Tomato In The Mirror / Live-Action Films

• The 6th Day, where the "cloned" Arnie turns out to be the original.
• The 2019 film Alive initially appears to be about a crazy doctor keeping two people prisoner after an accident that left them with amnesia, but the last few minutes of the film reveal that the "patients" were actually brought to life by the doctor as a result of Frankenstein-esque experiments.
• In Angel Heart, Mickey Rourke's character, a private detective, turns out to be the very man he's been hired to track down. Bonus points in that mirrors are involved with the revelation.
• Depending on the version of Blade Runner you watch, either Deckard or just Rachel is a/are replicant(s), and going to snuff it fairly soon, or live happily ever after. However, since both Rachael and Deckard (if he is a Replicant after all) are next-generation experimental Replicants, it doesn't necessarily mean they'd have the same four-year lifespan as the Nexus-6 series.
  • Blade Runner 2049 takes this one further: K comes to the gradual realization that rather than being a Replicant, he is actually Deckard and Rachel's son, a discovery heralded by a brief Freak Out. And then he later learns that they actually had a daughter, and he's actually a Replicant after all. He is crushed by this revelation.
• Played straightforwardly in 2008's The Broken, where Lena Headey's character kills her doppelgänger and then spends the movie running away from the evil mirror clones who have taken over all the regular people. And then the twist ending happens.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Once you understand that Francis is a nut, and Cesare and Caligari aren't even their real names, everything makes a lot more sense. Including the art style.
  • In the original ending everything was to be taken at face value. The producers suggested a change because they suspected the Weimar censors wouldn't allow a movie that implied an authority figure could be evil.
• The main character in Carnival of Souls is a young woman who just graduated from a Kansas college and is driving to Utah to accept a job as a church organist. Right before she gets to her destination, she is frightened by a strange man who appears in front of her car, and who she almost runs over. When she pulls over and looks to see what happened, there is no sign of the man. After she arrives in town and starts her new job, she is repeatedly troubled by visions of the strange man, visions that nobody else can see. She is also obsessed with an old pavilion that is just outside of town that used to be the site of a carnival. She finally seeks help from a doctor, who takes her to the pavilion in the hope that reality will cure her hallucinations. At the pavilion, she is overtaken by strange dancers that the doctor can't see and then suddenly disappears. It turns out that she actually died in a car accident back in Kansas but denied her own death. The strange man and the people from the carnival are souls who are trying to bring her to the afterlife, and who are ultimately successful.
• The classic The Creation of the Humanoids plays this to the hilt. After the End, humanoid robots are all that allow the small population of human survivors to maintain their civilization. Fearing a Turned Against Their Masters scenario, the humans despise and fear the robots, and even have the Nazi-like "Brotherhood of Flesh" that seeks to expose robotic treachery. They think they're on to something when they discover a highly illegal 'Type 96' robot that thinks it's a specific human, and an additional memory module that causes any robot it's plugged into to think it's that human. The Reveal is that this is the result of a completely benevolent conspiracy between the robots and a human scientist to devise a way to transfer human minds into immortal, self-reproducing 'Type 100' robot bodies at the death of their organic bodies, and the protagonist (who leads the Brotherhood) and his new girlfriend have both been through the process already.
• The Jim Henson made-for-TV Mind Screw film The Cube. Strawberry jam.
• After Wynn is captured at the end of Cube Zero, Jax reveals that Wynn is NOT an employee overseeing the cube. He's just as much a lab rat as the Cube residents, as another layer of the Cube experiment to "observe the observers". So were his colleagues. He can't even choose execution over staying in the cube, as he already waived this right long ago...he simply doesn't remember because the real operators removed this information from his mind.
• The protagonist in Cypher is the hapless Unwitting Pawn in a Gambit Pileup where one MegaCorp forces a Memory Gambit on him to fool their competitors Lie Detector, said competitor sabotages the Memory Gambit, and The Mole from the first company convincing him to come back, all while the organization of Sebastian Rooks tries to play him and the Mega-Corps for suckers. Only at the end does he remember that he is Sebastian Rooks, and pulled that same Memory Gambit on himself before the movie started to pass the Lie Detector.
• The 2003 Indian Bollywood film Darna Mana Hai, starring Shilpa Shetty, takes this trope almost literally, with apples.
• In The Da Vinci Code, Sophie discovers that she is the possible descendant of Jesus whom she and Langdon have been speculating about.
