Spoiler alert: talk of what happens in several recent films ahead.

Two screenwriting trends that have emerged in recent years have caught my attention. The first is the device in which, while at first glance the movie appears to tell a straightforward story, in fact part of the story was not 'true' in the movie's world. It was either made up or dreamed or fantasized by one of the characters. 'Figuring out' the movie then entails determining where this break between the movie's reality and the character's fantasy occurred, absent any of the usual cues like wavy lines or ethereal music, though sometimes with more subtle ones. The Usual Suspects, Mulholland Dr. and Swimming Pool could all be cited as examples. The funny thing about this technique is that only critically acclaimed movies seem to use it. I'm not aware of any crappy movies that had such a twist in them. Some are probably out there, but they're forgotten indies or B movies rather than Hollywood blockbusters.

The other trend is the ambiguous ending, which sometimes renders the entire plot ambiguous. In this case, there is usually evidence presented for multiple explanations of the action, but it seems to have been carefully balanced so that only each viewer's personal prejudices will lead them to conclude that one or another was what really happened. I hesitate to name examples for the reasons below, but the one I just watched that inspired this was Caché. I think The Minus Man also qualifies, or at least it wanted to.

There are two points to be made, and this thread illustrates both pretty well. First, these two techniques tend to dovetail. For many films that appear to divert from reality into a character's fantasy, the question can be asked, did they just imagine all that, or did it really happen? This is the case at least for Memento and Swimming Pool. And for any film with an ambiguous ending you can find at least one person arguing that some part of the movie was just imagined. The second is that the ambiguous ending is particularly devilish, because you never know for sure if it was meant to be ambiguous, or if there really is one true explanation, toward which one piece of evidence tips the scales. After all there are many films, such as The Usual Suspects and Primer, which might seem inexplicable on first viewing, but in fact have perfectly logical explanations. This always provokes arguments, and thus this is probably the easiest way to make a movie that "you'll be talking about for hours!" The director always refuses to say anything one way or the other. The question often comes up in these arguments of what makes it a better movie. Does it make a point about realism or anything else to have a truly ambiguous ending? Are some of the explanations just too mundane to be true? After a while I feel a bit embarrassed to be debating something that seems to have been constructed for the sole purpose of being debatable--though again, most of the movies that use this have plenty else going for them, and meaningful ideas that are not weakened one way or the other by the ending.