Psychological Thrillers: Films That Delve into the Abyss of the Mind

Here is a curated selection of films that perfectly embody the essence of the psychological thriller: bold, complex works that venture into the depths of the human psyche, exploring the darkest territories of the mind. There are the canonical masterpieces that made the genre famous—and you will find them here—but the true heart of this cinema is not content to just scare; it aims to disturb, to question our certainties, and to leave an indelible mark.

The psychological thriller doesn’t rely solely on external monsters. Its battlefield is the soul, its horror existential. It is a cinema that feeds on ambiguity, paranoia, unresolved trauma, and fragmented identities. Visionary directors like David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, Roman Polanski, and Park Chan-wook have used their freedom to create unconventional narratives, mental labyrinths where the viewer is invited to get lost. These are not simple “mind-game films”; they are immersive experiences that force us to confront our most hidden fears.

The rise of this genre, particularly thanks to studios like A24, is no accident. In an era marked by uncertainty and the crisis of collective narratives, cinema has turned inward, discovering that the greatest horror is not hidden in the shadows, but in the glaring light of our own consciousness. This definitive guide is a path that unites the fundamental pillars, from the most famous films to the most unknown independent cinema. Prepare to gaze into the abyss, because these films will not only gaze back, but will follow you long after the credits roll.

According to director John Madden, psychological thrillers focus on storytelling, character growth, choice and ethical dispute; both fear and anxiety drive psychological tension by unpredictable means. Psychological thrillers are full of suspense by taking advantage of the unpredictability about intentions, sincerity and the way they view the world of the characters.

James N. Frey calls psychological thrillers a style rather than a subgenre; Frey states that good thrillers focus on the psychology of their antagonists and slowly build suspense through ambiguity. Film creators and / or distributors or publishers seeking to distance themselves from the negative connotations of horror often classify their work as a psychological thriller. The same situation can occur when critics label a work as a psychological thriller in order to elevate its perceived literary value.

Mechanisms of Psychological Thriller

Twist: Films like Psycho have bet everything on twists and also asked audiences to refrain from spoilers.

The Unreliable Narrator: Andrew Taylor identifies the unreliable narrator as a common literary tool used in psychological thrillers and traces it back to Edgar Allan Poe’s impact on the genre.

MacGuffin: Alfred Hitchcock created the MacGuffin principle, a goal or thing that starts or otherwise advances history. MacGuffin is often only slightly hinted at and can be used to build suspense.

False Lead: The false lead was used by William Cobbett as a kind of misunderstanding which is a useless argument introduced to divert attention from the real conflict. A red herring is used to trick the public into making wrong assumptions and misleading their perception of the truth.

Styles of the Psychological Thriller

In recent years, many psychological thrillers have emerged, made in numerous media. Despite these very different forms of representation, general fashions have actually appeared in all of the stories. Some of these regular styles include: fatality, identification, mindset, perception, reality.

In psychological thrillers, characters often have to fight an inner struggle. Feeling novels, examples of early psychological thrillers, were considered irresponsible due to their themes of sex and violence. Peter Hutchings defines detective stories, an Italian sub-genre of psychological thrillers, as mysterious, violent murders that focus on style and spectacle rather than rationality.

Masterpieces of the psychological thriller genre

Vertigo (1958)

San Francisco detective John “Scottie” Ferguson, retired due to a paralyzing fear of heights (acrophobia), is hired by an old friend to follow his wife, Madeleine. The woman seems possessed by the spirit of a suicidal ancestor. Scottie’s obsession with the mysterious Madeleine pulls him into a vortex of deceit, manipulation, and tragedy.

Vertigo is not just one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films; it is the archetype of the modern psychological thriller. The “vertigo” of the title is not merely the physical fear of falling; it is an emotional, romantic, and epistemological vertigo. It is Scottie’s fear of falling into the abyss of romantic obsession, an abyss from which, as we see, he will not re-emerge. The famous “dolly zoom” (or “Vertigo effect”) that Hitchcock invented for this film doesn’t just show Scottie’s panic when looking down; it visualizes the distortion of reality his mind is undergoing.

Initially dismissed by critics, the film is now considered one of the greatest masterpieces in cinema history precisely because audiences and critics in 1958 were not ready for a protagonist whose psyche was so patently diseased. The true “villain” of the film is not the murderer at the center of the plot, but Scottie’s perverse obsession. In the second half of the film, the mystery has already been revealed (at least to us, the audience), but the psychological tension increases. The suspense no longer stems from “who dunnit?” but from “how far will he go?” We witness Scottie’s attempt to literally recreate the woman he thought he loved, methodically destroying the identity of another. It is the first, great cinematic exploration of psychological perversion and fetishism as narrative drivers.

Psycho (1960)

Marion Crane, a Phoenix secretary, steals $40,000 from her employer to start a new life with her lover. During her escape, in a downpour, she stops at the remote Bates Motel. The hotel is run by the timid and unsettling Norman Bates, a young man seemingly dominated by an oppressive and jealous mother who lives in the eerie Gothic house above the motel.

If Vertigo studies the sick psyche of the observer, Psycho literally shatters it. This film is the milestone that definitively shifts the thriller from a whodunnit (finding the killer) to the psychological (understanding the killer’s mind). Hitchcock’s genius here lies in manipulating the audience’s identification. For 40 minutes, the film makes us believe Marion Crane is our protagonist. We follow her anxiety, her guilt, her hope for redemption. Then, in one of the most traumatic and famous scenes in cinema history, she is brutally murdered.

At this point, the viewer is psychologically adrift. Who do we cling to now? Hitchcock cruelly shifts our point of view to Norman Bates as he meticulously cleans the crime scene. We are forced to hope that he doesn’t get caught. We are forced to enter his mind. Psycho is the first mainstream film where the final twist is not an event, but a psychological diagnosis. The revelation that his mother has been dead for years and that Norman has absorbed her personality is not just shocking; it is an act of narrative redefinition that forces us to re-evaluate every previous action and line of dialogue. The monster is not external; it is a dissociated personality. It is the mother of all modern psychological thrillers.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

A young, happy couple, Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, move into a prestigious and old New York apartment building, the Bramford, despite warnings from a friend about its dark history. They befriend their elderly and invasive neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet. After a mysterious night, Rosemary becomes pregnant and is overcome by excruciating pain and growing paranoia, suspecting that the neighbors are part of a satanic coven with designs on her baby.

This is the absolute masterpiece of paranoia. Roman Polanski creates an almost unbearable atmosphere of psychological terror where the greatest threat is not the devil, but doubt. The film is a masterful, slow, and suffocating execution of gaslighting. The term, now in common use, describes psychological manipulation where false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making them doubt their own memory and perception.

