This is a continuation of reflections I developed in an earlier article. Through a personal reading of films and series, I am exploring how surprises can play a ground-breaking role in our interactions with reality, for better or worse. In cinema, grossly unexpected events oftentimes shatter the expectations of viewership and cut the rope which suspends their disbelief. If a character's action comes out of the blue or the ending resembles a deus ex machina, the narrative construct and fictional theories spun by the viewer unwind, only to become tangled in utter confusion and dissatisfaction. However, if the surprise lands, the viewer's experience becomes meaningful and memorable precisely because it was unexpected and cleverly prepared. Commonly referred to as plot twists, such moments entirely redirect the viewer's understanding of the narrative by making them aware of a hitherto unrealised, unrecognised and utterly surprising seismic motion within the film's internal mechanism. Interestingly, such surprising scenes, often accidental bearers of meaning, afterwards feel like an absolute necessity in the stories' progression. Although plot twists as such generate insights into the functional role of the unexpected in films, this article will suggest that the most effective surprise takes place when it is, paradoxically, entirely expected. The article contains spoilers for The Usual Suspects (1995) and The Summer of 84 (2018).

I. Repeated Reading


What makes a good plot twist? Think of the film The Usual Suspects (1995) directed by Bryan Singer. In it, a small-time and physically disabled con-man called Roger "Verbal" Kint, played by Kevin Spacey, is interrogated by the police for his involvement in the burning of a ship docked in San Pedro Bay, which claimed 27 victims and was at the centre of drug-related crime. The majority of the film is told through Verbal's recollection of what took place in the weeks leading up to the ship's immolation. All seems to point to a mysterious Turkish crime boss named Keyser Söze.

Dave Kujan, the U.S. Customs agent interrogating Verbal, connects the dots in Verbal's story and comes to the conclusion that Söze must be Dean Keaton, a career criminal and one of the victims claimed by the immolation. Kujan believes that Keating, being Söze, probably wanted to wipe his tracks by killing a smuggler onboard the ship who was able to identify him. Kujan then concludes that Keaton must have faked his own death on the ship and escaped disguised as Söze. Verbal corroborates Kujan's theory and his statement ultimately leads to his bail being set and his release.

The twist of the story is as clever as it is unexpected. As Verbal leaves the police station, his hitherto cramped hand starts to loosen, and his limping leg regains its strength. His identity as the physically disabled Verbal was all an act. Kujan, glancing around the room after Verbal left, realises that the story he has just been told by Verbal, including any references to names, places and other events, had been entirely constructed by Verbal referring to random objects, names, newspaper clippings and other pieces of nominal inspiration strewn across Kujan's office.  Looming behind Kujan is a typically adorned wall of a detective's office: photos of suspects, locations, inconsequential details, all pinned together into a seemingly random but perfectly meaningful mess revolving around Söze's identity. Fortuitiously picking out words and names from Kujan's wall, Verbal told him a cleverly spun piece of fiction. The common thriller trope of a detective connecting the dots of his chaotic evidence using a red thread is thus upended, with the criminal playfully pulling at the seams of the detective's meticulously constructed narrative of whom he is investigating. Kujan's coffee mug, which slips out of his hand as he realises who he has just let walk free, shatters alongside his reality.

When reflecting on necessity and contingency, The Usual Suspects is an interesting philosophical playing field. Not only is Kujan taken by surprise once the final twist is revealed, but so is the viewer, whose entire experience of the film's plot has been orchestrated by Verbal's fictional account of Söze. The ground-shattering revelation that Verbal is not who he claimed to be throughout the film is experienced as a satisfying plot twist which rearranges the convoluted and mysterious story unfolding until that point and gives them a hitherto unrealised meaning. In an almost Hegelian movement, the dormant truth of the film's central mystery, absently present from the very beginning in the form of a lying protagonist, is revealed as an intrinsic element of the film's internal logic and only reveals itself once the motion is complete. Only at the end do we as viewers solve the mystery by working out a truth which has been lingering in Verbal's fiction-within-a-fiction.

However, there is a downside to films which rely on their final resolution. Once the mystery is lifted, the pieces fall into place and remain there, motionless and without possibility to ever stir as stronlgy as they did before. A plot twist works as a singular surprise, a moment of momentary confusion turning into a static revelation. While there is of course beauty in rewatching such films in order to satisfy the curious desire to catch the action before the veil is lifted, for example by spotting moments which, for a knowing viewer, already give the ending away, the surprise itself is unable to be replicated. Viewing the film a second time is therefore not in any way an invigorating epistemological experience but rather a confirmation of an existing understanding. In a way, it aligns with Hegel's dialectical phrase, which, as Žižek often mentions, is only fully comprehensible when it is read a second time.

