The Politics of Plot Twists: Cognition, Culture, and the Convention of Mental Illness

Plot twists have long become a mainstream mainstay, losing much of their ability to truly surprise audiences. A prevalent tendency in plot-twist films is to pit diegetic reality against protagonists’ subjective perspective as affected by a mental illness, connecting neurodiversity with (narrative) unreliability. This essay offers three alternative readings of this conventionalized type of twist films with a neuro-non-normative protagonist: as mediations of the fictional unconscious, as mediations of viewers’ unconscious, and as remediations of the role of mental illness. Drawing on cognitive film theory, the essay illustrates these readings using Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window (2018), whose surprising twist is that the protagonist does not have a mental illness. Subverting the convention of the unreliable, neuro-non-normative narrator, the essay argues that the film invites viewers to reflect on and question their own involvement in the (re)construction of narrative unreliability.