Every single person in Rosemary’s life, including those she should trust implicitly, tells her that what she is experiencing is just “female hysteria” or “pregnancy fantasies.” Her ambitious husband, Guy, betrays her. Her trusted doctor, Dr. Sapirstein, isolates and drugs her. The neighbors feed her strange concoctions. Polanski uses pregnancy (the most intimate, physical, and bodily experience) as a psychological battlefield. Rosemary loses control not only of her mind but of her very body. The suspense stems not from monsters (which are never seen), but from the harrowing question: “Is Rosemary going mad, or is she the only sane person in an insane world?” It is the definitive psychological thriller about isolation, betrayal, and the horror of losing one’s autonomy.

The Shining (1980)

Struggling writer Jack Torrance takes a job as the winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains. He brings his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny, a child with a psychic power called “the shining.” As a snowstorm cuts the hotel off from the rest of the world, the sinister forces inhabiting the building and the weight of isolation push Jack into a spiral of homicidal madness.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a fascinating case study that perpetually lives on the border between psychological horror and psychological thriller. There are undeniably supernatural elements: the hotel’s ghosts, the rivers of blood, Danny’s “shining.” And yet, the true terror of the film is the slow, methodical disintegration of Jack Torrance’s psyche. The film is ambiguous: does the hotel make Jack crazy, or did the hotel simply choose Jack because he was already prone to violence and madness?

Kubrick uses the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel (corridors that lead nowhere, windows in offices where they shouldn’t be) as a physical map of the labyrinth of Jack’s mind. The isolation and writer’s block (external “terrifying real-life events”) become the catalysts that allow the (internal) madness to emerge. The psychological tension is palpable, built not on jump scares, but on a sense of inevitable mental collapse. Jack Nicholson’s performance is terrifying not when he’s wielding the axe, but in the quiet moments, in the vacant stare, in the rage simmering beneath a false courtesy. The hotel doesn’t create Jack’s madness; it reveals it and gives it permission to act.

A Better Life

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Drama, thriller, by Fabio Del Greco, Italy, 2007.
Rome: Andrea Casadei is a young investigator specializing in audio wiretapping who conducts investigations commissioned by husbands betrayed by their wives, or by parents worried about what their children are doing outside the home. But what interests him most is understanding the human soul, listening to casual conversations in the streets, knowing what people think. He often meets in Piazza Navona with his friend Gigi, a frustrated street artist obsessed with success at all costs, with whom he shares a passion for wiretapping. Shocked by the mystery of the disappearance of Ciccio Simpatia, another street artist common friend, Andrea decides to abandon the commissioned works to seek a better life and reflect on his own and others' existence. He will meet the actress Marina and with a bug he will slowly enter her life until he discovers her most unthinkable secrets. The film deals with an important theme of contemporary Western society: the lack of love. The mysterious and tormented figure of Marina is reflected in a gloomy and soulless Rome.

Director Fabio Del Greco declared about his film: "Perhaps this film is a reflection on the art of observing, of listening, in short, of what one does when one leaves the real world to tell about it. Perhaps he wants to talk about the subtle relationship between the mirages of success touted by today's society, power and the most authentic human relationships.A 'dark cloud' hangs over the city: it is engulfing everyone in a sort of indistinct, uniform mass, where everyone thinks the same things, where everyone they are more alone. Where is the truest part that makes us unique? Maybe you can try to intercept it only secretly."

LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch.

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The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Clarice Starling, a young and brilliant FBI trainee, is tasked by her superior, Jack Crawford, with interviewing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is a genius former psychiatrist and a ferocious cannibal, held in a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. The FBI hopes Lecter can provide a psychological profile to help capture another serial killer, “Buffalo Bill,” who kidnaps and skins his female victims.

This is the psychological thriller that transcended the genre. It is one of only three films in history to win the “Big Five” at the Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Actress) and it brought the genre to its highest intellectual expression. This is not an action film; it is a film of conversations. All the suspense, adrenaline, and terror are based almost exclusively on the tense dialogues between Clarice and Lecter, separated by a pane of glass.

The analysis focuses on their relationship: a “quid pro quo” exchange. Lecter doesn’t want to escape (not yet); he wants to get inside Clarice’s head. He is fascinated by her ambition, her vulnerability, and her past traumas. The film contrasts two types of monsters: Buffalo Bill, the “physical” monster who acts on the body, and Lecter, the “mental” monster who acts on the psyche. Lecter is the psychological thriller incarnate: he uses analysis, memories, and trauma as sharp weapons. The film’s real battle is not the hunt for Buffalo Bill, but Clarice’s psychological survival of the autopsy Lecter is inflicting on her. “You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head,” Crawford warns her. But it’s too late.

Seven (Se7en) (1995)

Two detectives, the disillusioned and cultured veteran William Somerset, one week from retirement, and the impulsive and idealistic newcomer David Mills, just transferred, find themselves hunting a brilliant and methodical serial killer. The killer, known as John Doe, is orchestrating a series of grotesque and theatrical murders, each based on one of the seven deadly sins.

If The Silence of the Lambs is an intellectual duel, David Fincher’s Seven is a moral assault and an immersion into nihilism. It is a film that stains the viewer. The atmosphere is not just a backdrop: the nameless city, perpetually shrouded in rain and moral decay, is an active character that corrodes the protagonists’ psyches. The killer, as Somerset soon realizes, is not a madman; he is “methodical, precise, and, worst of all, patient.”

John Doe doesn’t just want to kill; he wants to preach. He wants to hold up a mirror to the world’s own filth. His “masterpiece” is not the individual murders, but the finale. The film’s climax is the point of no return for the psychological thriller. “What’s in the box?” has become an iconic line, but its power lies not in the shock, but in its diabolical psychological conclusion. John Doe doesn’t win by killing Mills or his wife. He wins by forcing Mills to become the embodiment of Wrath, the final sin. He has destroyed his psyche, not just his body. It is total psychological victory, an ending so bleak the studio fought with all its might to change it, without success.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Following an apparent drug-related shootout that ended in a massacre on a ship in the port of Los Angeles, Customs Agent Dave Kujan interrogates Roger “Verbal” Kint, a talkative con man with mild paralysis. Through a long and complex flashback, Verbal tells Kujan the chain of events that brought him and four other criminals under the control of the legendary and feared crime lord, the mythological Keyser Söze.

This film doesn’t just have one of the most famous twists in cinema history. This film is a psychological weapon aimed at the audience. The entire work is a masterclass in the use of the “unreliable narrator.” For the entire film, we, the audience, are Kujan: we sit across from Verbal, we listen to his intricate story, we try to piece it together, we feel smarter than him.