• Dead & Buried. The sheriff of a small town discovers that several strangers passing through town and many of the townspeople, including his own wife, have been murdered and turned into zombies by the town's mortician. At the end he confronts the mortician and learns that he himself suffered the same fate sometime earlier. What is more, it's implied that he's investigated the killings dozens of times before, his memories being wiped each time he learns the truth, because the mortician enjoys playing mental chess games with the sheriff.
• At the end of The Deaths of Ian Stone Ian Stone turns out to also be a Harvestor instead of the normal human he thought he was.
• At the end of the English-Arabic movie Djinn, the male lead Khalid realizes that he's actually a Djinn himself. He then throws his wife off a building in retribution for her previously having killed their child because she was starting to realize that he was an Enfant Terrible.
• Donnie Darko. The lead character has visions of a man named Frank who wears a large grotesque rabbit suit and claims to be a time traveler. Following Frank causes Donnie to avoid being killed by a Jet Engine that falls from the sky. Frank instructs Donnie on the actions he must take in order to save the future. The plan involves a metal artifact that will serve as a Deus ex Machina, a resolve to the central conflict of the plot. Donnie locates the artifact in the form of a gun. Donnie uses the artifact to shoot the man who accidentally hit Donnie's girlfriend with his car. The scenes that follow reveal that the man Donnie shot was in fact Frank, that the tragedy of his girlfriend's death was the result of his own actions, and that the artifact that will save everyone is not the gun that Donnie found but the Jet Engine that must fall on Donnie Darko, to avoid the tragedies of what would follow had it not. The Jet Engine itself being a time traveling artifact that would have fallen off the plane Donnie Darko's family would have been on, if Donnie had survived. Thus, revealing at the end that Donnie Darko is the villain of this story, and he must save the future from himself.
• Eden Log. After not even knowing his own name throughout most of the film, the man discovers that he is actually Tolbiac, the chief of security of Eden Log.
• Subverted in Ex Machina. After Caleb discovers Nathan's past failures and the extent of his manipulations, he has a Freak Out and starts to cut on himself to find out if he's actually a robot with false memories. He draws dark red blood, showing that he isn't.
• Fight Club is a masterful example, as Edward Norton's unnamed narrator befriends and starts Fight Club with Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, anarchist and soap salesman. As Durden begins to raise an army of committed nihilistic followers, the narrator becomes less and less comfortable with the direction of the movement. After Tyler Durden disappears at the kickoff of a coordinated act of domestic terrorism, the narrator hunts desperately for him, only to be told that he is Tyler Durden himself. The revelation changes the tone of previous conversations in the film, notably the inception of Fight Club — what was a brawl between the narrator and Durden that attracted other participants becomes the narrator/Durden beating himself up, rousing the curiosity of others. And Durden's intense sexual relationship with Marla Singer coupled with the narrator's open contempt for her; what were the actions and reactions of two separate characters take on a different light when you know the characters are the same person, and Marla's confusion and hurt at the narrator's scorn makes more sense. In the end, the narrator shoots himself through the cheek, "killing" Durden by demonstrating he was willing to kill himself.
• Frailty has two such twists. First is the discovery that the man the FBI agent has been talking to for most of the film isn't Fenton, but Adam. At the very end of the movie, you find out that Adam and his father aren't crazy, they really have been charged by God to destroy Demons walking the Earth.
• In Frozen Days, the main protagonist’s true identity seems to vanish as she assumes that of a comatose man. It turns out in the end that she was the comatose one the whole time.
• The Harvest looks at Andy Young, who has been home-schooled and kept in isolation for years because of apparent health conditions that leave him so weak he can barely walk. However, Andy’s friend Marianne realises that “Andy” is actually Jason, a boy abducted by the Youngs to serve as a source of organs for the real Andy after he was born with an undefined terminal illness, with Andy’s mother Katherine so fixated on keeping her son alive that she refuses to acknowledge that her efforts are basically destroying what’s left of her family.
• Haunter: Lisa is initially shocked to discover that she and her family are actually ghosts, but she adjusts fairly quickly.
• The ending of Hellraiser: Inferno reveals that the being known as the Engineer that Detective Joseph Thorne was after is in fact the embodiment of his own dark urges; when Joseph confronts the Engineer the thing even peels away its blank face to reveal Joseph's underneath.
• The 2008 film Hide follows the journey of an Outlaw Couple as, following her freeing him from a prison transport truck by causing it to crash, they head back to the town where they stashed their stolen loot prior to their gun battle with the police that led to his arrest. Along the way, however, they become aware that a Serial Killer has kidnapped the man's sister and is holding her captive in the very same now-deserted town...yet when the sister manages to free herself and the couple finds her, she freaks out at the sight of them because the guy is the killer, leading to the sister's death and the girlfriend's torture and eventual murder. Then the last few minutes of the movie provide an even stranger twist. The girlfriend had actually died during the aforementioned gunfight, the guy died when the prison transport truck crashed, and now he's trapped in Purgatory, killing his loved ones over and over again.