II. An Expected Surprise

What if we turned the notion of the plot twist on its head? The teen-horror-thriller Summer of 84 (2018), directed by Anouk Whissell, François Simard and Yoann-Karl Whissell, is a clear attempt to subvert expectations by cleverly leaning entirely on them.

The film follows Davey Armstrong, a 15-year-old paperboy enthralled by conspiracy theories and the possibility of alien life. Evidently wanting to find magic in the mundane, he becomes fascinated by the possibility that his neighbour Wayne Mackey, a popular police officer in their hometown Ipswich, may be an infamous serial killer called the Cape May Slayer. When he first shares his theory with his friends Woody, Curtis and Eats, they shrug it off on account of his general fixation on dubious urban legends. However, when Davey tells them that he saw a boy who recently went missing in Mackey's home, the group decides to take matters into their own hands and bring down the policeman-turned-serial-killer, walkie-talkies and all.

The film is, in general, rather inconsequential. It follows many teen adventure tropes taken from classic 80s flicks, such as The Goonies (1985), or copies of such films, for example Stranger Things (2016). Yet, the movie excels at one specific thing: creating surprise at the heart of something entirely expected.

Summer of 84 does not attempt to hide the fact that Mackey could likely be the mysterious killer. While never showing him committing any incriminating act during the boys' investigation, we become fully immersed in the teens' paranoia. For instance, Mackey leads Davey to a locked door in his basement while the boy is helping him carry down a piece of furniture right at the beginning of the movie, immediately causing suspicion about what horrors could lie hidden behind such a door. In a later scene, Davey catches Mackey spying on him with binoculars through his window and later places a walkie-talkie that the boys had hidden away on his property to spy on him on his windowsill to signal that he's onto them. Throughout the film, thus, the viewer learns to mistrust Mackey and truly suspects him of being the killer. Even when the film offers plausible explanations for Mackey's strange behaviour, such as him buying pound upon pound of dirt for his gardening project rather than the burial of dead children, the suspicion never truly dissipates.

Still, watching this film is akin to an episode of intense self-doubt. If you are somewhat versed in modern horror cinema, you expect recent releases to play with fundamental tropes. If the Goonies were a group of successful adventurous teens who snatch a pirate treasure out of the hands of experienced criminals, then it is almost to be expected that a 21st-century teen thriller would seek to subvert the notion that innocent children are capable of foiling the plan of a calculating murderer. Throughout the film, thus, you cannot but wonder if the directors are trying to take an unexpected turn by revealing the killer to be some unsuspected, innocent bystander, such as Davey's love interest, his attractive older neighbour Nikki, who, curiously, and to the surprise of everyone in Davey's friend group, starts inviting herself into his house to get to know him better.

The genius twist of this film, however, is precisely the fact that it opts to see the story to its end without the need of a real twist at all. After taking the viewer through a winding array of pre-climactic scenes trying to highlight Mackey as a likeable cop and further instilling doubts about whether or not he is the killer, the film stays true to its original project: telling the story of an observant and slightly paranoid and inquisitive child who sees right through Mackey's overly friendly demeanor. Towards the end of the film, Davey, Willy and Nikki break into Mackey's house while he is at a town gathering celebrating him for supposedly catching the serial killer. The group enters the locked door in his basement only to confirm their suspicion in a horrific scene: they find the missing boy now dissolving in a bathtub filled with sodium hydroxide, as well as another kidnapped teenager whom they subsequently rescue. In a scene which harkens back to The Usual Suspects, the group returns to Mackey's living room and Davey realises, much like Kajun staring at his web of evidence, that the framed family pictures lining the wall don't depict Mackey and his family, but rather his many victims and their parents. To Davey's surprise, he sees a picture of himself beside his parents among them, confirming his fear that he may be the next target. What is interesting here is that the ground-breaking moment for Davey is not that he was wrong, but rather that he was entirely correct and that all his suspicions, previously considered outrageous by his parents and peers, were justified, retroactively giving them a haunting quality. From the very beginning of the film, Davey has been right, and the viewer, cautiously expecting this conclusion, still ends up surprised by a horrifying reality.

