THE USUAL SUSPECTS

If a picture tells a thousand words, then what does a single note tell us?

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All Images © Gramercy Pictures / Polygram Filmed Entertainment

So it's the end of the movie. The cowboy walks out of the door [The Searchers], a hunted man emerges from his underground prison society to be faced with a setting sun [THX 1138], a man plays his saxophone in the apartment he has just ripped apart [The Conversation]... what are you feeling? What do you understand by that last shot? Are you feeling the same thing as the person sitting next to you on the sofa or the cinema seat? Is the final shot open to interpretation?

It may well be. And it may well be the intention of the director to advocate a set of different takes on what was just experienced by an audience member. But if you're Bryan Singer, maybe after a whole film of mis-direction, you want everyone to feel the same thing.

Ask most people how The Usual Suspects ends, and the answer will usually be Kevin Spacey saying [and in fact repeating from a previous scene]:

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was

convincing the world he didn't exist....

...and like that, he's gone."

But I always think of the cello. The cello's dark, stabbing thrust right after those final words. To me that is the end of the movie, the underline of intent, the reveal of the real deadly player that lies beneath Verbal Kint's facade of weakness and desperation.

The image of Verbal Kint disappears just before he finishes his fable, so that there is no competing image with the final musical florish. I'm a great beliver that images are intellectualised and music goes straight to your heart.

What's intriguing about the repeated use of the sequence to end the film is that it's not in Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay. Whether added by Singer or the film's editor and composer John Ottman is a mystery.