• High Tension: Marie is the killer who she perceives to be attacking and killing Alex's whole family, and presumably the victims before them.
• Maggie Banning experiences a distinct version of this in Hook; she can accept the idea that she's in Neverland being held prisoner by Captain Hook because her great-grandmother is the original Wendy, but she's clearly stunned when she realises that her grown-up father is the real Peter Pan.
• The original ending of the 2007 version of I Am Legend fits into this trope, at least metaphorically. It had the main character realizing that the infected were actually intelligent and capable of love/compassion/etc., and had only been coming after him because he was kidnapping, experimenting on, harming and killing them in an effort to "cure" the disease; the 'leader' of the infected merely wants his mate back, and the various attacks had been acts of self-defence. Will Smith spent the movie believing that they were mindless monsters when, in fact, he was the monstrous one, albeit unknowingly. The title refers to this, as he's the boogeyman in the infected's legends — hence, "I Am Legend". This was the ending in the book as well.
• Identity does this, but here everyone is a tomato, at least in a I Am You And You Are Me sort of way...
• Impostor. Gary Sinise's character is, in fact, the robo-bomb he's been trying to prove he isn't for the entire movie. His wife is one, too.
• In the original Korean version of Mirrors, Into The Mirror, Young-min gets trapped inside the mirror world but doesn't realize it because nothing is different...except for the fact that everything is backwards/mirrored.
• In The Island (2005), a vague apocalyptic disaster supposedly left a majority of Earth uninhabitable, save for the eponymous Island and the facility the survivors live in. Then the main characters find out that they and the other "survivors" are all clones of celebrities, used as organ donors, surrogate mothers, etc., and being chosen to go to the Island means being killed and harvested from. Naturally, their originals have no idea this is how they're getting the organs they need and children they want; they thought the organs and children were grown in advanced tech vats.
• Jacob's Ladder: In a deleted scene, Jacob finds out that he was actually Jezzie all along when he unmasks the shroud she's enveloped in.
• Subverted in the 2008 film The Lazarus Project (originally The Heaven Project) when Ben Garvey eventually accepts that he is a patient at the psychiatric hospital but then, after finding his supposedly hallucinated dog at the local animal shelter, finds that it was a plot to stop him leaving.
• Lifeforce (1985). Colonel Carlsen is a space vampire himself. At least that's what the Space Girl tells him.
• In the Brazilian romantic comedy Loucas pra casar, the protagonist Maria Lúcia finds out that her "rivals", with whom she believed her fiancé was cheating her, were actually her split personalities. It all started when she and her fiancé had some sexual fetish fantasies pretending to be other people, but her mind internalized some fetish identities too hard. The reveal happened in a literal mirror: she saw their rivals reflected on it, but realized there wasn't anyone at her side.
• The Machinist has Christian Bale's character Trevor, who hasn't slept for nearly a year, stalked and tormented by a man named Ivan. Ivan eventually kidnaps Nicholas, the son of the woman Trevor is (sort of) dating. Ivan appears to have murdered Nicholas, causing Trevor to kill Ivan. When disposing of his rug-wrapped body, it unrolls and is empty. Trevor then remembers that "Nicholas" was actually a nameless boy that he had killed in a hit-and-run himself a year ago.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Loki in Thor had always felt somewhat left out: the unfavored second son, a trickster in a world of warriors, et cetera. Thus, when he learns that he is also secretly a Frost Giant (and the son of their mortal enemy to boot), he flips the heck out.
  • In Eternals, Sersi is very unhappy to learn in her vision, inherited from Ajak, that the Eternals are actually artificial beings like robots and were manufactured in a space factory and not heroes from planet Olympia.
• Literally in the Bittersweet Ending of Mirrors. Ben leaves the Mayflower building after having defeated the demon, but none of the emergency workers seem to notice him despite his injuries. It turns out that he is trapped in the mirror world.
• In Moon, the protagonist, after spending 3 years on the moon, finds out that he is the fifth clone to work the station, and all his memories of the time before he was there are implants. Together with the sixth clone, they also find out that 'their' daughter, whom they thought was a newborn, is actually fifteen years old, and that they and the other clones are programmed to die at the end of their three-year contract. The station has hundreds of clones ready to be woken up in a hidden room.
