Movies with a great tonal shift

From Dusk 'til Dawn seems like an obvious choice here.

The one that sticks out for me is Muriel's Wedding which starts off as a breezy comedy about a fat girl and ABBA songs which suddenly shifts scenes with an emotionally abusive father, a mother who commits suicide and a best friend who contracts a disease which cripples her.

Its far to late to consider it a shift, but "Death to Smoochy"'s super happy alltogether now musical ending is great.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

From odd date who went wrong to high class what the fuck is happening, passing through a little scifi ending as a romantic movie after all. The scene between Dunst and Wilkinson is a great entrance into another vicious subplot.

Sunshine has a great tonal shift!

Save the Green Planet features about 15 tonal shifts, and they never fail to catch you off guard. Most good modern Korean films seem to feature a lot of tonal shifts, actually.

I think you have to differentiate between movies that have a sudden tonal shift and those that balance seemingly disparate tones. Full Metal Jacket vs. In Bruges. I really don't think any of the first three movies posted qualify as a rug-pulling tonal change.

It's very brief, but one of my favorites is the scene with Walken giving young Bruce the watch in Pulp Fiction. Walken's amazing monologue goes from deadly serious to straight-up stand up comedy in the span of one cut, and it totally works. Love the hell out of it.

If we're talking Danny Bolye, I didn't like that one at all.

Total Recall has about six--five overt and one subtle--so I'm not sure if it counts.

1)A bored guy at work goes for a vacation in VR.
2) Something goes terribly wrong.
3) The accident has revealed he is a spy and the film goes into full-out spy adventure.
4) The film goes into paranoid territory where Quaid is being led to believe that he's still at Total Recall and this is all the result of faulty programming in the spy adventure he ordered.
5) The film goes back to spy adventure.
6) The film finally subtlety reveals they were being honest with Quaid and he's being lobotomized back in the VR center.

That's a pretty awesome ride. It's the Ferrari engine of tonal shifts.

I'd nominate the Usual Suspects. From the moment Agent Kujan asks, "Who's Keyser Soze," the movie rises above your typical heist flick.

The Last American Virgin's third act is a brutal wet blanket on what was, for about an hour, a sub-par Porky's knock-off.

The recent HEARTBREAK KID movie with Ben Stiller. For the first 90 minutes it's a normal romantic comedy, even a little subdued for the Farrellys. Then Stiller's character gets dumped by his wife and stranded in Mexico, and transforms from klutzy, unassuming MEET THE PARENTS-style Ben Stiller into ranting, raving, DODGEBALL-style Ben Stiller, and it turns surreal, and he spends 10 minutes trying to sneak illegally into the US, and gets arrested by border patrols and beaten up by hobos on a train. Then for the final 5 minutes it reverts back to normal. It's staggering, and it's like the Farrellys just lost interest near the end of shooting.

Star Wars has a great tonal shift, from the explosive outer-space action and quick exposition to the relatively dialogue-free sequence with the droids on Tatooine, which almost plays like an anthropology documentary. We get to see the odd behavior and lifestyle of the Jawas without being told what we're seeing, and the whole thing is subtle and beautiful, with some amazing music and cinematography.

The Wages of Fear has the strongest tonal shift I've seen next to From Dusk Till Dawn.

I can't believe the thread has gotten this far without a mention of Audition. It wins.

When I saw MONSTER'S BALL, a dark drama, there's a bit near the end where Billy Bob Thornton is driving around at night, and it's seemingly the exact same shot used earlier, when Billy Bob Thornton is driving around at night and accidentally hits and kills Halle Berry's fat son.

When I saw the second driving scene, I thought for a moment that Billy Bob had actually travelled back in time, like it was meant to be a "history repeating" fantasy sci fi concept, and Billy Bob was doomed to relive his horrible moments. I thought, "What the hell, why did they ruin a serious-minded dark drama by making it a sci fi movie in the last 5 minutes?". I was half-expecting Imperiax the Time Wizard to appear in a puff of smoke and doom Billy Bob to relive the same fate over and over.

Then it became apparent that Billy Bob was just driving somewhere at night, and no sci fi or time travel was invovled. I may have been high when I was watching it, I'm not sure.

Taking into account the "fan theory thread", does Minority Report fit the bill here?

No.

Good, that clears it then.

I liked the transition in Sunshine quite a bit(not enough to use a pic from it as my avatar though...), as they were foreshadowing it the whole movie, which everyone seems to miss. If you weren't paying attention, i could see why you wouldn't like it.

One of my favorite character introducions.

Sorry, it's just a pet peeve when threads like this invariable waver to the point where we're almost not even talking about the subject anymore. Course this thread started out that way. Most of the movies mentioned don't even have tonal shifts, let alone major ones.

