Before Amitabh Bachchan’s Badla, here are 9 Hindi movies with the best, most unbelievable twist endings

As Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu treat us to another murder mystery with Badla, we revisit the 9 best twist endings in Hindi movies.

Actors Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu are reuniting again after Pink for the upcoming and second film together, Badla. The film, set for release on Friday is a classic whodunnit in which Taapsee’s character is accused of murdering her boyfriend and Amitabh plays her lawyer.

These 9 films made it to our list of best twist endings in Hindi movies. How many have you seen?

Reportedly, the Sujoy Gosh directorial is a remake of 2016 Spanish film The Invisible Guest, which was directed by Oriol Paulo. Could it be the next crime thriller that gets viewers biting their nails and sitting on the edge of their seats?

Before the film hits theatres, we have compiled a list of 9 Hindi movies with the best twists endings that no one expected. Did your favourite make it to our list?

(SPOILER WARNING)

1. Kahaani

Vidya Balan starrer Kahaani will definitely count among one of the few Indian films where the audience is kept guessing till the very last frame. That there was never a character called ‘Arnab Bagchi’, supposedly Vidya’s missing husband, isn’t revealed till the last shot, when we see her lighting a candle in front of the picture of her deceased husband, a person called Arup Basu. He was an IB officer, who was killed in the poison-gas attack in the Kolkata metro compartment, shown at the start of the film. Yet through the course of the film, the audience is made to believe that the person in the photograph she shows around is her husband. The truth is unveiled in the final moments when we realise that the man in the photograph is actually her husband’s killer, a person named Milan Damji, an IB officer who went rogue. Another high point is the discovery that Vidya’s character was never pregnant; a fact deftly hidden to arouse the empathy of both the characters in the film and the audience.

2. Bluffmaster

Riteish Deshmukh plays Robin to Abhishek Bachchan’s Batman in Bluffmaster; a conman-in-the-making who is taking lessons from the one who has made it an art form. Mumbai, it seems, is full of people who have been on the receiving end of Abhishek’s sleight of hand. This time, the two together are playing bait-and-switch with the master criminal himself, Nana Patekar’s Chandru. Before the heist is over, Abhishek will be conned within an inch of his life, criminals will be outed as blameless dialogue writers and Robin will teach Batman a lesson.

3. Ugly

The ending of director Anurag Kashyap’s low-key 2014 thriller Ugly could be interpreted as a ghastly twist on the Alchemist. The plot involves a struggling actor searching for his missing daughter in the underbelly of Mumbai, evading goons, gangsters and cops, only to realise that what he’d been looking for had been under his nose all along.

The film captures Anurag in his element, shooting guerilla style on the streets of Mumbai, and dealing with the outcasts of the city.

4. Drishyam

This 2015 Ajay Devgn film was a remake of 2013 Malayalam film by the same name. Ajay plays Vijay Salgaonkar, a big fan of murder mysteries and thillers. He watches these films all day as he runs a cable TV service in Goa. It all comes handy one day when his daughter accidentally kills a boy.

Having learnt the best and most foolproof tricks from the movies, he charts out a perfect plan to dispose the boy’s body and keep the police spinning in circles, even the boy’s mother who is the Inspector General of Goa. The film keeps the characters and the audience hooked right until the end to know where did he bury the boy’s body. A place where the police will never look: underneath the police station itself.

5. Kaun

One of the best films Urmila Matondkar has been part of, the movie written by Anurag Kashyap is a brilliant canvas showcasing the acting prowess of both Urmil and Manoj Bajpayee who plays the main role. A woman, fearing a serial killer on the loose, accidentally allows the killer inside her house. However, after she sees Manoj’s gun, she manages to get hold of the weapon and tries her best to save herself, calling up her mother and the cops for help. Throughout, we watch a scared woman in fear while Manoj behaves as killer with a twisted mind. However, the twist ending is remarkable when we realise that she is the serial killer. Directed by Ram Gopal Varma, the film hit theatres in 1999.

6. Khamosh

Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s debut film revolves around a film unit visiting Pahalgam in Kashmir for a shooting schedule where a budding actress (Soni Razdan) is killed and what follows is an investigation full of twists and turns and a series of murders. The film unit was supposed to be working on a murder mystery even as they face similar situations off camera. There are references to the American thriller, Psycho as the iconic shower scene is recreated and there is a looming fear of the supernatural. Released in 1985, the film also seemed to be taking a dig at filmmakers of the 80s – a speculation director Vidhu has admitted was true.

Unlike a typical Bollywood film, none of the twists are predictable and various layers of the characters add to the thrilling experience of the movie. Not only is it quite difficult to guess the murderer, the real killer is actually revealed in the beginning itself - only it is so wonderfully etched in the narrative that the audiences often miss it. With power-packed performances from Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Amol Palekar, Shabana Azmi, Sushma Seth and Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Khamosh is a treat to watch.

7. Special 26

What do you do when you fail an exam for the Central Bureau of Investigation? If you are Akshay Kumar, you find a few good men and women, do some serious research and form your own CBI. After a few heists, you lock horns with the real CBI and you outwit them. In the process, you leave Manoj Bajpayee and the audience completely flummoxed but thoroughly entertained.

8. That Girl in Yellow Boots

Kalki Koechlin’s 2011 film, directed by Anurag Kashyap, was one of his darkest and that is really saying something. Kalki played Ruth, a British woman coping with her sister’s suicide and looking for her father in the dark underbelly of Mumbai. She dates a drug addict and works at a men’s massage parlour to sustain herself. There, work is not always very pleasant and she often has to give her clients ‘happy endings’.

When she finally reaches her father’s doorstep, having located him successfully, she figures out he already knows who she is. She had met him before, at her massage parlour. He was one of her clients. One to ask her for a ‘happy ending’, knowing it all this while that she was his daughter. Let’s just say her story got far from a happy ending.

The ending is so harrowing and dark that even Anurag had himself said, “I hope you feel the film, because you will not enjoy it.”

9. Gupt

Kajol did it!

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