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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37978
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think you've hit on the key in your question: **All secondary story arcs need to reach a satisfying conclusion _prior_ to the twist.** This is because what we seek at the end of a story is emotional completeness, not necessarily logical or narrative completeness (although it's significantly harder to achieve the first without the other two).

The movie version of _Oz_ works because Dorothy's friends have all achieved their goals, and Dorothy herself has earned her happy ending, _prior_ to her learning a) the existential lesson that she always had the power to rescue herself and b) that it was all in her head. If this ending had come sooner, and short-circuited the story arcs, it would have been deplored, rather than celebrated.

Thus, in the _Sixth Sense_, Malcolm completes his therapeutic work with Cole _before_ learning his truth. In _[Children of Men](http://popculturephilosopher.com/top-ten-movies-children-of-men/)_, even though we never learn the final fate of the world, we do know that the protagonist has _completed_ his journey from a selfish, apathetic, hopeless and emotionally distanced cynic to someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for a comparative stranger. As far as _Alice,_ it's a bit of a special case because it's an episodic work without major secondary story arcs. It still has an emotionally satisfying conclusion, however: Alice asserts ownership over her own dream world, and ceases to be bullied by figments of her own imagination. (This is also the ending to Nabakov's _[Invitation to an Execution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_a_Beheading)_.)

Original score: 6