The Usual Suspects transforms the psychological thriller into a game of semiotics and storytelling. The suspense derives not from what is happening, but from what we are being told. The final twist, when Kujan (and we with him) realizes that the entire, complex mythology told by Verbal was invented on the spot, by reading names and places from a cluttered bulletin board in the office, is not just a “gotcha.” It is a profound statement on the nature of truth and power. The truth is simply the best story. As Verbal says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Keyser Söze is not a man; he is a myth, a narrative so powerful it paralyzes the mind and allows the guilty man to walk away clean.

Fight Club (1999)

An unnamed, insomniac, and deeply disillusioned automotive employee is trapped in the emptiness of consumerism. His life changes when he meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic and anarchic soap salesman. Together, they form a secret “fight club,” a place where alienated men can beat each other back to “feeling” something. This club quickly evolves into a subversive and terroristic movement, Project Mayhem.

Like Psycho for the 1960s, Fight Club is the definitive psychological thriller for the end of the millennium. It is a fierce, satirical, and nihilistic attack on toxic masculinity, the void of consumerism, and the search for identity in a world that wants us all to be the same. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t,” Tyler proclaims.

David Fincher’s film, with its neo-noir aesthetic and frantic editing that inserts subliminal frames, immerses us in the Narrator’s fragmented psyche. We don’t know who he is, and neither does he. The twist (Tyler Durden is an hallucination, an alter ego of the Narrator himself) is not just a gimmick. It is the central point of the film. It is the diagnosis of a social schizophrenia. The protagonist literally had to invent a more charismatic, violent, and free version of himself to survive in a world that left him numb and powerless. The film’s analysis makes us complicit in his dissociation, making us want to be Tyler, only to reveal at the end that Tyler is the disease, not the cure.

Scarlet Street

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Thriller, by Fritz Lang, United States, 1945.
Lang reprises the cast and the ambiguous triangle from "The Woman in the Portrait" and makes one of his best films, telling a story of guilt and degradation. A senior bank employee, Christopher Cross, has an insufferable wife and only one pastime: painting. One day he meets a woman, Kitty, who begins to exploit him discovering that the paintings the cashier paints can be sold at a good price.

LANGUAGE: italian
SUBTITLES: english

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The Sixth Sense (1999)

Malcolm Crowe is a respected child psychologist in Philadelphia, his life scarred by the trauma of a former patient he failed to save. A year later, he meets Cole Sear, a terrified and socially isolated boy. After initial mistrust, Cole reveals his secret to Malcolm: “I see dead people.” Malcolm, believing he can redeem himself by saving Cole, tries to help him understand his “gift.”

M. Night Shyamalan built a career on the final twist, but with The Sixth Sense, he reached a peak never to be matched. This film is a near-perfect psychological thriller disguised as a ghost story. The real psychological tension does not come from the ghosts (who, as Cole learns, are more sad and confused than scary), but from the deep emotional trauma and in-all-communication that afflict the two protagonists, Malcolm and Cole. They are two lost souls desperately trying to connect.

The film is a masterpiece of visual and narrative misdirection, but its true genius lies in the fact that the final twist (Malcolm has been dead since the first scene) is not just an intellectual trick; it is an emotional revelation. Rewatching the film, every scene takes on a tragic and moving weight: his wife’s coldness, her silence, the fact that Cole is the only person he interacts with. The film doesn’t deceive us for the sake of it; it deceives us to make us feel the pain of grief, of miscommunication, and, finally, the cathartic release of acceptance.

Memento (2000)

Leonard Shelby is hunting the man who raped and murdered his wife. His mission is made nearly impossible by a rare form of anterograde amnesia: following the attack, he can no longer form new long-term memories. He remembers everything about his life before the incident, but forgets what happened just minutes ago. To orient himself, he relies on a system of tattoos, instant photos, and written notes.

If The Usual Suspects weaponizes the narrative, Christopher Nolan’s Memento weaponizes the structure of the film itself. It is one of the most ambitious and structurally complex psychological thrillers ever made. The film is divided into two timelines: one in color, which proceeds backward (showing scenes in reverse chronological order), and one in black and white, which proceeds forward (showing Leonard in a motel room on the phone). The two lines meet in the finale.

This choice is not a stylistic quirk, but a brilliant mechanism to force the viewer to live Leonard’s psychological experience. Like him, we never know what happened before the scene we are currently watching. We are lost in the present, unable to build a reliable context. This creates an epistemological suspense: we don’t ask “who is the bad guy?” but “who can I trust? What did I do five minutes ago?” Memento is a neo-noir that dismantles the very idea of identity. If we are only the sum of our memories, who are we when we can no longer create new ones? The true psychological horror is the revelation that Leonard is manipulating himself, trapped in a loop of revenge that he may have already completed many times.

Oldboy (2003)

Oh Dae-su, a boorish and drunken Korean businessman, is kidnapped on his daughter’s birthday. He wakes up in a squalid hotel room, where he is imprisoned for 15 years, without ever seeing his captor or knowing the reason for his confinement. His only company is a television, from which he learns he has been framed for his wife’s murder. Suddenly released, he is given five days to find the truth and get his revenge.

Park Chan-wook’s masterpiece, part of his “Vengeance Trilogy,” is a Greek tragedy disguised as an ultraviolent thriller. It is a film that explores the psychology of revenge in a way so visceral and philosophical it leaves you breathless. While Memento is about the loss of memory, Oldboy is about the weight of memory and the consequences of a single, forgotten act.

The film’s villain, the wealthy and glacial Lee Woo-jin, doesn’t just want to kill Dae-su; he wants him to understand why his life was destroyed. The villain’s entire, elaborate plan is a psychological experiment. He imprisoned Dae-su for 15 years not just to punish him, but to transform him into a monster, to focus his entire existence into a single, pure desire for revenge. The final twist is one of the most devastating and morally repugnant in cinema history, a revelation that doesn’t kill the body but annihilates the soul, forcing the protagonist into an unimaginable psychological punishment. It is a thriller that asks the question: can the truth be worse than imprisonment?

Black Swan (2010)

Nina, a technically perfect but emotionally repressed ballerina in a prestigious New York company, lands the role of a lifetime: the Swan Queen in “Swan Lake.” The part requires her to play both the innocent and fragile White Swan and the sensual and dark Black Swan. Under pressure from a suffocating mother, a manipulative director, and a new, uninhibited rival, Lily, Nina descends into an abyss of paranoia, self-harm, and hallucinations.

As anticipated, Black Swan is a perfect example of psychological horror, but its inclusion here is fundamental to understanding the genre’s boundaries. Unlike a pure thriller, where the threat is external (a killer, a kidnapper), the threats in Black Swan are almost entirely internalized. Her wounds move on their own, her rival Lily at times seems to be just a projection of her own repressed sexuality, and her very skin transforms. It is her internal fears and repression that externalize in grotesque fashion.

