The 5 Best Thriller Movie Climaxes Ever (& The 5 Worst)

The thriller genre is known for its innate excitement and tension. Many of the greatest films of all time would be considered thrillers, and the majority of them have exceptional final sequences full of action, reveals and twists. However, thrillers are often an area that filmmakers think they can instantly dominate by placing a huge twist at the end of their picture. It doesn’t always work.

We’ve compared the five best final, climactic moments of thriller films to five films in which those key last moments are wasted on something bland, boring or nonsensical.

10 BEST: The Prestige (2006)

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige was one of three major films from the year 2006 to look at the world of stage magicians. Audiences were gripped by the incredible tricks shown during the film (and confused about how they were happening!) and enamored by some fantastic performances throughout (such as David Bowie as Nikola Tesla). The final moments gave fans a double twist: Borden was using his identical twin, while Angier was duplicating himself each night.

9 WORST: The Number 23 (2007)

Jim Carrey tries so hard to get himself away from the goofy comedy he is known and loved for, but not every serious attempt can be on the level of The Truman Show. The Number 23 saw him take on this uber-serious thriller about a man obsessed with the 23 enigma after reading a book strangely similar to his own life. The ending reveals that his character is a murderer who wrote the book as an extended suicide note before a botched suicide attempt left him with amnesia.

8 BEST: Memento (2000)

While The Number 23 is a classic example of amnesia being poorly executed, cheap twist, Memento is the exact opposite. The audience knows there is more to the story from the shifts between black and white and color filming, and the complex non-linear presentation, but we spend the entire film not knowing quite what it is.

The fantastic climax allows the two sides of the story to collide and reveal that Leonard was using his amnesia against himself by convincing himself that people that have wronged him are the ‘John G’ he is hunting. Genius.

7 WORST: Glass (2019)

M. Night Shyamalan managed to show the world that he was an exceptional director through the brilliant The Sixth Sense. However, this final film in the Unbreakable trilogy failed to hit the mark with its twists and turns. His 2016 film Split ended with the (very clever) twist reveal that it was actually a sequel to Unbreakable, but the film that connected the two, Glass, was a lackluster ending full of twists for the sake of twists.

6 BEST: Identity (2003)

John Cusak and Ray Liotta team up for the fantastically underrated 2003 thriller Identity. The film starts out as a moody pseudo-slasher, before diving headfirst into one of the most game-changing psychological twists of all time. The heavily developed expectations of a murder mystery created throughout are explosively subverted during that divisive third act.

5 WORST: The Game (1997)

David Fincher is almost incapable of creating a bad film, and The Game certainly isn’t a bad film. However, with Fincher, you know there is more to what you see. The entire premise of the film is that Nicholas has been put inside a game as a present from his brother, and from the start, it’s a little too easy to see that the game is going to seem real, and then be revealed as part of the game all along. Thrilling, but a little predictable.

4 BEST: Shutter Island (2010)

Martin Scorsese’s return to the thriller genre came in 2010 with the huge success of Shutter Island. The dark mystery of the film was a visual delight full of foreshadowing, but it was the twist and those final moments that really made the film a masterpiece.

After the reveal that Teddy Daniels was just a patient undergoing a particularly extreme attempt at therapy, he asks if it would be better “to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” and seemingly wanders away, cured, but unwilling to go on remembering what he did.

3 WORST: Gone Girl (2014)

Much like The Game, Gone Girl is yet another great film from David Fincher. However, the big twist of the film comes halfway through, when it is revealed that Amy is still alive and framing her husband. The actual final moments are rather lackluster and unrealistic: Amy is back and Nick has to carry on with life knowing what his wife has done, because her twisted mind has found a way to keep him at her side, rather than gathering all of his proof and telling the police.

2 BEST: Fight Club (1999)

The final entry from David Fincher on this list is arguably his greatest achievement: Fight Club. The film polarised critics at the time, but quickly went on to be re-evaluated and is now considered a true and deserved cult classic. The film is interesting enough anyway, but the reveal that the two central characters are simply two halves of the same mind is nothing short of astonishing.

1 WORST: Serenity (2019)

Serenity is a comparatively recent film, but has already started to go down in history as having one of the worst, film-ruining twists of all time. After a relatively bland thriller story, it is revealed that the events of the film are coming from a game programmed by Patrick to escape his abusive step-father.