MAJOR plot hole....


Emma is just John with a dress and a wig on. He looks EXACTLY the same. It's so silly. Nobody would fall for that, let alone the whole town. Yes I know that cross dressing was probably a lot more in the closet (ahem) in those days...but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what was going on there.
Identical twin sister who was seperated at birth I could just about accept. Or if Emma made some more effort with her appearence. I mean a pair of fake boobies or something at least, come on...
Cillian/John has a strinking and unusual face. Emma should have got her hands on some prosthetic make up if she wanted to realisticly pass as a different person.
The whole town falling for it just didn't work because it's a sort of realistic film. It doesn't ask you to use your imagination, so you don't.
Sillyness. Beautifully shot though, and some very good acting.
Rant over :)

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I actually disagree. I thought Emma and John's personalities and mannerisms were so completely different, I sometimes forgot they were the same person, because Cillian is that good. I thought he really lost himself in the female role far better than he did in Breakfast on Pluto, where I just kept seeing a man in a blonde wig.

And not to be nit-picky, but a girl and a boy cannot be identical twins. It's not possible.

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Thats interesting, because for me its the other way around. I found him much more convincing as Kitten. I really loved that performance.
But I'm not slating his performance in this film, it was very good acting and the personalities were completely different, but people knew John and what he looked like. so for me it didn't work.

"a girl and a boy cannot be identical twins. It's not possible."

Haha. Good thinking Sherlock. time for me to go to bed, methinks....

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[deleted]

I agree with you there. In "Pluto" it was like he was in drag.



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he had multiple personality disorder. this is why they never really knew that it was the same person. they both had distinct peronalities, john a bit weaker, and emma more secure.

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It is actually possible for an identical twin to be of the opposite sex. It's very rare, but it is possible. However, it would have given this film a ridiculous soap-opera quality.

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@ignatiusbk :

It is actually possible for an identical twin to be of the opposite sex. It's very rare, but it is possible.

Partially correct.

Identical (monozygotic) twins are nearly always the same gender because they form from a single zygote that contains either male (XY) or female (XX) sex chromosomes, and then it splits. Therefore, boy/girl twins are nearly always fraternal or (dizygotic); they can only form from two separate eggs that are fertilized by two separate sperm. Fraternal twins can be either two girls, two boys, or one of each.

But identical twins are literally...identical. The extremely rare occurrence to which you refer, is when something goes wrong with one of the split's sex chromosomes after the zygote has completed the split. However, while they are from the same original egg/zygote, those twins are no longer considered identical, since they are different genders. While they are technically monozygotic, they are non-identical twins. Monozygotic fraternal twins, really. :P



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Clark Kent got away with it for years.
Great movie.
eb

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[deleted]

Not really what you'd call a 'plot hole' but yeah, it's a bit unrealistic that people wouldn't catch onto the fact that John IS Emma (and vice versa). That said Cillian played the role (or both roles, you could say) wonderfully and as someone else said, at times I did forget John and Emma were the same person-- they had different mannerisms, Emma's voice was convincing, ect. And yeah people would surely have to notice how alike they looked (although I really just buy Cillian as a woman so I won't say it was just absurd or anything). I kind of think it would've been cool to have had John and Emma have differen eye colours, considering Cillian's eyes are actually blue and not brown. But anyway, what I think people should have been questioning was the fact that John and Emma were NEVER seen together and both seemed to get rather uncomfortable at the mention of having to be present at the same time. I just think if I were one of the townspeople that would get me thinking.

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It was the 1900s. I am sure people wouldn't think of it back then. I would have thought they were brother and sister, still weird but not the same person.

Awsome movie. Awsome acting.

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Hold on. Wait. The 1900s...? Try the mid to late Sixties. The Skillpa car is a '64 Impala, and there's a '68 Nova rolling around in the background. And Sarandon's "progressive" shelter implies that she's keen on the women's-rights movement of the Sixties. One of the many problems with the script: Lander can't be bothered to tell us when the movie takes place. His assumption that "small-town equals naive: those hicks'd buy a guy wearing a skirt, hands down" would be insulting no matter what the era, but the Sixties was a decade of upheaval in the United States. "Weird" was the order of the day. If anything, the whole town would have been in on the joke immediately.

What they needed was one person-- just one-- to become suspicious of what was going on with John and Emma. We needed to hear why Fanny and the others were so willing to accept that (a) John was quite clearly nuts and (2) Emma was quite obviously not quite what (s)he appeared to be.

And the Skillpa car needed to be older, if Maggie was going to call it an "old" car. It wasn't old. If anything, it was a bit too new and sharp for what a crazy, evil old recluse-- John's mom-- would have left behind when she died. They needed a late-Thirties, early-Forties sedan or something. Something darker, dustier, and about twenty years older.