Its okay, i mean, had the "is the happy ending fake?" subject in that other thread never popped up, i wouldnt had mentioned it here.
its cool, you're very spot on on your comment.

Really? Staggering? Not once did I get that feeling from it. The conceit of the story is that there's a major bump in the road for that character that sets off a snowball effect of increasingly weird and outlandish bumps. Not to go all Robert McKee on it, but most solid scripts have turning points. The Heartbreak Kid is no different. Things escalate and develop over the course of the movie, but the tone doesn't shift anywhere near as much as you make out, especially not after most of the movie's over.

It seems like you're considering surprises and shifts to be the same basic thing. If you think about this, then ...Dusk Till Dawn, it's night and day.

It's a generally restrained romantic comedy for 90 minutes, and then it cuts to 6 months later, and Ben Stiller's in a big fake comedy beard and playing a completely different character, and he gets into a fight with hobos during a montage with "Under Pressure" playing. It's like if KEEPING THE FAITH turned into TROPIC THUNDER for 15 minutes, then went back to normal. The Farrellys clearly lost all patience and discipline.

Yeah, I dont think you can have a tonal shift within the first 20 minutes of a movie (Star Wars). There hasn't been anything established yet to determine that a shift has happened. And don't get me started on Total Recall.

75% of Japanese live action cinema.

That just doesn't sound like the film I watched, Paul. Music and Lyrics is a typical romantic comedy. So's Love, Actually. ...Heartbreak Kid is not a generally restrained romantic comedy for the first 90 minutes, a fact obvious after the initial reveal with Malin Akerman's Lila. There are any number of moments throughout (Jerry Stiller in the hot-tub w/the massively endowed woman, the "traumatized by his wife sex scene") that attest this. The initially somewhat normal set-up is a deliberate and effective feint to introduce you to the story proper which is an offbeat, often crass rom-com.

That Stiller's playing "a different character" at one point is too much of a stretch to even dwell on, and the only thing clear about that ending is that its meant to take that guy to the absolute extreme. Again, scriptwriting 101; out of the darkness, into the light.

The Frighteners. That movie takes one hell of a left turn after Jake Busey shows up.

It's easy to put almost any Miike movie in this list but I find his Happiness of the Katakuris has two of the best tonal shifts - from 1) the general offbeatness of the whole movie to 2) the point at which the wife is taken hostage by the escaped killer and the movie becomes an intense cinema-verite style thriller which suddenly morphs into 3) a song and dance number centred around how old people are close to death and, thus, expendable.

No one's mentioned District 9?

It started off like a sci-fi faux documentary and it had some funny bits in it. Then when the doc ends it turns into a serious sci-fi action film.

I think that the comedic SHAUN OF THE DEAD masterfully turns into all-horror and/or tear-jerking drama with ease in the pub climax.

I'll nominate Adaptation.

I can't believe it wasn't mentioned right away, but Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang jumps pretty deftly from silly comedy to effective drama from scene to scene. But another would be the Red Lights, a French movie that veers from domestic drama to noir thriller to something else entirely with each passing act.

This. Saw this without knowing anything about it and it hit hard.

The tonal shift in Irreversible is gut wrenching. The ending and overall structure fits perfectly.

Sure you can. If you can't see the desert scenes as a tonal shift from the first 5 minutes, then look at it as a tonal shift when the movie goes back to being a loud, explosion-filled movie set in outer-space. There's nothing like the early scenes on Tatooine in any of the other Star Wars movies, excepting maybe some of Luke's time on Dagobah in ESB.

Definitely need to make room on this list for DEAR ZACHARY: A LETTER TO A SON ABOUT HIS FATHER. Don't want to go to deeply into it because it needs to be unspoiled (if that's even possible now). But GODDAMN.

Sunrise is the winner, because it's probably the earliest and best. First half is a thriller about a man who decides to kill his wife at the behest of his mistress, second half is a legitimately touching and beautiful reconciliation where that man finds he actually still loves his wife, and she loves him.

No Country For Old Man--topnotch thriller becomes topnotch meditation on the morality of the modern age.

Barton Fink and Mulhuland Drive--Christ almighty the turns these take.

Finally, there's a batshit crazy film called Possession that I'm always pimping here. I don't know that the tone so much changes, as it's batshit throughout, but what starts and continues as a particularly dark relationship drama certainly becomes something...different...once the squid monster shows up.

I can see how there's a difference in going from an explosive action scene and then slow things down to introduce more characters, but I just didn't think it fits in this thread. There hasn't been enough established on screen or story-wise to say anything's really shifted. If that's the case, every single movie can be listed in this thread. It's like saying Commando has a tonal shift. It opens with a gun down of a guy taking his garbage out, and then cuts to a guy chopping wood and loving his daughter. Tonal shift!!

I guess your example does kind of work, but the given examples like From Dusk 'til Dawn and Full Metal Jacket really change tone in the second half of those films. I think that's more the point of this thread.

