The players are in place and the circumstances are set. The audience is expectant and the action can take place. Now, after an hour and a half of systematic misdirection and play-acting, comes the reveal.
“Everything you saw was a set-up.”
“Nothing is real.”
“Be amazed.”
The credits close the film with aplomb as the audience feels, thinks, and reacts in whatever way and through whichever means they’re accustomed to. The trick has been played and we have been had.
But have we? All the signs were there; the clever use of sleight-of-hand-editing to undermine the audience’s anticipation, the dialogue explicitly framing the impending twists and turns, and the premise of the film itself, which denotes impending surprise. Does the fault then lie with us, that we allowed ourselves to be manipulated? This is the conceit of the ‘trick’ films, which uses the capacity of narrative and the expectation it can create to direct the audience in a desired direction. However, through the various means of doing so, these films potentially undermine any affective connection to the film itself. This is to say that in the deliberate set-up of the final twist (or intervening turns), the film betrays its own ability to surprise the audience, which in turn betrays the possibility of narrative film to shock, cajole and incite emotion. Hate, whilst a strong feeling, is an acceptable response to these films. I hate that I initially was on board with this particular film, accepting its overacting and flashy visuals, only to slowly lose every iota of emotional connection to the plot, characters and conflicts. This hate is not directed at my response to the film, but how the film made me respond in this way.
Louis Letterier’s Now You See Me (2013) is the primary culprit, enticing the audience and creating various question and answer scenarios, whilst ultimately undermining the suspense he cultivates. The film sets a basic premise: a group of magicians are experts in misdirection, and any oppressive forces – the police, the rich, the pessimistic – will be duped and overcome. Featuring an ensemble cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fischer, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, Melanie Laurent, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, Now You See Me operates as a typical cat-and-mouse caper. The magician troupe The Four Horsemen come into conflict with federal agents (Ruffalo and Laurent), a billionaire (Caine), and a magic-doubter (Freeman) when they seemingly steal millions of dollars from a bank. Although their potential capture is seen as a possibility, the probable outcome in this scenario is their inevitable survival and success. This outcome is reached not solely through the conditioning of audience expectation with respect to conventional commercial cinema – the idea that every ending will be a happy ending – but also through the way the film frames the plot. The characters, as magicians, intimate every step of the way that what is happening isn’t what it seems. However, once this is accepted by the audience, the drama fails and the conclusion, no matter how ‘surprising’, lacks any emotional impact.
This is hatred towards films that twist and turn to the point where you lose all sense of direction and, subsequently, attachment. This hatred stems from the suspension of disbelief that is taken past the point of no return. Once the plot is made explicit, any attempts to create surprise can no longer exist. The complete lack of affective connection towards a film that relies on those connections is not the fault of the audience member, but on the way the film oversimplifies how it creates suspense and drama. This particular film’s main fault was not in its acting, storyline or ultimate climax, but in how the amalgamation of these elements resulted in my indifference towards the film as it concluded. Given the possibility of film to generate genuine human interaction and emotion, moving from suspense to apathy through the duration of the film is detestable.
This is not to say ‘trick films’ or ‘twist endings’ are altogether abhorrent. The Usual Suspects (1995), Fight Club (1999), and many other popular films with plot twists are commendable for the way they execute their final surprise, and how the cinematic world is constructed to allow for the greatest degree of audience involvement and genuine response to that surprise. Now You See Me, however, is of a group of films that includes Primal Fear (1996) and Unknown (2011) that execute the twist ending as a natural progression from the initial premise, but whose systematic creation of surprise is simultaneously dismantled throughout the film. When a question is framed as “will the heroes succeed?”, or “who is responsible for this orchestration?”, the answer becomes meaningless when those questions are accompanied by a lack of trust in the characters themselves.
Extending this supposition, the failure of a certain ‘twist’ endings lies in their inability to sustain the suspense and give away the notion of a twist ending. Fight Club succeeds because despite the explicit proof that the twist ending will come, the audience is taken aback by the very notion of a twist ending. The same applies to The Usual Suspects, where the audience’s logical conclusion may be supported by the film’s conclusion, but the film succeeds in creating surprise nonetheless.
As Charles Derry writes in “The Suspenseful Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock”: “If the creation of curiosity demands that information be withheld from the spectator, the creation of suspense demands that enough information be revealed to the spectator so he or she can anticipate what might happen; suspense then remains operative until the spectators expectations are foiled, fulfilled, or the narrative is frozen without any resolution at all.” In the instance of Now You See Me, the information provided does not foil the twists themselves, but the attachment to the twists as they happen.
If Now You See Me can claim any success (other than financial, which has spawned in a sequel due for release next year), it is how cinema’s ability to trick the audience is made inseparable from the film’s magicians to trick the audience. However, the hatred towards Now You See Me stems not from the notion that the film has twists, but from the notion that the film rests on twists that are explicitly hinted at when the film begins, as Jesse Eisenberg’s character claims “the closer you look, the less you see”. If they audience is asked not to look closely, but to look at the bigger picture, what happens when the bigger picture is fully seen? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that is the problem.