The Usual Suspects: The Twist That Ate the Film

Some films are remembered for a performance, some for an image, some for a line. The Usual Suspects (1995) is remembered for a single narrative move so effective that, thirty years on, it is genuinely hard to talk about anything else the film does. The twist ate the film. The question a revisit has to answer is whether there was a good film underneath the trick, or whether the trick was the film all along — and that turns out to be a more interesting problem than it first appears.

I saw it the way its makers wanted, cold, no idea what was coming, on a rented tape a friend pressed on me with the instruction to say nothing to anyone. The reveal detonated exactly as designed. What I want to test here is the thing you can only test on a second viewing: does the machine still run once you know where it is going?

The con of the flashback

Christopher McQuarrie’s Oscar-winning screenplay is built on a deceptively simple structure. A boat has burned in San Pedro harbour, most of a criminal crew is dead, and a burned, jittery survivor — Roger “Verbal” Kint, played by Kevin Spacey — sits in a police interrogation room narrating how it all went wrong. The film is his story, told in flashback to Chazz Palminteri’s Customs agent Dave Kujan, who is convinced the answer is a dead cop-turned-crook named Keaton.

The crucial craft decision is that director Bryan Singer visualises Verbal’s narration as if it were objective truth. We see the flashbacks; we believe the flashbacks; the film’s images carry the authority of fact. That is the con, and it is a con played on the audience through the fundamental grammar of cinema — we trust what we are shown. McQuarrie and Singer weaponise that trust. Every noir since Double Indemnity has used the confessional flashback, but most play it straight. The Usual Suspects uses the form itself as the murder weapon.

The engine of the plot is the story of Keyser Soze, a Turkish criminal of near-mythic ruthlessness who the crew comes to believe is orchestrating everything. Soze is described in a monologue so vivid it does the work of a dozen scenes we never see — a legend built entirely of hearsay, which is the film quietly telling you what it is made of.

The line-up and the lightness

Before the machinery closes, The Usual Suspects is genuinely fun, and that is under-remembered. The assembled crew — Gabriel Byrne’s haunted Keaton, Stephen Baldwin’s live-wire McManus, Kevin Pollak’s Hockney, Benicio del Toro’s mumbling, gloriously incomprehensible Fenster, and Spacey’s twitchy Verbal — has real chemistry. The police line-up scene, where they are supposed to deliver a phrase deadpan and instead corpse and improvise, was reportedly a genuine case of the actors breaking, and Singer kept it because the looseness sells them as a crew. Del Toro’s decision to make Fenster nearly unintelligible is one of the great weird supporting choices of the decade, an actor gambling that a mush-mouthed cipher would be more memorable than a clear one. He was right.

For a while the film plays like a caper — a jewel job, a taxi-service heist, banter and double-cross. The collector’s note: this loose-crew energy descends from the great ensemble heist pictures, and it is worth setting beside Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, released three years earlier, which similarly hides its actual robbery offscreen and lives instead on the men talking around it. Both films understand that the pleasure of a crime movie is often the assembling and the aftermath rather than the job itself. If you want the fuller argument, the heist film is really about process makes the case at length.

Why the twist works — as mechanism

Set aside whether the twist is “fair” for a moment and admire it as engineering. A great twist has to satisfy two contradictory demands: it must be genuinely surprising, and it must feel inevitable in retrospect. The Usual Suspects nails both because Singer plants the mechanism in plain sight. The reveal is not information withheld; it is information you were shown and taught to disregard. On a rewatch, the “how” is visible in nearly every frame of the interrogation room, and that is the mark of an honest trick rather than a cheat.

This is the same family of pleasure as Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, whose reveal similarly recontextualises everything before it, or Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs, which runs its whole plot on the audience knowing what the characters do not. Where those films use the twist to deepen tragedy, The Usual Suspects uses it as a punchline — a magician’s flourish, a curtain whipped away.

And that is the crux of the revisit. The twist is a magnificent piece of engineering, and it is also, arguably, all the film is engineered to deliver. Which is the problem the second viewing exposes.

The unreliable narrator on trial

The device at the centre of the film has a long literary pedigree, and the revisit gains from placing it there. The unreliable narrator is old — Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie’s most notorious novel, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon — but cinema resisted it for decades because film’s images feel like objective proof in a way a first-person sentence never does. When a novel’s narrator says “I saw a man in a green coat”, you know a person is telling you; when a film shows you a man in a green coat, the medium itself seems to vouch for it. The Usual Suspects exploits exactly that difference. It is one of the first mainstream thrillers to treat the flashback as a potential lie and to make the lie the entire structure.

What McQuarrie gets right is the discipline of the frame story. The interrogation room is the only space we can be sure is real, and Palminteri’s Kujan is our stand-in — smug, certain, sure he has the answer, and wrong in the most complete way possible. His arrogance is the film’s moral: the man convinced he cannot be fooled is the easiest mark of all. That single idea gives the twist a spine of meaning it might otherwise lack, and it is the reason the ending feels like a comeuppance rather than merely a gotcha.

The verdict

The Usual Suspects is a brilliant machine that runs once at full power and thereafter idles. That first viewing is one of the great pure-cinema experiences of the nineties, and no rewatch can take that away. But strip out the surprise and you are left with a well-acted, cleverly plotted crime film whose emotional stakes were always a bit thin — a puzzle-box that prizes the click of the lock over anything inside it. That is a real limitation, and it is why the film is admired more than it is loved.

Watch it for the construction, and for a supporting cast having a wonderful time before the trap shuts. Then, if you want twists that deepen rather than merely dazzle, follow it with Oldboy and Infernal Affairs to see the same device carrying real grief. It streams widely; the film is dialogue and faces, so transfer matters less than usual here.

Spoilers below

The whole point of this film is a secret, so everything past this line burns it.

Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. The meek, limping, chatty little con man in the interrogation chair, the one the arrogant Kujan dismisses as a “stupid” nobody, has been fabricating the entire story in real time — inventing characters, motivations and events out of the names and words on the cluttered bulletin board behind Kujan’s head. When Verbal is released and walks out of the station, Singer shows us the con reassembling in Kujan’s coffee cup and the board: “Kobayashi” is a brand name on the bottom of a mug, “Redfoot”, “Skokie, Illinois”, the quilt of details Verbal wove his myth from, all hanging on the wall the whole time. Then the limp straightens. The hand uncurls. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, as Verbal has already told us in voiceover, was convincing the world he did not exist.

What the reveal exposes is that the film we watched may be almost entirely fiction. Keaton, Fenster, the boat, Soze’s murdered family — any of it, or all of it, could be Verbal’s invention. That is the source of the twist’s power and its hollowness at once. Because nothing in the flashbacks can be trusted, nothing in them can carry lasting weight; the emotional investment we made in Keaton’s doomed romance evaporates the moment we learn its narrator was lying. Gabriel Byrne has spoken about not being entirely sure, on set, who his character even was.

On a second viewing you watch Spacey’s performance instead of the plot, and it is genuinely excellent — the micro-tells, the way “Verbal” flinches and hesitates precisely when a real innocent would, all of it a performance-within-a-performance. That is the film’s one durable pleasure once the surprise is gone. The mystery is solved forever; the acting is the thing you come back for. A twist that great is a gift you can only open once, and the film knows it, which may be why it ends on a wink rather than a wound.