12 Movies Where The Protagonist Winds Up Being The Villain

Primal Fear gets unfairly lost in the shuffle of great '90s thrillers about dissociative identity disorder. After troubled altar boy Aaron Stampler (Edward Norton) is arrested for killing powerful archbishop Rushman (Stanley Anderson) in Chicago, vain defense attorney Martin Vail (Richard Gere) takes on the high-profile case, convinced of the young man's innocence. 

As Martin uncovers a troubling history between Aaron and the archbishop that could point to a motive for his murder, Aaron transforms into a second personality, the psychotic "Roy," and confesses to the deed. Following an examination by an accredited psychologist, it is concluded that Aaron has a split personality, and has no awareness of "Roy." After turning into Roy on the witness stand and threatening to snap the neck of lead prosecutor Janet Venable (Laura Linney), Aaron is eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity, and is set to be remanded to a psychiatric institute for long-term care.

But that is when things get even stranger. Aaron, who claims never to remember his spells as Roy, slips up in an exit interview with his lawyer, mentions the efforts of "Roy" to snap the neck of Venable. Martin confronts him, and he drops his facade. There never was an "Aaron" personality. Aaron was always, and only, Roy, in terms of his psychological disposition. Aaron created the dissociative personality conceit in order to weasel his way into the eventual insanity plea. 

The poor, pathetic hero, a victim of cruel mistreatment at the hands of the archbishop, is actually a brilliant psychopath.

As The Others commences, single mother Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) lives with her two photo-sensitive kids in the European channel island of Jersey, near Guernsey, circa post-WWII 1945.

Grace has hired three new employees to help her take care of her family and maintain their country estate. Soon, Grace claims to see several "others" inside the home, convinced that the house is haunted. Things begin to cascade, as strange goings-on in the house further freak out Grace and the servants. 

The twist? We discover that Grace, her children, and the servants are all ghosts. Grace murdered her kids many years ago before taking her own life. The "others" are the actual, still-breathing occupants of the house, who are using a medium to channel Grace, her family, and the servants.

Fight Club kicks off with a disaffected narrator (Edward Norton), a self-described "30-year-old boy" who tours support groups for afflictions he doesn't possess and overloads on Ikea furniture just to feel something. He soon falls in with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) a soap salesman with a penchant for self-destruction. In their attempt to break free of the consumerist society that has imprisoned them, they begin squatting in a derelict house, and before too long they have started underground fight clubs, secret groups where the Angry Young Men who populate the working class beat each other senseless.

Soon, Tyler is sleeping with Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), the closest thing our narrator has to a friend. Marla, like our narrator, is a support group "tourist." This aggrieves our narrator, who clearly likes Marla, but has trouble expressing it. Tyler and our narrator's fight club society soon escalates into a demented terrorist sect, Project Mayhem. When our narrator tries to pull the plug, Tyler becomes evasive, seemingly staying just one step ahead of the narrator on a jet-setting journey across the country. Tyler, it seems, is determined to take Project Mayhem all the way.

When they finally encounter each other again, we discover that, in fact, our narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person. Tyler is the turbo-charged manic id of our insomniac narrator, the result of a dissociative personality disorder. Tyler is the beautiful terrorist psychopath sleeping with Marla and disrupting our narrator's sad life. Our narrator has been, to paraphrase a song popular in the era of the movie, his own worst enemy. Our narrator's solution for eradicating Tyler from his consciousness is insane but effective. He shoots himself through the mouth, and his visualizations of Tyler cease.

After his wife perishes in a freak magic accident, understandably bitter magician's apprentice Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) accuses his colleague Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) of botching her intended escape during the trick. They become arch rivals, committed to outdoing each other, and occasionally attempting to murder or imprison each other.

We eventually realize that neither character is really all that likable. Borden is actually a pair of identical twin brothers, each of whom loved a different woman. When one Borden brother discovers Angier drowned in a water tank beneath the stage of his latest transportation trick, he is arrested, only to be met in prison by a still very-much-alive Angier, who arrives with Borden's daughter, intending to raise her as his own. Though Angier is still alive, he does not make his presence known before Borden is put to death. We discover that Angier's transportation trick employs a duplicator machine invented by Nikola Tesla, which creates two Angiers every night, leaving the second doomed to perish at the end of the trick. Angier is replicating himself, and killing the originals, night after night.

The surviving Borden eventually does away with all Angiers and reclaims his daughter.

All-American movie star Kevin Costner playing a sleeper USSR agent?? Say what?

In one of the few true heel turns of his career, Costner portrays a seemingly very Costner-esque hero type, US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell. Tom witnesses the accidental-ish murder of his girlfriend Susan Atwell (Sean Young) by her other lover, Tom's boss, Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman, who would later play a very similar character in Absolute Power). When Brice suspects that whoever witnessed the murder was actually a covert Soviet operative, code-named "Yuri," working within the Department of Defense, Tom pulls some strings to clear his name, convincing his friends that, while he was in love with Susan, any connections between himself and Yuri are purely circumstantial.

Of course, the fun twist to that is... Tom is Yuri, a hero of the Soviet Union, and the actual villain of the movie. It is quite jarring to see Costner speak eloquent Russian. His handlers determine that it's prudent he be extracted from the States, but he opts instead to quit the spy game altogether.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a former insurance investigator struck with anterograde amnesia, is obsessed with avenging the death of his wife Catherine. Though her first attacker was brought to justice, Leonard is convinced there was a second, named "John G.," and is struggling to grapple with his own memory issues while tracking his movements. The narrative of Memento is told in reverse-chronological order for most of the story, as we build from the end of the story to its beginning, before ultimately hopping back to the end. Leonard gives himself a series of body tattoos, knowing that he cannot form new memories, in the hopes that he will eventually be able to piece the puzzle together.

Unfortunately, we also discover some uncomfortable truths about Leonard during the story. Leonard may be misremembering denying an insurance claim to another man with his condition, Sammy, who inadvertently gave his wife a fatal insulin shot because he could not recall having administered a shot to her just moments before. We know for sure, though, that Leonard and a man claiming to be an undercover cop, John Edward "Teddy" Gammell (Joe Pantoliano), tracked down and killed the real John G. a year ago, and that they have been taking out men named John G. ever since, driven by Leonard's need for vengeance and Teddy's intrepid tracking skills. A bitter Leonard, frustrated by this revelation, writes himself a note that John G. is not to be trusted. Soon enough, he has forgotten why entirely and kills Teddy, convinced his partner is John G.