Sometimes its seems there are only a few different stories that movies are interested in telling. The romcoms, where the couple fall in love, have a misunderstanding, and then eventually make up and live happily ever after. The slasher movies, where the cast is picked off one by one until the final girl fights back.
But not all movies are so predictable. The following films head out in one direction before leaping the central reservation and speeding away to who knows where.
(Warning: This article contains spoilers for films including a recently released movie that we hesitate even to name at the top at the risk of revealing that it's this kind of film. And it's not The Emoji Movie.)
1. From Dusk Till Dawn
Written by and co-starring Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez's film initially unfolds as you would expect – as a fast-talking criminal caper with plenty of swearing and violence.
Everything ticks along much as you would expect until the somewhat loveable crooks and their hostages take shelter in a Mexican border bar called the Titty Twister (because Tarantino). There the writer/co-star is torn apart by vampires and the film veers into B-movie horror territory, complete with a band playing human corpses as instruments.
2. Audition
Audition is a cruel mistress, luring you into a false sense of security by presenting itself as a drama about a widower struggling with his loneliness. Convinced to get back on the dating game by a friend, we get a thread of light-hearted romance as he auditions various women to find the perfect partner.
And find her he does, and the rest of the film is dedicated to them falling in love. Of course, there's the occasional hiccup along the way, such as her turning out to be a vengeful murderer with a taste for cutting pieces off the men who have wronged her. And suddenly we're in a terrifying fever dream, and we don't know how we got here.
3. Sunshine
Danny Boyle's Sunshine remains just as divisive a decade after its 2007 release, and the arguments over its quality hinge on the point in the movie where it takes a surprising left turn.
It begins as a hard science fiction story about the crew of a spaceship on a quest to reignite the dying sun, with maybe a dash of mystery over why the previous mission failed. The film answers that by transforming into a slasher movie where a skinless man brutally executes the crew – a bit like an upmarket Jason X.
4. Titanic
Even faithful old Titanic can't be trusted, but at least we knew where this one was leading. Rose and Jack's period romance is a tale for all time, even if Leonardo DiCaprio's archetypal '90s curtains were utterly period inappropriate.
Inevitably, the iceberg intervenes and Titanic becomes a full-on disaster movie, aided by James Cameron's groundbreaking CGI destruction and that guy falling off the deck and smacking into the propeller.
5. Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock made a career out of playing with our emotions, and no more famously than in Psycho.
A woman steals a stack of money from her employer and goes on the run in a classic setup for a crime thriller. But as we all know now, when she stops for a rest in a motel, she is murdered in the shower. The film's protagonist is dead, the money that was the focus of the plot is sunk in a swamp, and we're left with a horror movie that is – or at least was, before it became a cultural touchstone – very disorientating indeed.
6. mother!
The Marmiteiest movie of 2017 begins as a home invasion-style horror movie about Javier Bardem being an awful husband and Jennifer Lawrence struggling to be polite to Michelle Pfeiffer's house guest from hell, Woman (yes, the movie credits her as 'Woman').
But spoiler alert! It transforms into a surrealist, dark-fantasy Biblical metaphor and environmental parable – and is probably the only film in which you'll see Kristen Wiig executing unarmed people in a dining-room-turned-prison-camp.
7. Hancock
From the trailer, you would be forgiven for thinking that Hancock is an anarchic action comedy with Will Smith playing a drunken superhuman who tries to get his life back on track while poking fun at superhero clichés.
And you would be right, but that would leave you surprised when it transforms into a po-faced romantic drama about god-like beings and incomprehensible plot twists.
8. Miracle Mile
Miracle Mile begins in classic romcom fashion when a girl and a guy share a perfect date at the La Brea Tar Pits (literal translation: 'the tar tar pits'). He fails to meet her later after work when a power cut knocks out his alarm clock, putting their budding relationship in jeopardy. So far, so ordinary.
Except the guy then accidentally learns that a nuclear war is about to end the world, flipping the switch to 'apocalyptic thriller'. Can love survive when only the cockroaches are left?
9. Hot Fuzz
Edgar Wright has a habit of playing with genre in his movies, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the second of his 'Cornetto Trilogy', Hot Fuzz.
What begins as a comedic whodunit set in an idyllic English village takes a final act turn into graveyard-set horror, followed by a second turn into classic '80s action film with all the slow-mo gunfights and explosions you could want.
10. The Talented Mr Ripley
You can't help but feel sorry for Matt Damon's socially awkward, sexually ambiguous Tom Ripley as he spins a web of lies to ingratiate himself with beautiful young rich people living on the Italian coast in this sunny period drama. How long until his new friends find him out?
You stop worrying too much about that embarrassing eventuality once Ripley uses an oar to grind Jude Law's face to pulp in the bottom of that rowboat. The movie takes a sudden twist into a psychological thriller where the body count continues to grow and our titular hero stops looking so loveable.
11. The Birds
If Hitchcock's Psycho is a horror masquerading as a crime drama, then The Birds takes the even more surprising tack of switching from romantic comedy to, well, horror.
Tippi Hedren is a mischievous socialite who goes to extreme lengths to get her man. But that all ends up feeling a bit irrelevant when the birds go wild and eyeless corpses start mounting up on the porch. Our heroine is reduced to a catatonic state by the disaster, but at least she's finally getting on with her beau's mother, right..?
