The thriller genre has seen a number of fantastic films where the villain comes out on top. When crafting complex tales around excellent characters, allowing the villain to win is a powerful choice that must be navigated carefully. Even if the heroes are unable to emerge victorious, the film’s close must feel satisfying, making this plot device’s success so difficult.
This idea has been tackled in multiple genres. Some of the best superhero movies have allowed the villain to win. However, many of these must contrast this against a more heroic philosophical core, causing the villain’s win to either ring hollow or to be undone in subsequent story installments. Fortunately, thrillers have greater flexibility to explore controversial moral positions.
Institutions like the Hays Code in Hollywood helped to monitor morality in films for quite some time. Still, this was an artistic limit, and as such it was broken by films including the Marilyn Monroe-starring Some Like it Hot and It’s a Wonderful Life, the latter of which featured a villain who succeeded and escaped the film’s end unpunished.
Forcing moral guidelines onto a form as diverse as storytelling can be extremely limiting, and fortunately, the Hays Code was repealed fully in 1968, being replaced by the still-used MPAA ratings system. The movie industry has been better for it ever since, and this flexibility has allowed films like the following ten thrillers, where the villain wins, to flourish.
Fallen
The Denzel Washington-starring thriller Fallen has a deeply unsettling plot that sees a homicide detective played by Denzel Washington investigating what initially appears to be a copycat murderer. It turns out that the story is much darker, however, when supernatural elements are exposed.
The killer turns out to be the mythical demon Azazel. The film takes a darkly nihilistic tone in its twisted ending, which sees Washington’s character become the host for the demon before succumbing to poison, in an attempt to kill them both.
The movie’s ending makes it clear this was unsuccessful. Rather than dying, Azazel is transferred into the body of a cat, set up to commit more and more of the same murders that began the film.
The Usual Suspects
The ending of The Usual Suspects is often credited as one of the greatest twists in movie history. Keyser Söze, the criminal mastermind at the heart of the story, is revealed to be the real identity of Kevin Spacey’s character.
Söze leaves at the end of the story with the entire tale unraveled. This clever twist helps to reframe the entire story, and make it one of the most satisfyingly rewatchable movies of the 1990s.
Directed by Bryan Singer, and written by Christopher McQuarrie, the movie’s ending is powerful, intelligent, and memorable, making Söze’s ultimate win a notable moment in the greater canon of thriller films.
Se7en
Another film where Kevin Spacey plays the villain, Se7en is a powerful and disturbing thriller that sees a pair of detectives investigating a series of murders thematically framed around the biblical idea of the seven deadly sins.
Starring Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brad Pitt as the film’s lead, Detective Mills, Se7en‘s disturbing ending is one of the most upsetting ever put to film. Spacey’s John Doe is revealed to have killed Mills’ wife. This causes the detective to react in violence, killing Doe.
This is all as Doe had intended. Even if the villain does not survive the film, the murder, framed as wrath, completes his own sequence of killings, all while destroying Mills’ own life and moral code.
No Country For Old Men
Cormac McCarthy’s incredible 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into one of the best movies of 2007. The film received almost universal acclaim, going on to win a series of Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
No Country for Old Men’s ending is more complex than many of the others on this list. Yes, the villain Anton Chigurh is not stopped by the heroes, and he does succeed in murdering Llewlyn’s wife. The protagonist is also killed offscreen, and Anton does escape.
However, Anton is then struck and injured by a car. While not fatal, this intense look at the chaotic nature of the universe and its fates makes the otherwise dour story more curious. The villain wins, certainly, but he is not as unbeatable as he seems.
Swordfish
Swordfish is an exciting thriller with a great cast, including John Travolta as Gabriel Shear, Halle Berry as Ginger Knowles, and Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson. The film explores the world of computer hackers, with Jobson recruited to steal government money, supposedly to fund a counter-terrorism unit.
Things are quickly revealed to be even more complicated than they seem, as Jobson navigates issues with the FBI and distrust of his own employers. This culminates in a powerful ending with some great fakeout deaths.
Knowles is not a DEA agent as expected, and Shear is the real villain of the piece. The story gets a bit convoluted, but the two clever villains escape together, succeeding in their plans.
Funny Games
One of the most upsetting movies ever made, Michael Haneke’s 1997 Austrian film Funny Games does everything it can to make the audience feel complicit in the murder of an innocent family. Two young men enter a home uninvited, and the story quickly becomes dark and twisted.
The film is intended to be a critique of how desensitized audiences have become to seeing violence on screen. In this, the film is imbued with subtle, quiet forms of psychological terror, leaning into the story’s inevitably dark end. One memorable meta scene even has one of the men rewinding one of the scenes to stop the family from escaping.
The innocent family is killed in the end, and the killers get away. The ending is unsatisfying and morose, highlighting the difficult themes that the filmmaker was looking to confront.
Saw
There have been a great number of Saw movies over the years, and the franchise has certainly been hit or miss. However, the ending of the first film, released in 2004, was a satisfying and unsettling way to close off the film’s unrelenting horror.
At the close of the terrifying film, after Adam acts out violently in dark moments of desperation, the corpse lying in the middle of the room stands up. John Kramer, the mastermind behind the traps, exits the room, locking Adam inside to die.
This surprising turn is satisfying, as the dark fates and intentions of all of the characters are finally laid bare. Kramer is the villain, certainly, but his moral focus is an interesting component that allows his win at the end of this film to still feel somewhat satisfying.
The Wicker Man
1973’s The Wicker Man is one of the greatest and most horrific thrillers of all time. In the film, Sergeant Neil Howie is lured to a remote island to look into the disappearance of a young girl. Once there, things take a turn for the twisted, with a series of disturbing scenes playing out around him.
The movie’s tone of folk horror is unusual and unsettling, and the events that occur around Howie lead toward the film’s powerful ending. There is no missing girl, and Howie has instead been lured to the island to serve as a sacrifice to pagan gods in an attempt to revitalize a weak harvest.
This ending is powerful and unsettling, and recurs largely in the same way in the disappointing 2006 remake. With a dark and upsetting tone, The Wicker Man remains one of the best movies of the 1970s.
The Silence Of The Lambs
The Silence of the Lambs was a huge critical and commercial success, even winning Best Picture at the 64th Oscars. And while the film’s primary villain Buffalo Bill is killed by the end, Hannibal Lecter escapes.
Lecter is perhaps the more terrifying of the film’s two killers: he is a ruthless cannibal, but often appears courteous, thoughtful, and even kind. This has made the character an iconic pop culture villain, examined in an entire franchise of films as well as a TV series.
Lecter helps to catch the film’s villain, and in doing so, finds a way for himself to escape from his imprisonment. He disappears to a tropical location, where he makes plans to kill again.
Gone Girl
David Fincher’s Gone Girl is a powerful film that takes a look at a dark and deeply disturbed relationship. Amy and Nick Dunne are far from the perfect couple they seem, an idea that is given focus when Amy goes missing. This disappearance is by her own design, as Amy embarks on a twisted journey to destroy her husband’s life.
Featuring dark violence and some truly sadistic actions, Amy makes it through to the end of the film unscathed. Rather than being punished for what she has chosen to do, Amy frames others for her crimes and finds a dark sort of reconciliation with Nick, holding him stuck to her in a depraved marriage.
A complex villain in a powerful story, Gone Girl is exactly the right kind of thoughtful, satisfying thriller that still allows for the villain to win in the end. It remains a must-see film for its direction, performances, and thrilling script.