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[deleted]

My use of the term "1900s" was directly from the documentary on the DVD. The creators used it, I used it. The time period smacks one of being older than the 60's whether the cars were from that time or not. I didn't see any long haired hippies. I saw conservative people and it was meant to convey a time period earlier than the 60s as to how the characters were and acted. It was small town America which probably hadn't changed since the 30s.

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I didn't think it was a plot hole. You had to look at in context of the town of Peacock. No one who lived there could imagine a man dressing up as a woman let alone grasping something as complex as dissociative indenity disorder. Fanny remaks that the Skillpas "kept to themselves." Therefore, I am sure they could completely believe that John was married and told no one.

Also, John and Emma were two very different individuals. Even though I knew they were the same person, Murphy's performance was so convincing that I completely saw them as two seperate characters.

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So no one, in the tiny town even bothered to ask share Emma came from? I mean, she wasn't from peacock ( where everyone knows everyone) Ans john never left town....I'd think someone would be curios

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In the beginning of the movie I did not realise that the woman was Cilian Murphy until she took the wig off. It may have been obvious to you, but I would suggest it was not obvious to everyone.


Go ahead, make my day....

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Same. I knew nothing about the film before I watched it, and Ive seen a fair few Cillian Murphy films (he's one of my faves) but I didnt know it was him.

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The five o'clock shadow would've given him away at some point. It's a ridiculous notion. How they got Sarandon, Pullman and Page to sign up for this crap is beyond me.

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"The five o'clock shadow would've given him away at some point."

--not only that, but also his adam's apple. And his height, and the size of his hands, and in real life (ie not in 2D as in a movie) most people would have spotted that she/he was wearing a wig, and did no have a feminine body shape and would then have looked a bit more closely at her/him.

--to sum up, when you consider the above, the WHOLE film falls apart

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I agree with those that said that they in the beginning did not know it was him. In fact, the people I was watching it with insisted for awhile that it was actually another actress. It's only after you know that it becomes more obvious...but like Hitchcock, it's only obvious to the audience. There's the suspense. Better to reveal it early.

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I have to disagree on the "looking exactly the same". Cillian as John was stressed, face pressed, skin pale, and hair floppy. His general body shape was obscured by his suit. As Emma, his face was relaxed, his skin had color and smoothness, his lips were always colored. His hair didn't appear to be an overly obvious wig. The only thing I saw that was extremely obvious was his height seemed out of place for a woman.

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I would have found it more believable if the townspeople thought Emma was John's sister, not his wife. That would explain the physical similarities.

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Good point, the sister idea. But the way it was worked OK:
1. general idea of unreality
2. marriage registers hotter theme than sibling-hood!

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i don't see it as a plot hole. jon/emma had different mannerisms. jon was more awkward and a little disheveled, emma generally neat & only slightly awkward. it wouldn't have worked as them being siblings cause the town knew he was an only child.

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Not having seen a sister in the past 30-odd years, whereas little John would have been seen around town growing up, might put a monkey wrench into the sister idea. Townspeople would naturally assume a young woman living there to be John's wife.

Am I anywhere near the imaginary cliff?

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I didn't hate the movie, or love it... rated in the middle. The only things that saved it for me were Cillian's acting and some of the lovely shots. Because I'm with you (though I don't consider it a "plot hole"), there is just NO WAY somebody -- at least one person! -- wouldn't have figured it out. Uggh, it ruined it for me in the first five minutes, I just couldn't buy it. Cillian's got a very unique face, and it was that same face with makeup on, period! Wouldn't somebody in that town have looked this person in the eyes once or twice? Or even glanced at his mouth? Dead giveaways, both -- especially his smile. (Or else I just look more carefully at these things.)

It was like I was asked to sit through an entire movie and "pretend", as if this was a fantasy flick. Very tough. In fact, I ended up multi-tasking during the last half of the movie.

But wow, Cillian did do a fab job -- too bad the flick was mediocre. That scene where he's talking to Josh Lucas by the tree... he's just damned good.

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That' the problem with not watching the movie when yo're in front of it.
You actually think she's have allowed the townsfolk to look her in the eye? There was a very good reason she avoided all contact when in that persona.
Every time she was forced to be near somebody, she made every effort to hide her face.
Oh - nobody asked you to do anything.
This kind of thing has happened, and in the past, people definitely got away with it.
Nowadays, sure.

If you were 'asked' to do anything, it was more about actually watching the film, and trying to place yourself in that time period, in that location.
Then, watch 'her' movements when she's forced to interact with the townsfolk.
It's quite understandable that nobody realized what was going on.

It's a period film. Maybe period films are just too far removed for some, nd they may as well be fantasy films.

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Nope, I disagree. I was so convinced that there were 2 different people that I forgot many times that it was one actor, one man with 2 identities, etc. Cillian's facial expressions, voices he used, and the makeup and wardrobe people all played a part in why I was sold.




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