After the resolution, the film moves to a scene which hints at a happy ending: Davey is back in the safety of his own home, his parents apologise for doubting him, he is hailed a hero and his best friend Willy sleeps over while the police hunt Mackey, who is now on the loose. It is within this entirely expected climax of Mackey being the killer and of Davey assuming the role of the hero that another likely twist takes place. Mackey has been hiding in Davey's attic and, once the house is asleep, kidnaps both boys before chasing them into the woods. The film's imagery rapidly increases in  violence, with Mackey slicing Davey's heel while he's scurrying away and cutting Willy's throat as he is trying to run to his kidnapper's car in order to escape. Upon finding Willy, Davey is toppled by Mackey who instils in him the greatest of fears through a calculated, eery monologue which he whispers to him inches away from his face:

All you had to do was leave me alone. This is your goddamn fault. [...] You stole my life. You did not need to be sorry. All I want to do is kill you. Isn't that enough for you? You have spent so much time thinking about me. I want you to keep thinking about me. I want you to imagine what I am going to do when I come back to you. And I am going to come back to you. After you've spent your life looking over your shoulder, after you've wondered every single day if that is the day that I'm going to come for you. One day, you'll be right.

Davey is given a sentence which revolves around a suffocating paradox: an expected surprise. Rather than taking revenge on the boy for causing his downfall, Mackey announces his second coming as an event without a date, a return without a departure. He makes it perfectly clear to Davey that his retribution is guaranteed, but by barring him from knowing when the day will come, he subjects his life to the rule of an expected accident, an almost tantalising prospect that some day his life will suffer a gruesome end and that his existence will hitherto be marked by a dreadful sense of anticipation.

What interests me in this film is how, as suggested earlier, it subverts the notion of the plot twist, excellently portrayed in The Usual Suspects, by turning a deducible, rational and logical reality into the horrifying twist itself. Once in the face of the child serial killer, all sense of meaning and hope gathered in Mackey's pursuit is lost and reality enters as a corrupt and cold-hearted cop, a sliced heel, a cut throat and a looming revenge. Davey, in wanting to unveil the real identity of the killer, comes face to face with the real in the shape of Mackey: Yes, you found out who I am, and now what? You've passed through the veil of illusion, you've successfully accessed a moment of truth, but this revelation is akin to a re-vealing, a repeated shrouding of clarity and a shiver-inducing realisation that, indeed, reality is exactly as harsh as you expected. No consolation comes after revelation, no comfort comes with knowledge. The very narrative spun upon reality bites back, even if it ended up being entirely accurate. Like Mackey's final monologue suggests, reality is a plan waiting to be foiled, a bad surprise to be expected. Lying on the floor, Davey is left to live a life under the header of a terrible fate.

The viewer, at the very end of the film, is left with a similar feeling of dread. The build-up towards the climax was nothing other than a straightforward development to a reasonable conclusion which still ended up being truly haunting. The final scenes offer glimpses into a new reality: Davey cycling with his bandaged foot, Nikki driving off in her divorcing parents' car to start a new life elsewhere, Mackey's house being up for sale and Woody's presence lingering as a bittersweet memory. Facing the expected has led to the realisation that what remains is a fragmented, elusive and unsolvable web of threaded, eery questions.

The surprise in Summer of 84 is not the fact that some unsuspected character turns out to be the killer, a possibility which is subtly teased throughout the film but ultimately only appears in a sceptical viewer's mind, but rather the fact that an expected conclusion can still end up utterly shattering you. Once Davey solves the mystery, all doubts are lifted, all suspicions confirmed and yet the expected outcome turns out to be the most surprising moment of the plot, offering no sigh of relief. Davey, who attempted to resolve the mystery and verify what he already expected by stumbling upon that one surprising piece of evidence which would satisfy his curiosity and give him a definitive answer about the killer's identity, is upended by the true horror of the film: unleashing the prospect of an ever-deferred, constantly and continuously expected and yet unexpected coming of a surprise.︎

Mathieu Buchler, co-founder of Mnemozine, studied philosophy at University College Dublin and at Freie Universität Berlin. He currently works as a writer, editor, photographer and teacher. He is co-director of Six Minutes Past Nine, curator at Safelight Paper and member of AICA Luxembourg.
You can find more of his work here on Mnemozine, on his website mathieubuchler.com or on Instagram @mathieu.buchler.

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