Darren Aronofsky’s film masterfully uses the structure and pacing of a psychological thriller (the suspense, the tension of competition, the envy, the threatening rival) to tell a story of body horror and mental disintegration. The “pressure” for artistic perfection is the external event that triggers the implosion. It is a film about the loss of self in the pursuit of perfection, a terrifying journey into the psyche of an artist who must destroy herself in order to create.

Silent night, bloody night

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Horror, by Theodore Gershuny, United States, 1972.
1972 American Slasher, is a forerunner horror genre several years before Carpenter's Halloween, with a complex script and first person shooting of the killer, which inspired many subsequent films. Its originality and its narration are what manage to make it a small and little known pearl of the genre. A series of murders in a small New England town on Christmas Eve after a man inherits a family estate that was once a madhouse. Many of the cast and crew members were former Warhol superstars: Mary Woronov, Ondine, Candy Darling, Kristen Steen, Tally Brown, Lewis Love, director Jack Smith, and graduate Susan Rothenberg.

LANGUAGE: english
SUBTITLES: italian, french, spanish

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Shutter Island (2010)

In 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, travel to Ashecliffe Hospital, a hospital for the criminally insane on a remote, storm-beaten island, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a multiple-murderess patient. Teddy, haunted by memories of liberating Dachau and the death of his wife, finds himself battling not only suspicious doctors and reticent patients, but also a reality that begins to crumble under the force of a hurricane and his own traumas.

Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller is a lavish and oppressive modern Gothic that explores the theme of denial. It is a film built entirely on trauma and the most powerful psychological defense mechanism: negation. The entire investigation, the conspiracy about mind control experiments, the hurricane, the mysterious patient: all of it is an elaborate construct. Scorsese litters the film with visual and narrative clues (small inconsistencies, daydreams) that constantly tell us that what we are seeing is not objective reality.

Shutter Island is the Memento of trauma. If Nolan’s protagonist cannot build new memories, Scorsese’s has built a complex alternate reality to avoid facing a single, intolerable memory. The twist is not simply that he is a patient and the investigation is a therapeutic role-play. The true, devastating psychological twist is his final choice. His last line: “Which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” It is the rare instance where the protagonist understands his psychosis and, finding the truth unbearable, consciously chooses oblivion.

Gone Girl (2014)

On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne returns home to find that his wife, Amy, has disappeared. The crime scene suggests a struggle. The disappearance of “Amazing Amy,” the author of a famous children’s book series, becomes a national media sensation. Under pressure from the police and a ravenous media circus, the portrait of their happy union shatters. Nick’s lies and strange behavior lead everyone to ask: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

David Fincher’s third film on this list demonstrates his mastery of the genre. Gone Girl is a fierce, cynical, and pitch-black critique of modern marriage and the performative nature of identity in the media age. The film is split in two. The first half is a tense procedural thriller: is the apathetic husband the number one suspect? The second half, after the shocking reveal that Amy is alive and has framed him, becomes a perverse psychological game between two sociopaths.

The film’s beating heart is the “Cool Girl” monologue. Amy is not just a psychopath; she is a social creation rebelling in the most destructive way possible. She has spent her life playing the role of the perfect, effortless, and accommodating woman to please men, and now she uses that same storytelling ability (like Keyser Söze) to destroy her husband. The film’s analysis explores how Amy manipulates media psychology and public opinion to create a narrative that makes her untouchable. It is a thriller about the psychological warfare fought behind the facade of perfect domestic life.

Get Out (2017)

Chris, a young and talented African-American photographer, prepares for a weekend getaway to meet the parents of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage, for the first time. The weekend begins with an overly accommodating and “progressive” welcome from her parents, a neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist. But a series of unsettling discoveries, the mother’s hypnosis, and a strange gathering of white guests lead Chris to a terrifying and unimaginable truth.

With his debut film, Jordan Peele redefined the genre, using the structure of the psychological thriller as a vehicle for a powerful social critique of racism. Get Out is a masterpiece of social gaslighting. The real terror Chris experiences at first doesn’t come from explicit threats, but from everyday micro-aggressions, the out-of-place comments, the family’s performative white liberalism, all of which make him feel constantly uneasy. They tell him his paranoia is just paranoia, until it’s too late.

The “Sunken Place,” where Rose’s mother imprisons him with hypnosis, is perhaps the most powerful visual metaphor for modern psychology to appear in cinema. It is the paralysis of powerlessness; it is being screaming and silenced while someone else controls your body and your identity. It is the historical experience of African-American repression transformed into a thriller mechanism. Get Out proves that the most terrifying psychological thriller is one that doesn’t need to invent monsters, because the monsters are already embedded in our society.

M- A City Searches for a Murderer (1931)

In Berlin, a group of children are playing in the courtyard of an apartment, someone sings a song about a child killer. A woman sets the table for lunch, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. A poster warns of a staggering array of missing children as anxious moms and dads wait outside a school.

Little Elsie Beckmann leaves school, bouncing a ball on her way home. A man offers to buy her a balloon from a blind street vendor, then talks and walks with her. Elsie’s seat at the table remains empty, her ball is shown rolling away on the grass, and her balloon gets lost in the suspended telephone lines in the city.

Beckert sends an anonymous letter to the newspapers, taking credit for the murders of the children and promising that he will commit more; police extract clues from the letter, using new fingerprinting and handwriting analysis techniques. Inspector Karl Lohmann, head of the homicide squad, instructs his men to step up research and check records of recently released psychiatric patients, focusing on those with a history of violence against children. They organize frequent raids to interrogate known criminals, thus severely disrupting the affairs of the underworld. Der Schränker (The Burglar) convenes a meeting of the city’s crime lords.

Beckert sees a girl in the reflection of a shop window and also starts following her, but stops when the girl meets her mother. He runs into another little girl and befriends her, however the blind salesman recognizes her boos. The salesman informs a friend of his, who finds Beckert and sees him inside a shop. As the two go out onto the street, the man marks a large “M” (for Mörder, “murderer” in German) on his hand and collides with Beckert, marking the back of his overcoat so other beggars can track him down. She notices the cast and cleans it up for him, but before she completes it, Beckert realizes he is being seen and runs away.

The film centers on the manhunt of the character of Lorre, the monster of Dusseldorf, carried out by both police and criminal gangs.

The screenplay for the film was written by Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbor and was the director’s first sound film. It features several stunning cinematic innovations, including the use of long fluid shots, and even a musical leitmotif, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” booed by Lorre’s character. Currently considered a absolute cult, the film was considered by Lang to be his most important work. It is widely considered to be one of the best films ever, and also an indispensable work on modern criminal crime and also on thriller fiction.

