The best M. Night Shyamalan twist endings are the ones that bolster the larger point his movies are making. Consider his 1999 breakout success “The Sixth Sense,” a film about how honest and open communication can allow us to make peace with our ghosts (in both a figurative and, for the purposes of its story, literal sense). Or take his 2004 offering “The Village,” a tale about loss and grief and how they can spur people to reject social progress in ways that are suspect at best and outright harmful at worst. For as much as that movie’s third act rug-pull was unjustly ragged on in its time, the actual message it was meant to drive home (one that was especially pointed for U.S. audiences arriving three years after the September 11th terrorist attacks) came through all the louder for those willing and able to hear it.
There are occasions, admittedly, when Shyamalan has included a convoluted denouement seemingly for its own sake, as though he felt the need to try and one-up himself. M. Night joints like “Knock at the Cabin” and “Trap,” on the other hand, all the better because they forgo tossing a last-minute curveball at audiences, preferring to instead follow the twisted trails they’ve blazed for themselves to their distressingly logical conclusions. (“Knock at the Cabin,” in particular, has one of the more powerful — and darker — endings in his oeuvre without having to take a hard-left turn to get there.) He’s almost certainly not done with surprise endings entirely, but it’s good to see the “Master of Twists” becoming increasingly comfortable not always doing the thing he’s most famous for.
Besides, even he would tell you that when it comes to all-time cinematic plot twists, we’re all just chasing the ghost of Rod Serling anyway.