• Though Mulholland Dr. doesn't make it explicit, it's probably the most believable explanation for David Lynch's Mind Screw. Naomi Watts's blonde and Laura Elena Harring's brunette have different names in the last segment of the movie— names given previously to other characters.
• The Neverending Story. When confronting his "true self" in a mirror, Atreyu sees Bastian, the boy reading the book, as his reflection.
• Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb: Sir Lancelot has no idea what he really is, until he crashes a Camelot play thinking it's really Camelot. The revelation that he is just a statue hits him hard.
• In The Nines, it turns out the protagonist is a God in Human Form, one supporting character is a human trying to keep him Locked Out of the Loop, and the other is a fellow God in Human Form who wants him to re-Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Oblivion (2013) : He's not the real Jack Harper, but a clone. He works for the Tet, which is stealing the planet's water for fuel. And he's just one of many (we follow the 49th, which fights the 52nd later on, and Beech mentions that the Tet used an army of Harper clones as foot soldiers during the war).
• Nicely done in The Others (2001). Grace Stewart finds herself in the midst of a haunting, only it turns out she and her family are the ghosts; the "spooks" they've been seeing are actually the living family who've come to see about buying the house. Particularly unsettling is the publicity clip where the creepy old woman talks to Grace in her daughter Anne's voice — when one realizes Anne's soul is actually possessing the woman, a medium hired by the living family.
• Passengers (2008): Claire, a therapist counseling a group of plane crash survivors, grows suspicious when her patients start disappearing, and she suspects that the airline is behind it when a mysterious man starts coming around and insisting that the crash was pilot error. Meanwhile, others insist they heard an explosion beforehand. Claire takes on the mission of finding out what really happened while trying to protect her patients from what she believes is a corrupt airline. It turns out that Claire was actually on the flight also and there were no survivors. The reason the patients are disappearing is because they accepted their deaths and are moving on. The mysterious man is the pilot, also dead, and he blames himself for the crash because he was distracted and tired, hence "pilot error."
• In Police Academy 6 it soon became clear that someone in the group was leaking information to the mastermind behind the crime wave; as always, Captain Harris figured it was one of the heroes, and started an investigation to find out who. As it turned out, the mastermind was the mayor, with whom Harris was communicating - meaning that Harris was unknowingly the leak, because he thought by giving the mayor information, he was helping oppose the mastermind! (The mayor's charade does not exonerate Harris, however, because everyone on the team was told to specifically tell nobody, a rule which Harris was breaking because he figured - wrongly - there'd be no harm telling the mayor.
• In Takashi Shimizu's Reincarnation (2005), the story begins with a college professor filming himself as he brutally kills a hotel full of innocent people, including his own children, because of his obsession with reincarnation. Thirty-five years later, some creep decides to make a movie about it, and sets out to cast the killer and his victims. So what? So plenty. He succeeds, managing to cast the reincarnation of everyone involved in the massacre. The main character realizes she ties into all this, but doesn't find out how until the end of the movie, when she sees her true self in her reflection.
• Re;member: After some previous hints, it's revealed that Zev is the Nazi he's been hunting.
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
  • The reason Alice woke up in the first movie with no memory of who she was is because she's a clone of the co-owner of Umbrella, Alicia Marcus, who suffers from an aging disease. Alice is not happy about this, but Alicia thinks of her as the person she never had a chance to be, and arranges for her childhood memories to be transfered to Alice on her death.
  • Dr. Isaacs is Back from the Dead, saying that the one who died in Resident Evil: Extinction was just a clone. Turns out he's also a clone, programmed to think he's the original to give him the same drive and motivation. When he encounters the real Isaacs, he doesn't take it well and stabs him to death.
• Return of the Killer Tomatoes, appropriately, has Tara, a woman who finds out she's a modified tomato.
• In Ruby Sparks, Calvin keeps it a secret that his girlfriend Ruby was a fictional character who came to life. When she finds out, it is not pretty.
• In Salvage, Claire Parker seems to be living a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare where she keeps getting stalked and killed by serial killer Duke Desmond, only to wake up back at work as if nothing had happened. After a non-fatal attack, she learns from the police that Desmond can't be stalking her, since he's been dead for some time. She decides maybe it's his ghost that's tormenting her, and seeks advice on how to deal with that. The first place she visits just happens to be Desmond's former church, where the janitor reassures her that Desmond can't hurt her, as he's in hell. Not reassured, she goes to his old home, and then the library, where she finds a newspaper article showing that she and her boyfriend were his last victims. Eventually, Desmond appears in her house to kill her yet again, and now she's finally told the whole truth — she isn't Claire. She's Duke Desmond, whose punishment is to keep reliving his murder of Claire, from her perspective.