The stranger

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Thriller, by Orson Welles, United States, 1946.
Orson Welles, a filmmaker who has always been against the Hollywood system, did not like this film made inside the studios, but strangely he managed to create a commercial product beyond his own expectations, managing to insert his unmistakable style into it, leaving us an amazing movie. In the small town of Harper, lives Charles Rankin, who is about to marry the daughter of an important judge. But Charles Rankin is actually Frank Kindle, a Third Reich criminal who has created a new identity for himself. However, Inspector Wilson is on the trail of him.

Food for thought
Forget the untruths. For a while, you may feel a certain boredom, fear or lack of motivation: while what is false disappears, it takes time for what is real to assert itself. There will be a transition period. Let it happen, and hold on. Sooner or later your masks will fall, the falsehoods will dissolve, and your true face will appear.

LANGUAGE: english
SUBTITLES: Spanish, French, Germa, Italian, Portuguese

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Suddenly (1954)

The story is set in a small California town whose harmony is shattered when the US head of state’s train arrives in town, and a killer and his henchmen take control of a house to kill the president.

In postwar America, a train carrying the US head of state will stop in the village of Suddenly, California. Declaring themselves FBI agents seeking protection before the head of state arrives, three boys arrive at the Bensons’ home: Ellen, a widow, her son “Pidge” and also her father-in-law, “Pop” Benson. The house sits atop a hill near the station where the presidential train is scheduled to stop, making it a perfect location from which to shoot the head of state.

It soon becomes clear that the men are not government agents but murderers, led by the ruthless John Baron, who take over the house and hold the family hostage, planning to shoot the president from a house window that has a good view of the train station. .

Sheriff Tod Shaw arrives with Dan Carney, the intelligence agent in charge of the president’s security details. When Baron and his gangsters arrive they shoot Carney and a bullet fractures Shaw’s left arm. The baron boasts of the silver medal he won in the war for killing 16 Japanese. The baron explains that he has nothing against the president, but is paid 500,000 ₤ to kill him and money is his only motive.

Pop has damaged the TV earlier and the man who fixes the television arrives in the middle of the scene. If they don’t obey, the baby will be killed. Baron sends out Benny, one of his two henchmen, to examine the President’s typical day, but is soon killed in a police shootout. On the other hand, Jud, a television technician, has appeared at her home and becomes a hostage. Pidge goes to his grandfather’s dresser to get some medicine and finds a revolver which he replaces with his toy gun. The film stars Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden, in addition to James Gleason and Nancy Gates.

Diaboliques (1955)

Michel is having an affair with Nicole Horner, a teacher at the school. Rather than antagonism, the two women have a rather close relationship, based primarily on their apparent mutual hatred for Michel. He is cruel to the students, beats Nicole and teases Christina about her heart condition.

Threatening a divorce to lure Michel into Nicole’s apartment building in Niort, a town several hundred kilometers away, Christina sedates him. The two women then drown him in a bathtub and, returning to school, dump his body into the abandoned pool. There the cleaning man tells her that Michel had stayed in the room for a while, but was rarely, if ever seen, and hadn’t kept anything there.

Nicole sees in the newspaper that the police found the body. When Christina goes to the morgue, she discovers that it’s not actually Michel’s body. This stunning psychological thriller is based on the original She Who Was No More (Celle qui n’était plus) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The film was the 10th highest-grossing film of the year in France, and also received the Louis Delluc Award in 1954.

Clouzot, after completing The Wages of Fear, optioned the rights to the film’s script, avoiding ad Alfred Hitchcock to make the film. This film helped motivate the making of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, mentioned in a meeting that his favorite horror film of all time was Les Diaboliques.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Kiss Me Deadly is often seen as a cult of the fantastic film noir period that began in the early 1940s. If so, it’s also a preamble to a new generation of neurotic heroes who dominated noir films of the following decades, such as Lee Marvin’s ex-convict trying to find his elusive reward in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), or Hackman’s hysterical detective Gene, who ends up traveling literally in circles in Arthur Penn’s superb Night Moves (1975).

As if anticipating future characters, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), the hero of Aldrich’s film, is a particularly hateful incarnation of the pimp, a ferocious and unpleasant variation of one type of man which sees itself in danger and on the verge of extinction. Hammer is the creation of Mickey Spillane, whose pulp stories have taken on a particularly ferocious tone of the Cold War and postwar macho society.

Hammer laughs aloud as he strafes a pack of Communists. Mike Hammer perfectly represented his creator, a racist and also a misogynist. The Man of the Organization defined a new way of life for the postwar wage slave.

Hammer tortures a senior medical examiner who will not disclose information and slaps another old man who does not accept a bribe. He hits a senseless thug by banging his head against a wall, then, when the stunned man doesn’t give up, Hammer punches him down an endless flight of concrete steps. He is part of a group of slimy and intrusive men who like to humiliate people: no one is saved in the director’s fierce vision of 1950s America.

Psycho (1960)

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a Phoenix office worker, steals forty thousand dollars and flees to meet her lover. During her journey, she stops for the night at an isolated motel, the Bates Motel, run by the shy and introverted Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his tyrannical mother. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

This is the quintessential psychological thriller and one of the most influential films of all time. Hitchcock rewrote the rules of cinema, shocking audiences with unpredictable twists (the famous shower scene) and exploring the depths of a disturbed psyche. It is unmissable because it created a new language for suspense, demonstrating that the most terrifying monsters are not fantastical creatures, but hide behind the ordinary.

Repulsion (1965)

Based on a short story written by Polanski and Gérard Brach, the plot follows Carol, an alienated girl who is subjected to a series of horrific experiences. The film focuses on Carol’s point of view and her hallucinations and headaches as she comes into contact with men. Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Patrick Wymark and Yvonne Furneaux appear in supporting roles.

A man, Colin, is in love with Carol and makes fervent attempts to woo her, but Carol seems disinterested. Carol is troubled by Helen’s relationship with a man named Michael, whom Carol doesn’t seem to like.

Carol is troubled by a crack in the sidewalk when she gets home from work. Colin meets her, walks her home and tries to kiss her several times, but she refuses, running upstairs and brushing her teeth hard before crying. That night Helen interrogates Carol for throwing Michael’s toothbrush and also the electric razor down the toilet. At the beauty salon, Carol becomes increasingly distracted, barely talking to her clients and colleagues.

That night, Helen and Michael leave for Italy on vacation, leaving Carol alone in the apartment. After trying on one of her sister’s dresses, Carol sees a dark figure in the mirror. Carol’s isolation begins to take its toll on her: she has been missing for three days at work.

Filmed in London, it is Polanski’s first English-language film, as well as the second production of a feature film, after Knife in the Water (1962). The film premiered at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival before receiving theatrical releases internationally. Upon its release, Repulsion received considerable critical acclaim and is currently regarded as one of Polanski’s greatest works. The film was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Photography by Gilbert Taylor.

