The Usual Suspects ending explained: Verbal, the mug and Keyser Soze

What happens in the final scene

Customs agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) has spent the film interrogating Verbal (Kevin Spacey), a small-time con man with a limp and a weak hand, about a massacre on a boat in San Pedro. Kujan convinces himself that ex-cop Dean Keaton was the mythical crime lord Keyser Soze, and Verbal tearfully appears to agree before he is released on bail.

Alone in the office, Kujan looks at the cluttered noticeboard and starts recognising names and places from Verbal's story printed on the papers pinned there. His coffee cup falls and shatters, and the maker's name on the bottom reads Kobayashi, the name of Soze's lawyer in Verbal's account. A fax arrives with a sketch of Soze from a survivor of the boat. It is Verbal's face.

Verbal walks out

Outside, Verbal's limp straightens, his curled hand flexes, and he lights a cigarette with a gold lighter. A car pulls up driven by the man he had called Kobayashi, and he leaves. Kujan runs into the street too late. Over the scene we hear Verbal's earlier line about the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

The Usual Suspects ending explained: how much was true

This is the central question behind The Usual Suspects ending explained. Kujan realises Verbal improvised his account using details from the borrowed office. That means the names, and perhaps entire scenes, were invented. But some things are clearly real: there was a boat, there were dead men, and the survivor's description matches Verbal.

Viewers generally land on a middle reading. The crew and the job may have existed, but how they met, who did what and who Soze is were shaped to send Kujan after Keaton. Singer has said the film was made so you can go back and find things you did not notice the first time.

• Real: the boat, the deaths, the survivor who saw Soze.
• Likely invented: names and colour taken from the noticeboard and the mug.
• Uncertain: how much of the crew's history happened as shown.

Clues hidden in plain sight

The name itself is a joke. McQuarrie based it on a former boss called Kayser Sume and found the word soze in a Turkish dictionary, where it translates roughly as talking too much. A man nicknamed Verbal, who will not stop talking, is the person the name describes.

Singer has said that during editing he wanted the film to convince viewers that Keaton was Soze, then do the same with Verbal, so the audience follows Kujan's mistake step by step.

Legacy of the twist

The film premiered at Sundance in January 1995 and opened in the US that August. Spacey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and opened his speech by joking about whoever Keyser Soze is. The title comes from a Spy magazine column named after Claude Rains's famous line in Casablanca.

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