In addition to “it was all just a dream“, here’s another trope I’d love to get rid of: “He was never really there the whole time.“
This trope is so overused, so cliché, that at this point I can see it coming from miles. I just watched Goodnight Mommy and (spoilers) I knew within the first minute of the first interaction with the three main characters that Lukas wasn’t really there. We, the audience, were supposed to think he was, because the story is from Elias’s perspective. But it’s obvious from the get-go. Only someone missing a modicum of intelligence wouldn’t be able to tell.
I realized it as soon as Mom set a plate for one boy and not the other. Why would a mother purposefully ignore one child and not the other? There was no backstory that she was punishing the child for something. What kind of sociopath would starve her own child? Unless there was no child there in the first place.
Everything else just confirmed it–Lukas never interacts with anything, never picks up anything, never talks to anyone but Elias. No one talks to him, no one touches him. And there are no other characters besides these three. Only one person ever does anything that acknowledges his existence. And he never does anything that would require intervention by someone else (e.g., leaving a water faucet on).
And therein lies the flaw in incorporating this trope. You have to bend reality/plausibility so far back that the illusion doesn’t hold water when held up to the slightest bit of light. If a mother really was giving her son the cold shoulder, that is a blank check for a little boy to do all kinds of rule-breaking mischief. Draw on the walls, eat all the snacks, watch all the TV. Consequence-free naughtiness. But that would require the kid to interact with something, and he never does.
In order for us to believe that someone is a real person, they have to do realistic things. That means interacting with more than one person. With tangible objects. They have to respond to the world around them. But the author/filmmaker is relying on the absence of proof doing the work for him. It’s hard to detect what you’re not looking for, like “The Invisible Gorilla“. The problem is, I always see the gorilla.
And once you know what to look for, these hints glare like disco lights. Fight Club did it best, A Beautiful Mind is a close second. But the more you do it, the less it works. And if it doesn’t work, then it’s nothing more than a shaggy dog story. I skipped 40% of the movie, and I never do that. It was all just suspense and putzing until the twist was revealed. It’s been in The Boys, IF, Joker, an episode of Scrubs, and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven’t seen.
It’s a twist ending that’s adjacent to “tomato surprise” and “dead all along“. Stories are told from a perspective. Twists like this involve the author/creator having to obfuscate information that would be known if they were truly in that perspective. So they manipulate the text, control what they see, all so they can lie to the consumer. Or hide the truth, same thing.