Persona (1966)

Persona, even if it’s not explicitly a psychological thriller, it could be seen and interpreted as such by many viewers. The story centers on a young nurse named Alma (Andersson) and her patient, the famous stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who has stopped talking. They move into a cottage, where Alma takes care of Elisabet, confides in her, and begins to have a hard time distinguishing herself from her personality.

A projector starts projecting a collection of photos, consisting of a crucifixion, a spider, and the murder of a lamb, and a little boy gets up in the hospital. He sees a large screen with a blurry image of two women. Among the women could be Alma, a young nurse appointed by a doctor to take care of Elisabet Vogler.

Elisabet is a stage star who suddenly stopped talking and even moving around, doctors have determined that it is the result of psychological illness. In the medical facility, Elisabet is distressed by the televised images of a man’s self-immolation during the Vietnam War. Alma reads her a letter from Elisabet’s husband containing a photo of their baby boy. The doctor speculates that Elisabet can recover much better in a beach house and sends her there with Alma.

At the cottage, Alma tells Elisabet that no one has ever paid attention to her in the past. She discusses her boyfriend, Karl-Henrik. Alma tells the story of how, while already in a relationship with Karl-Henrik, he sunbathed naked with Katarina, a woman he had met. Two guys appeared and Katarina started an orgy. Alma got pregnant, miscarried and began to feel really guilty.

Alma goes to the community to send their letters and notices that Elisabet’s is not sealed. The law. The letter states that Elisabet is “studying” Alma and also discusses the nurse’s orgy and abortion. Angry, Alma accuses Elisabet of using her. In the ensuing battle, she threatens to scald Elisabet with boiling water and stops when Elisabet begs her not to. This is the first time ever that Alma has spoken, even though she thought Elisabet had muttered something to her earlier when Alma was half asleep. Alma informs her that she knows that Elisabet is a despicable person; when Elisabet runs away, Alma chases her and begs for mercy. Later, Elisabet takes a look at the famous photograph of Jews arrested in the Warsaw ghetto from the Stroop Report.

The film’s exploration of duality, insanity and personal identity has been interpreted as a reflection of Jung’s theory of the person and which addresses issues related to cinema, vampirism, homosexuality, motherhood, abortion and others. subjects. The experimental style of his prologue and storytelling was also appreciated. The enigmatic film has been called the Mount Everest of cinematic psychological analysis; according to film historian Peter Cowie, “Anything that is said about Persona can be contradicted; the opposite will also be true.

Ingmar Bergman made Persona with Ullmann and Andersson in mind for the lead roles and the intention of discovering the actresses their identities. He shot the film in Stockholm and Fårö in 1965. In production, the technicians create effects using smoke and a mirror to assemble a scene and combine the faces of the protagonists in post-production in a single shot. Andersson wanted to insert a sexually explicit monologue into the film’s script and rewrote parts of it.

Blowup (1966)

Best arthouse film, existentialist and out of the box of the cinematographic language known up to that moment, it is also a psychological thriller with a murder, investigations and suspense.’s first entirely English-language film Antonioni and stars David Hemmings as a London fashion photographer who believes he has unintentionally photographed a murder.

After spending the night in a homeless dorm, where he took photos for an art image publication, photographer Thomas is late for a photo shoot with model Veruschka in his lab, which consequently delays him for a shoot with various other models later. Bored, he leaves, leaving the models and production staff behind. As he leaves the workshop, two girls, aspiring models, ask to consult with him, but Thomas avoids them and goes to an antique shop.

A woman, Jane, is furious at being photographed and chases Thomas, asks for his film and eventually tries to snatch his camera. She joins him back in his studio desperately asking for the movie. She and Thomas have a conversation and flirt, but he deliberately passes her a different roll.

Thomas, interested in the contents of the film, makes several zooms of the black and white frames of Jane and her lover. A third person hides in the trees with a gun. Thomas calls Ron eagerly, stating that his impromptu photo shoot may have saved a man’s life. Thomas is interrupted by someone who knocks on the door: they are once again the two girls, with whom he does somersaults in his study and flirts.

Upon awakening, she discovers that they would like to be photographed, but realizes that there may be other clues in the park. Further examination of a shadowy figure under a shrub leads Thomas to assume that the man in the park may have been killed, while Thomas was talking to the woman around the corner.

The film also stars Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Tsai Chin, Peter Bowles and Gillian Hills, as well as 1960s model Veruschka. The film’s non-diegetic music was written by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, while rock group Yardbirds are also featured.

In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, Blowup won the Palme d’Or, the highest honor of the festival. A critical and box office success, Blowup would inspire later major films, including Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981) by Brian De Palma. . In 2012, Blowup was ranked 144th in the Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll of the Greatest Films in the cinema history.

The Conformist (1970)

In the Paris of 1938, Marcello Clerici prepares to kill his former university professor, Luca Quadri, leaving his future wife Giulia in their living room. He often uses a car driven by Manganiello as they are both chasing the teacher.

A collection of memories portrays Marcello discussing with his blind friend Italo about his plans to get married, his somewhat uncomfortable efforts to join the fascist secret police and even his visits to his parents: a mother addicted to morphine in the house of the family’s decaying vacation, as well as how his father hospitalized in an asylum.

In a further flashback, Marcello is seen as a child who is humiliated by his schoolmates until he is saved by Lino, a driver. Lino offers to give him a gun and later makes sexual proposals to Marcello, to which he reacts by picking up the gun and shooting at Lino, then escapes the scene of what he thinks is a murder.

Marcello, in confession, admits to the priest that he has committed many serious sins, including homosexual intercourse and the subsequent murder of Lino, premarital sex and his absence of guilt for these sins. The priest is shocked, but quickly acquits Marcello when he learns that he currently works for the fascist secret police, called the Organization for the surveillance and repression of anti-fascism.

The film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio, Fosco Giachetti, José Quaglio, Dominique Sanda and Pierre Clémenti. The film was a co-production of Italian, French and even West German film companies. Bertolucci sets the film in the 1930s in the style linked to the fascist era: the attractive halls of the bourgeoisie as well as the large halls of the ruling elite.

The Shining (1980)

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a struggling writer with a past of alcoholism, accepts a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains. Along with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd), who possesses psychic abilities, Jack soon finds himself confronting the hotel’s malevolent forces, which slowly drive him to madness. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Based on the Stephen King novel, this is a masterpiece of psychological thriller and horror. Kubrick builds claustrophobic tension and growing paranoia through cinematography, editing, and Jack Nicholson’s iconic performance. It is an unmissable film because it delves into the dark side of fatherhood, madness, and trauma, showing how an isolated environment can amplify inner demons.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), a frustrated housewife, has an affair with a stranger but is brutally murdered in an elevator. Her son Peter (Keith Gordon), a prostitute (Nancy Allen) who witnessed the crime, and her psychiatrist (Michael Caine) find themselves entangled in a maze of deception and ambiguous identities, as a mysterious killer stalks them. Directed by Brian De Palma.

