in his own home to cover his tracks. It is a brilliantly constructed twist and one that plays well into the plot.

Se7en (1995)

The twist at the end of Se7en is one of the most brutal gut punches in movie history. The movie stars Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as a pair of detectives, one old and ready for retirement, and the other young, with a new wife. They set out to catch and stop a serial killer known as John Doe, who is staging his murders around the Seven Deadly Sins. This is a movie where the twist is not about who the killer is, but about his final kills.

The twist comes when Pitt’s Detective Mills opens a box the killer left for him that includes the head of his wife. The brilliance of the twist isn’t that it’s Mills’ wife’s head in the box; it is what it says about the story. There are two sins left that John Doe hasn’t used. One is envy, which John Doe fulfills by killing Mills’ wife. The last sin is wrath, and he lures Mills into murdering him to fulfill the seventh sin. It is a masterful twist and reveal.

Memento (2000)

Memento was Christopher Nolan’s second movie and his breakout directorial effort. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, a man who has anterograde amnesia and cannot form new memories. The movie is told in reverse order, with Leonard seeking the man whom he believes killed his wife. He leaves himself Polaroids, Post-it notes, and tattoos to remind him of where his investigation has left off.

The twist comes when the movie shows that Leonard’s wife likely died when he accidentally gave her a fatal insulin overdose because of his developing anterograde amnesia. This recontextualizes the entire movie’s story at that moment, and it works because it forces the audience to uncover the truth with the same disorientation that Leonard does. The only thing holding it down is the ambiguous nature of the twist.

Primal Fear (1996)

Primal Fear is a movie whose entire basis is set up on an eventual twist, and that twist throws everything in the movie into disarray. Richard Gere plays Chicago defense attorney Martin Vail, a man who agrees to take on the case of Aaron Stampler, a stuttering, seemingly meek altar boy accused of brutally murdering an archbishop. The defense’s argument is that Aaron is innocent because he has dissociative identity disorder (DID), and an alternate personality committed the murder.

Throughout the movie, it is easy to cheer for Vail as he believes this young man is mentally ill and doesn’t deserve to go to prison for a murder his alternate personality committed. The twist shows that it isn’t Aaron who is the innocent man, but Roy is the killer. It shows that Aaron has always been Roy, and he invents the meek alternate personality to beat the murder charge. Edward Norton impressed the world with this performance, and the twist still hits hard to this day.

Gone Girl (2014)

Gone Girl is a 2014 movie based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, with a script by Flynn and directed by David Fincher. The movie opens on the fifth wedding anniversary of Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). On that anniversary, Nick reports to the police that Amy has gone missing. The police immediately assume Nick murdered her, and the evidence points in that direction. This begins to ruin Nick’s life.

However, the twist here is that Nick doesn’t kill Amy because she is still alive and well. She has framed him for her disappearance, planting clues that indicate that Nick killed her after cheating on her. The entire movie has the audience sympathizing with Amy before the twist reveals her evil intentions and throws the entire movie on its head. Seeing the twist play out and watching how Nick and Amy deal with it recontextualizes the entire film.

Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island is a mystery crime thriller by Martin Scorsese based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. The movie follows two detectives who arrive at Ashecliffe, a mental hospital on a remote island, to investigate a missing patient who disappeared without a trace. Leonardo DiCaprio is U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, and Mark Ruffalo is his partner Chuck Aule, and the deeper they investigate, the more it feels like something is wrong.

The twist here is massive. Teddy is the patient, and he is institutionalized after killing his wife, who drowned their children during a mental breakdown. The fake investigation is a way for Chuck to try to get Teddy to remember who he is and break out of his delusions. The ending delivers one final kick where it seems like Teddy remembers who he is, but he prefers to be lobotomized rather than live with his memories.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

The Usual Suspects is the perfect example of a movie that is told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. However, viewers don’t know this until the very end. Roger “Verbal” Kint recounts to Customs Agent Dave Kujan how a lineup of five criminals was drawn into a deadly job orchestrated by the mythical, unseen crime lord Keyser Söze. He recounts everything that happened and then leaves when the agent hears his story.

However, the twist comes when the agent looks around and sees names and moments from Verbal’s story on posters and flyers hanging around the room. It is too late. As the agent runs out into the streets, the audience watches Verbal straighten out and stop pretending to be meek, only to disappear into the city.

Mystic River (2003)

Mystic River is a movie where the twist is more of a dagger to the heart than anything that changes the story itself. In this tale, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, three childhood friends from Boston reunite after the murder of the daughter of one of them. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is now a cop, Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con now running a corner store, and Dave (Tim Robbins) is a married man dealing with trauma after being sexually assaulted as a child.

Jimmy believes Dave killed his daughter, so he kills Dave. The twist is the gut punch when Sean finally catches the real killers after Jimmy has already killed Dave. Watching Jimmy kill his own childhood friend for something he didn’t do is horrifying, especially since Dave had already suffered so much in his life. It is an emotionally devastating reversal.

Arlington Road (1999)

Arlington Road is a movie where the twist completely destroys everything viewers have been watching up to that point. The plot sees a widowed George Washington University professor, Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who teaches about domestic terrorism. He grows convinced his friendly new suburban neighbors, Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins) and Cheryl Lang (Joan Cusack), are hiding a terrorist plot. He is right, but no one else ever realizes this.

The twist comes when Michael’s discovery about them turns out to have been engineered by them. They choose him as a patsy, and when he races to stop their act of terrorism, the bomb goes off anyway, and all the authorities believe Michael is the terrorist. Oliver and Cheryl leave at the end for their next act of terrorism, and it is a crime movie where the dark twist ending reveals that the bad guys win.