All Slights Deserved

There's a gimmick that's gained prominence in cinema over the past decade that I find increasingly irksome. It cropped up in La casa muda just last week and here it is again, albeit Haute Tension preempted the Uruguayan film by several years. Let's call that gimmick EYTYKIW: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong. Now EYTYKIW is a somewhat different creature to the twist ending, which has been with us ever since cavemen began sitting around the fire telling stories. Twist endings are the final snap in a story, a little surprise to muse over afterwards. By contrast EYTYKIW typically comes at some point during the third act and gleefully exposes the artifice of narrative; those logical assumptions we've made while reading or watching a story. The interesting thing about EYTYKIW is it can be effective without necessarily being that much of a surprise. Anybody with a passing knowledge of old school psycho-thrillers won't have been taken aback by Scorsese's Sh...