Before we start, a warning. There will be spoilers for both Fight Club and Angel Heart in this post. They’re both good movies so, if you haven’t seen them, go watch them before reading on.

I rewatched both Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) and Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987) recently and although I enjoyed them both, one of them handles its twist significantly better than the other.

Spoiler: It’s Fight Club.

Because I’ve seen both films before, I knew the twists going in and got to watch both films with a different perspective.

What I didn’t realize was that I only remembered half of the twist in Angel Heart. I knew that Robert De Niro’s character is Lucifer but I’d forgotten why he hired Mickey Rourke. Until their very first on-screen encounter where it immediately became obvious what was going on.

I don’t really go into movies trying to solve the mystery. I prefer to let the experience play out as much as possible. But my subconscious doesn’t always let me and I’ll find myself making little guesses as to what’s going on. Usually, I’m wrong.

That wasn’t the case with Angel Heart. The foreshadowing seemed so heavy-handed that I find it hard to believe that I wouldn’t have picked up on what was going on even on my first viewing.

Even if you missed the “hidden” meaning of De Niro’s character name (Louis Cyphre) then the whole some cultures-believe-this-egg-I’m-eating-is-a-soul scene is tantamount to sticking a giant neon sign saying “he’s the devil and he’s after Harry’s soul” in the background.

Again. I enjoyed the film. The blend of hard-boiled detective and voodoo drenched New Orleans hits all the right notes for me, but rewatching Fight Club was a very different experience.

Knowing the ending to Fight Club actually added to my enjoyment. You can see all the ways that David Fincher and writer, Jim Uhls, avoided breaking the illusion that Norton and Pitt are different characters. Incidentally, The Sixth Sense, is also very good at this.

There are very subtle clues throughout Fight Club that with hindsight might be enough to give the game away, but none of the neon signs you get in Angel Heart.

I wish I had a reference so that I could credit them, but someone (probably on Bluesky) made a really good point about clues in mysteries. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was that if you want people to realize that they missed your clues then those clues have to be obvious enough for the viewer to remember them when the big reveal hits.

That’s tricky in a movie and even harder in a book. It could be days between someone reading the author’s carefully constructed foreshadowing and them reaching the payoff at end of the story. That’s why you tend to find these sort of twists in short stories rather than novels.

The twists at the end of my books tend to be more about how all the seemingly unrelated threads come together rather than a very specific revelation that changes your perspective on the story. I’ll happily admit that’s down to cowardice on my part. It’s been a long time since I read the original Fight Club novel, but I need to revisit it to see how Chuck Palahniuk pulled it off.

[Fight Club vs Angel Heart by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 1st May 2026]