This is an explicit homage to Alfred Hitchcock (particularly Psycho) but with a more explicit and baroque sensibility typical of De Palma. It is an elegant, sensual, and high-tension psychological thriller, famous for its masterful suspense sequences and plot twists. It is a must-see for its stylistic audacity, eroticism, and for how it plays with themes of voyeurism and sexual identity.

Blow Out (1981)

Jack Terry (John Travolta), a sound technician working on low-budget films, accidentally records the sound of a gunshot and a car crash. He rescues the woman onboard, Sally (Nancy Allen), and discovers that the accident, in which a presidential candidate dies, may not have been accidental. He thus begins to investigate. Directed by Brian De Palma.

This is a Brian De Palma masterpiece, a paranoid and visually brilliant thriller, heavily influenced by Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Watergate. It is an unmissable film for its growing suspense, virtuosic editing, and for how it explores themes of truth, manipulation, and powerlessness in the face of a conspiracy. The ending is one of the most haunting and unforgettable in cinema.

Blue Velvet (1986)

The film is about a young college student who, returning home to visit his sick father, discovers a severed human ear in a field that leads him to uncover a vast criminal conspiracy and to enter into a romantic relationship with a struggling singer.

Jeffrey finds a human ear and hands it over to police detective John Williams. Williams’ daughter Sandy who tells him the ear belongs to a singer named Dorothy Vallens. Intrigued, Jeffrey enters Dorothy’s apartment posing as a thief and steals a spare key while distracted by a man in a distinctive yellow sports coat, whom Jeffrey dubbed “the yellow man.

Jeffrey and Sandy attend Dorothy’s show, in which she sings “Blue Velvet“, and leave early so that Jeffrey can infiltrate her apartment. After Frank leaves, Jeffrey sneaks off and seeks comfort from Sandy.

After discovering that Frank kidnapped Dorothy’s husband Don and little Donnie to force her into sexual slavery, Jeffrey believes Frank cut off Don’s ear to intimidate her into submission. Jeffrey begins a sadomasochistic sexual relationship in which Dorothy pushes him to beat her. Jeffrey sees Frank go to Dorothy’s show and later watches him market drugs and a conference with the Yellow Man.

After the failure of his 1984 film Dune, David Lynch attempted to develop a “personal story” somewhat characteristic of the surrealist style shown in his first film Eraserhead (1977). The independent studio De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, then owned by Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, agreed to finance and produce the film.

The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director and achieved the status of cult film. Publications including Sight & Sound, Time, Entertainment Weekly and BBC Magazine have ranked it among the greatest American films ever. In 2008 it was chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest detective films ever made.

Seven (Se7en) (1995)

Two detectives, the cynical veteran William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and the young, impulsive David Mills (Brad Pitt), investigate a series of gruesome murders. They soon discover that the serial killer (Kevin Spacey) is basing his actions on the Seven Deadly Sins, turning each crime into a horrific moral lesson. Directed by David Fincher.

This is a tense, claustrophobic, and brutally effective neo-noir that redefined the investigative thriller genre. The suspense derives not only from the killer’s identity but from his grim intelligence and his distorted worldview. It is an unmissable film for its dark atmosphere, shocking ending, and its ability to dig into the blackest depths of the human psyche, leaving a lasting impression.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a renowned child psychologist, tries to help Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a disturbed boy who claims to see and talk to the dead. As Malcolm tries to understand the nature of Cole’s gift or illness, the two develop a deep bond. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

This is the quintessential psychological thriller for its supernatural element and its legendary final plot twist, which shocked and made millions of viewers reconsider the entire film. It is an unmissable film because, beyond the twist, it is a touching story about childhood trauma, loss, and communication, built with subtle suspense and an unsettling atmosphere.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

The film tells the story of an ambitious actress named Betty Elms (Watts), who has recently arrived in Los Angeles, who meets a woman (Harring) who is recovering from an accident. The story tells numerous other situations and characters, including a Hollywood director.

A dark-haired woman is the only survivor of a car accident on Mulholland Drive, a winding road in the Hollywood Hills. Injured and in shock, she arrives in Los Angeles and slips into an apartment. Later in the morning, an ambitious actress named Betty Elms reaches the house, which is inhabited by her aunt Ruth. Betty is surprised to find the woman, who has a memory loss and calls herself “Rita” after seeing a poster of the film Gilda with Rita Hayworth. To help the woman remember her identity, Betty searches Rita’s bag, where she finds a large amount of cash and an unusual blue key.

In a restaurant called Winkie’s, a man tells another about a problem where he imagined he met a horrible figure behind the diner. When they explore the place, the monster suddenly appears, causing the man who had the nightmare to collapse in shock. Elsewhere, director Adam Kesher has his film commandeered by mobsters, who insist that he cast an unidentified actress named Camilla Rhodes as the lead. Adam returns home to find that his partner Lorraine is cheating on him with Gene. When the mobsters block his line of credit, Adam arranges to meet a strange cowboy, who cryptically urges him to choose Camilla for his film. Meanwhile, a bungling hitman attempts to steal a book full of phone numbers and even leaves three people dead.

A casting agent takes Betty to a sound stage where the film The Sylvia North Story, directed by Adam, is cast. Betty and Rita go to Diane Selwyn’s apartment, where a neighbor tells them that she has changed apartments with Diane. Worried, they return to Betty’s apartment, where Rita dresses up in a blonde wig.

The Franco-American co-production was originally conceived as a television pilot and much of the film was shot in 1999 with the plan of David Lynch to keep it open for a potential series. Lynch then provided an ending to the project, making it a feature film. The result is half pilot and half feature film, together with the characteristic surrealist style Lynch’s

Classified as a psychological thriller, Mulholland Drive earned Lynch the Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director Award) at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, sharing the award with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There. Lynch also earned an Academy Award for Best Director. The film significantly boosted Watts’ fame and was also the latest feature by Hollywood star Ann Miller.

Mulholland Drive is generally considered to be among Lynch’s finest works; was ranked 28th in Sight & Sound’s 2012 Film Critics Poll of the Best Films Ever Made, as well as ranking in a 2016 BBC poll of the Best Films of 2000.

Black Swan (2010)

The story centers on a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet by the New York City Ballet company. The show features a dancer playing the innocent and delicate White Swan, for which professional dancer Nina Sayers (Portman) fits perfectly, as well as the dark and even sensual Black Swan, which are qualities best embodied by rival Lily (Kunis ). Nina is bewildered by a feeling of immense stress when she discovers that she is carrying out her duty, making her lose her sense of reality and fall into madness.

