The most shocking movie moments of 2023 really ran the gamut in terms of genre, from terrifying horror movies to uproarious comedies to chilling psychological dramas.
Intimate awards contenders like All of Us Strangers, big-budget rom-coms like No Hard Feelings and scary robot flicks like M3GAN all offered up seriously shocking scenes that left us stunned well after the credits stopped rolling.
From disturbing demonic possessions to unexpected dance scenes, here are the most shocking movie moments of 2023. (And, if it's not already obvious given the subject matter, SPOILERS are very much ahead.)
The most shocking movie moments of 2023
All Of Us Strangers: Paul Mescal is actually dead
This wistful fantasy drama from British director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) tells two tales at once. One is a tragic ghost story about an adult man named Adam (Andrew Scott) who encounters his parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) just as they were on the day that they died 30 years before. The second is a burgeoning love story, between Adam and his mysterious new neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) in a nearly empty London high-rise.
However, by the movie's end, it turns out that Harry is also a ghostly figure and his sweet romance with Adam actually never happened. Instead, Harry seemingly died after his and Adam's very first meeting, when Harry tried to come by Adam's apartment with a bottle of Japanese whiskey. In the final scene of the movie, we see Adam come upon Harry's long-cold corpse in his bed, that very same bottle of whiskey next to him. Adam movingly cradles the spirit of his imagined lover in bed as "The Power of Love" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood plays out over the credits.
Foe: Paul Mescal is actually AI
Yes, Paul Mescal strikes again. In Foe, the Garth Davis-directed sci-fi thriller adapted by Ian Reid's 2018 novel of the same name, Mescal plays Junior, a man living on a remote farm in the climate-ravaged near future with his wife, Hen (Saoirse Ronan). Their simple life is shaken when a stranger, Terrance (Aaron Pierre), arrives and tells Junior he has been selected to participate in a new government space program. He will be at the space station for several years and in the meantime, Hen will be kept company by an AI robot that looks exactly like her husband.
It's all very mind-boggling, but even more so when you get to the big twist, where it's revealed that the Junior we thought we've known the whole time has actually been the AI replacement and the real Junior is now just returning from space after several years. It's an especially harrowing scene, as the substitute Junior is separated from his "wife" and heartbreakingly "turned off" in front of her.
No Hard Feelings: JLaw's nude fight
Given the premise of raunchy R-rated rom-com No Hard Feelings — which stars Jennifer Lawrence as a down-on-her-luck 30-something hired by a wealthy couple (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) to seduce their inexperienced 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman) — we knew there would be some salacious moments throughout.
What we were not expecting, however, was a full-blown fight scene between a very naked Lawrence and a group of drunken teenagers on a beach. And if you're wondering if the Oscar-winner employed a body double for the bawdy bout of physical comedy, that was Lawrence herself at her most fearless. The actress told Variety: "Everyone in my life and my team is doing the right thing and going, 'Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?' I didn't even have a second thought. It was hilarious to me."
Knock at the Cabin: the cult was right
From "I see dead people" to "They called me Mr. Glass," it's not an M. Night Shyamalan movie without more than a few twists and turns. Knock at the Cabin, an apocalyptic horror movie based on the 2018 Paul G. Tremblay novel The Cabin at the End of the World, is no exception.
A couple, Eric and Andrew (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), and their 7-year-old daughter Wen are vacationing at a remote cabin. Their trip is interrupted, however, by four intruders (Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint and Abby Quinn) who turn up to the cabin and posit a seemingly ludicrous proposition: the world is facing an impending apocalypse and the only way to stave off Armageddon is if the young family sacrifices one of their own.
It's, of course, an impossible choice and for the majority of the movie, Eric, Andrew and Wen don't believe the cultish strangers. However, as more and more plagues are unleashed around the world — a tsunami destroying California, planes falling straight from the sky — Eric starts to believe the intruders are telling the truth and the individuals are really the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He convinces Andrew to sacrifice him and once he dies, the plagues end.
M3GAN: the dance breakdown
Jump scares and plot twists are staples of the horror genre. Dance scenes usually are not. That is, until M3GAN — an artificially intelligent doll who develops self-awareness and turns murderous toward anyone who comes between her and her human companion, Cady (Violet McGraw) — startlingly cuts a rug in the middle of, you know, cutting people.
In the now-viral movie moment, the A.I.-powered toy gets down to "Walk the Night" by Skatt Brothers before whipping out a guillotine blade and taking care of David Lin (Ronny Chieng), the CEO of the company her creator works for. Given that M3GAN doesn't boogie at other point in the freaky flick, it definitely takes viewers by surprise. Talk about killer moves.
Saltburn: that tub scene
It's honestly difficult to choose only one shocking moment from Saltburn, Emerald Fennell's black comedy starring 2024 Golden Globe nominee Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant.
There's the scene Koeghan's Oliver — an Oxford student who becomes obsessed with a wealthy fellow student, Felix (Elordi), who invite him to spend the summer at his family's spacious estate — has sex with Felix's grave. Or when he pulls Pike's breathing tube, killing her. Or his dance around the Saltburn estate in his birthday suit to Sophie Ellis Bextor's "Murder on the Dancefloor."
But the provocative pièce de résistance is the scene where Oliver secretly catches Felix masturbating in the bathtub. After Felix leaves the bathroom, Ollie sneaks in... and slurps up the effects of Felix's pleasure from the bathtub drain. We'll never look at a bath basin the same way again.
Cocaine Bear: the ambulance chase
"This sequence was The Fast & the Furious — but one of the cars is a bear," director Elizabeth Banks told Vulture about Cocaine Bear's absolutely absurd ambulance chase, which sees the 400-pound drugged-up beast attack an ambulance carrying Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) and paramedics Beth (Kahyun Kim) and Tom (Scott Seiss). It's a gory, gruesome thing to behold, especially contrasted with a synth-pop soundtrack of Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough."
But what's even more shocking is that the horror-comedy movie is actually loosely inspired by a true story. Yes, back in 1985, an American black bear accidentally ingested several kilograms of a bag about 75 pounds of smuggled cocaine. You know what they say: truth is stranger than fiction.