Wall-E is infamous for it's 180 tonal shift. It goes from being a post-apocalyptic silent film to a loud and shiny cartoon.

Agreed. Korean films are very guilty of this as well. I remember watching a Korean flick (don't know the name, the cover had no English on it), and it starts as a zany comedy about introducing planned parenthood in a countryside village, then does some crazy 180 turn involving a flood and a murder or something, I can't remember exactly what it had to do with the rest, because my head was thrown for a couple of loops. It's like they forgot the first half was a comedy involving jokes about condoms. Strange shit.

Also, I would nominate some Indian films as well. I remember Bride and Prejudice (sorry!) having 1 really out of place musical number.

This is what I came to submit soon as I saw this thread title. I know the gore and torture is the selling point to get awareness, but I really wished I thought this would be a romantic comedy before getting into just for to amplify the brutality. Great, great movie.

Beaten to the punch again! Loved that I saw this thinking it would be a Ghostbusters type romp, and left thinking it was more brutal than I imagined it would be.

Audition just came in second place.

I almost want to put Galaxy Quest on here as well but that might be more of a "have its cake and eat it too" kind of movie. It's a satire of the Star Trek fan base, then a straight up Star Trek parody, and then a straight up space opera without breaking a sweat. Would this count?

The Explorers

This one went from awesome "kids making a secret space ship, I love this!" movie to "I'm only 7 but I hate these stupid fake fucking retard carnival aliens" bullshit.

I feel very strongly about this one.

EDIT: Oh, sorry... that's not "great". I'm sure some of you liked it though.

I think people are forgetting the title of this thread.

Boogie Nights

Most of David Lynch's movies

Pulp Fiction

Happiness

True Romance

Predator 2

Return Of The Jedi

Hannibal

Edward Scissorhands

A Clockwork Orange

In the end there will be many worse examples of tonal shifts than Star Wars listed in this thread. The first Star Wars movie is weird. It doesn't follow a pre-established action blockbuster formula. Think about how audiences viewed it back in the day. Ridiculous pulp sci-fi action out of nowhere in the first few minutes, the type of thing that hadn't been done in years. Of course, it all worked because of the state-of-the-art special effects. And then they're watching a robot shaped like a trash can wheel down a desert canyon with a gorgeous sunset in the background. The whole sequence with the Jawas which follows is like nothing attempted in any other Star Wars movie, to my chagrin. For a few minutes the film just follows their work. As I said, it's done in the style of a documentary, and it feels closer to Lucas' work on THX1138, for which he used the conceit to a greater degree.

My point is that there is a sublime little section of Star Wars which is incongruous to the typical story structure of any of the later Star Wars films or even any of the break-neck paced action films it influenced. If you read many of the reviews of Star Wars from when it was first released, you'll find a lot of comments about the pace of the film. It doesn't seem to move along as fast today, but for a 70's film it was frenetic. And yet there's that wonderful, naturally paced sequence there at the beginning on Tatooine that is part of what elevates the original Star Wars film above any of the others (again, with ESB being the exception). The movie doesn't care to do things in an established way because there wasn't one yet.

I do think Full Metal Jacket and From Dusk Til Dawn are even better examples of tonal shifts, but both of those films' tonal shifts are accompanied by substantial narrative shifts as well. A simple tonal shift can be more subtle, and the shift in Star Wars is one of my favorites.

From Dusk Til Dawn had a horrible tonal shift. It did such a great job setting up this odd couple pairing of the Gecko brothers and this broken family and then BOOM! Vampires. I hated it...felt it should have stayed the kidnap/heist flick it started out as.

And I wouldn't say Star Wars had much tonal shift. The robots on Tatooine was mostly a locale shift to me. They'd already been established as the bumbling odd couple on the blockade runner and they're now stuck in the harsh, expansive desert as opposed to a cramped space cruiser. They're still with the program.

Moving from narrative to action sequences does not constitute a tonal shift. That's a really weird position to take.
This could be because there was no pre-established action blockbuster formula yet. Star Wars was among the films that invented the formula.

As has been pointed out by others here, some of you don't seem to understand what a tonal shift is. It doesn't mean balancing tones, or switching back and forth between narrative and action, or between quiet and loud, or funny and serious. It's when a film goes along for a while being one thing, then switches gears to become another thing, and remains that thing for the rest of the film. Star Wars shows you up front what you're in for with the Star Destroyer sequence. The fact that you have to wait a while for the next action sequence just means that it stops to set up its story and world.

From Dusk Til Dawn is a good example (although I despise that thing). Harold and Maude is another. H&M starts out as a black comedy about a kid obsessed with death, a tone it then unceremoniously drops as it follows Harold's discovery that life is actually worth living.

Star Wars does nothing resembling this.