• Session 9 does this in the form of The Killer in Me.
• Shattered (1991) follows a man who survives a car accident with amnesia. Along the way he discovers that his wife was having an affair. She explains that she didn't say anything because she didn't want him to remember killing her lover. When he finds her lover's corpse, it's actually his own face. It turns out that he was the lover, and the dead man was the husband. He looks like the husband now because after the car accident, the doctors repaired his face to look like the photos of the husband that they believed he was.
• The Twist Ending of The Sixth Sense is a relatively subtle example of the trope; the main character has no idea that anything is odd about him, as people's reactions to his words and actions seem entirely plausible, until he realizes that they only appeared to have been interacting with him in the way he expected them to. The fact that everyone's reactions seem plausible is even lampshaded ahead of time, when Cole tells him that ghosts only see what they want to see, and hear only what they want to hear.
• The Twist Ending of the Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters featured this trope in the form of an Unreliable Narrator, with the combination of Real After All adding to the ending's confusing nature.
• In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright finds out halfway through that he is a modified cadaver used to outfit a prototype infiltration Terminator. The same situation occurs in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode "Allison from Palmdale", where the Terminator Cameron believes she is a human girl.
• As seen in this video, in Transmorphers the main character is eventually revealed to be an android. One reviewer had this to say:
  Film Brain: What? What a twist!...I don't mean that sarcastically. That is a genuine statement from me. This is a shocking development. Mostly because he's the only one who can act. Remotely.
• The Moebius strip of a film known as Triangle does this in numerous ways throughout the movie, which largely consists of a repeated sequence that reveals more of its story every time, each time arriving at a Memento-like "how we got here". This story includes Melissa George's character Jess running from a masked killer who turns out to be herself, turning into that killer in an effort to evade her, and trying to warn away doppelgangers of herself and her friends. Then it's revealed that Jess is not the saintly mother to her autistic son that she makes herself up to be, but instead a shamelessly abusive one. This constitutes this trope because Jess is amnesiac when she learns about this, which is why she proceeds to "rectify" this by killing her Evil Twin doppelganger, attempting to take her son elsewhere, and getting him killed in the car accident that repeats the timeline all over again.
• The Truman Show has this Lighter and Softer, and somewhat inverted: Truman's not a tomato, everyone else is. And always has been.
• In The Uninvited (2009) where main character Anna (Emily Browning) turns out to be the killer of both Alex and her mother.
• In Unknown (2006), several men wake up in a warehouse with toxic-vapor-induced amnesia. They discover that some of them are kidnappers, and at least one of them is a kidnappee, but they don't know who's which. The protagonist hopes he's not one of the villains, and the gradual return of his memories eventually reveals he's an undercover cop. This comes as a great relief...until, at the end, he catches sight of the kidnapped man's wife, regains his memory of the affair he's been having with her, and realizes that he'd gone to the warehouse to kill her husband so they could get married and the kidnappers would be blamed.
• In Unknown (2011), Dr. Martin Harris wakes up from a four-day coma after a road accident to find that another man has completely taken over his life and identity, to the extent that the impostor has the same family photos and is believed by his wife to be the real Martin Harris. Harris decides explore what happened in the four days he was unconscious, eventually discovering that "Martin Harris" is not a real person but a cover story - Martin and his "wife" are undercover assassins, and the "impostor" is another agent sent to replace him after the accident, the trauma of which caused him to believe his own cover story.
• In Us, the Adelaide we've been following along is the doppelganger Tethered version, and "Red" the antagonist was the real original. At the end, Adelaide manages to kill Red, doing a full Kill and Replace.
• In The Ward, Kristen is institutionalized under mysterious circumstances, and quickly becomes aware that something strange is going on in the psych ward: She's visited in the night by a ghostly woman, the fellow female patients she's befriended keep disappearing mysteriously whenever they show signs of improvement, and the staff refuses to speak of what happened to the other girls or admit that anything is wrong. Her friends are only slightly less cagey than the staff, but eventually reveal that they had killed a fellow patient named Alice, whose vengeful ghost is now murdering them. But while attempting to escape, Kristen learns that she is Alice, or more specifically her latest Split Personality - the other girls are also Alice's multiple personalities, they "killed" Alice via Split-Personality Takeover, and they're disappearing one by one because of an experimental hypnosis treatment that's eliminating her personalities one at a time.

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