Turning on a dime: 15 great gearshift movies

Warning: "Gearshift movies," a term coined by P.T. Anderson, are films that head in one direction, stop on a dime, and veer off into radically different territory. Since the turning point is usually a startling surprise, it should go without saying that the entries below contain major spoilers. Proceed at your risk.

1. Psycho (1960)

Imagine, for a moment, that you'd never seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and knew nothing about it. To really make the thought experiment work, let's pretend you didn't even know it was called Psycho. What kind of movie would you think you were watching for the first 40 minutes? Psycho at first plays like the story of a woman of limited means who makes a bad decision, then tensely lives on the outside of the law. On the run after absconding with her boss' money, she slowly turns into a nervous wreck. Then she checks into a motel, meets a nice (though slightly nervous) young man, and comes to a decision: She will right her wrongs and return the money. But first, a nice shower… At which point Psycho throws out its carefully constructed moral drama and enters a place where personal values and tough choices get destroyed by insanity that lets life bleed down the drain. It also abandons its seeming protagonist to a grisly fate, revealing that the story was never really about her at all.

2. Audition (1999)

As with Psycho, the ideal way to experience Audition is to know absolutely nothing about it going in—not the genre, not the director, and certainly not any plot developments beyond the most basic synopsis. And even then, you have to be the sort of person who can stomach a movie this graphic, though knowing you need a strong stomach spoils the movie a little, too. The last third of Audition is what shocks most viewers, but fans of extreme J-horror maestro Takashi Miike are probably more shocked by the first third, which tells the story of a lonely widower with a restraint more common to a Yasujiro Ozu movie. When the man uses his post in a film-production office to "cast" a potential future wife, he finds the demure young woman of his dreams. Then, in one shot involving a telephone and the contents of a giant burlap sack on her apartment floor, the genre, the tone, and the audience's expectations all abruptly change.

3. Death Proof (2007)

Going into Death Proof, the hot-rod half of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez exploitation epic Grindhouse, it's pretty obvious that the movie is going have fast cars, sexy women, and a few violent intersections of the two. What comes as a shock is that the beautiful, charming ladies Tarantino dotes on at the beginning of the movie—dwelling on their conversations, and taking time to show them downing shots and dancing to songs on a barroom jukebox—aren't picked off one by one, with the survivors allowed to develop as characters as they struggle over time. Instead, they're abruptly killed en masse in a single terrifying act of vehicular homicide by psychopath "Stuntman Mike," played by Kurt Russell. It only appears that Tarantino is introducing us to the main characters; in reality, he's establishing his killer's M.O., which a different group of women will thwart in Death Proof's second half.

4. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)

F.W. Murnau's stark morality tale, one of the great achievements of the silent era, opens with a married man from the sticks (credited simply as "The Man," alongside "The Wife," "The Maid," et al.) sneaking off to see a foul temptress from the city. As they share intimacies under the moonlight, The Woman From The City convinces The Man to murder his wife and run off with her instead. But at the very moment he's about to drown The Wife, he recognizes his madness and has a sudden change of heart. From there, Sunrise quickly shifts to what amounts to a second honeymoon between man and wife, a delirious trip to the city that's a radical break from what has transpired before. But viewers can't forget so easily, and the revival of this moribund marriage carries a tension that wouldn't have been possible without the opening act.

5. Boogie Nights (1997)

P.T. Anderson put his love of gearshift movies into action with Boogie Nights, his sprawling portrait of the porn industry in the '70s and '80s, and the surrogate family of fucked-up stars and filmmakers caught up in its ebb and flow. Anderson shows an obvious affection for way things were done in the '70s, before hippie permissiveness ran smack into Reagan-era moral reactionaries, and before the video age laid waste to porn producers striving for some measure of artistic legitimacy. The difference between the two decades couldn't be drawn more sharply: As midnight approaches at a New Year's Eve party in 1979, with news of video's imminent rise already tarnishing the atmosphere, a despondent crew member, finally driven to the brink by his wife's infidelities, pulls out a gun. Blam! It's the '80s. The good times are over.