Nina Sayers is a young woman who lives with her overprotective mother, Erica, a former dancer, and dances with a New York City company. Nina auditions for the roles and performs flawlessly as Odette, but fails to play Odile. Nina asks Thomas to reevaluate his role. When he forcefully kisses her, she bites him and runs away from her workplace.

Later that day, Nina sees the cast checklist and is surprised to find that she has been given the lead roles. At a gala celebrating the new show, a drunken Beth accuses her of providing Thomas sexual favors in exchange for the role. Thomas believes Beth was attempting suicide. Nina sees Beth after an accident in the hospital and also sees that her legs have been badly injured, which implies that she will definitely no longer have the ability to perform as a dancer.

During training sessions, Thomas tells Nina to observe a rookie, Lily, who bears a physical resemblance to Nina, but similarly Nina has no spontaneity. Nina suffers from hallucinations. One night, despite Erica’s objection, Nina accepts Lily’s invitation to go out for a drink. Under his influence, Nina flirts with the men at the bar and Lily. After arguing with her mother, Nina barricades herself in her room and has sex with Lily.

After arriving at Lincoln Center, Nina sees Lily dancing as Odile and talks to her about their night together. Lily refuses to move in with Nina and ridicules Nina for having a sexual fantasy about her. Nina is convinced that Lily plans to take her place, particularly after learning that Thomas has made Lily his replacement.

Nina’s hallucinations expand and her wounds increase, reaching the hallucination of transforming herself into Odile. On the night of the inauguration, he shouts to his mother: “I am the queen of the swans, you are the one who never left the body!”, And leaves. Since Nina is late, Lily is ready to replace her. Nina meets Thomas, who is so pleased with her newfound confidence that he allows her to reprise her roles.

The screenplay was written by Mark Heyman, John McLaughlin and Andres Heinz, based on an early story by Heinz. The film stars Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey and also Winona Ryder.

The director considered Black Swan an accompaniment piece to his 2008 film The Wrestler, with both films featuring challenging performances for different types of art. Portman and Kunis trained in ballet for several months before filming began.

Shutter Island (2010)

In 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are sent to Shutter Island, a remote asylum for the criminally insane on an isolated island, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a patient. But on the island, nothing is as it seems, and Teddy finds himself confronting his personal demons. Directed by Martin Scorsese.

This is a labyrinthine and claustrophobic psychological thriller, an homage to film noir and gothic horror. Scorsese creates an atmosphere of paranoia and disorientation that is visually stunning, guiding the viewer on a tortuous journey into the protagonist’s mind. It is an unmissable film for its flawless construction of suspense and for its ambiguous ending that challenges the perception of reality.

Babycall (2011)

Anna and her 8-year-old son Anders flee a tragic family past: the child’s father is a violent and dangerous man. They move into a secret house and Anna buys a babycall to keep Anders in check while he sleeps. One night Anna wakes up with a start: noises come from Anders’ room, it seems a murder is taking place.

Noomi Rapace brilliantly plays a restless and obsessed with control character. A woman who never smiles, shady, trying to save her fragile mental balance. Story of love, motherhood and violence, between gray city exteriors and claustrophobic interiors.

My Son (2017)

Julien is always on the road for work. His constant absences from home and inability to care for his son Mathys destroyed his marriage to Marie. While in France, he receives a disturbing call from his ex-wife: their child, now seven, has disappeared while camping in the Alps.

Starting with a well-established narrative cue in the thriller genre, French director’s My Son. Christian Carion is a film not to be missed especially for the style in which it was shot. Conceived from the outset as a project to be realized almost in real time, over 6 days of shooting, the director uses a radical improvisation method with his lead actor Guillaume Canet: he does not let him read any script and asks him to experience the tension, suspense and unexpected events of fiction as if they were real events, moment by moment.

Custody (2017)

Miriam Besson and Antoine Besson are a divorced couple. They have a daughter who is about to turn eighteen, Joséphine, and an eleven-year-old son, Julien. Miriam wants to keep her youngest son away from her father, whom she accuses of being a violent man. He asks for exclusive custody of Julien: the child is traumatized and does not want to see his father again.

In Foster care – a story of violence Xavier Legrand tells the characters with great humanity. A dramatic story in which little Julien is destined to lose the ingenuity of his childhood in a battle for survival. The film, shot with a sober and intimate style, highlights a bitter and hopeless vision of human nature, with men who, in order to escape loneliness and failure, become violent and murderous persecutors.

Parasite (2019)

The film, starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun -kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Jang Hye-jin and Lee Jung-eun, follows a poor family who plans to be used by wealthy family members and break into their home by pretending competent and highly qualified individuals.

The Kim family, father Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook, daughter Ki-jung and son Ki-woo, live in a small basement apartment in Seoul, have a low-paying temporary job folding pizza boxes and they struggle to make ends meet. Setting out to study abroad and knowing that his friend needs the money, a friend suggests to Ki-woo that he pretend to be a college student to take on his job as an English tutor for the daughter of the wealthy Park family, Da- hye.

The Kim family plans to find a job for each family member by posing as self-employed and highly skilled workers to become servants of the Parks. Ki-jung pretends to be “Jessica” and, using Ki-Woo as a reference, becomes an art therapist for the Park’s young son, Da-song.

When the Parks leave for a camping trip, the Kims revel in the luxuries of the residence before Moon-gwang abruptly appears at the door, telling Chung-sook that he left something in the basement. Moon-gwang films them on his phone and threatens to expose their ruse to the Parks.

An extreme storm soon brings the Parks home, so the Kims rush to tidy up the house and imprison Moon-gwang and Geun-sae before their return. The Kims hide Geun-sae and Moon-gwang in the basement. Ms. Park exposes to Chung-sook that Da-song had a traumatic experience which resulted in him having convulsions at a previous birthday party, when she saw a “ghost” – actually Geun-sae – emerge from the basement at night. . Before the Kims decide to come out, they hear Mr. Park’s hasty comments about the smell of Ki-taek. The Kims find their home flooded with water from the sewer system due to the severe storm and are forced to take refuge in a gymnasium with several other evacuees.

Parasite premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2019, where it was the first South Korean film to win the Palme d’Or. The film is considered by many critics as the best film of 2019 and also among the best films of the 21st century. He made over $ 263 million worldwide on a budget of $ 15.5 million. Among its many accolades, Parasite won 4 awards at the 92nd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film, becoming the first non-English language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture .

Parasite is the first South Korean film to achieve Oscar recognition and one of 3 films to win both the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Picture. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and also the BAFTA Award for Best Non-English Language Film, and also became the first non-English language film to win the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a cast in a movie.

Enemy

Adam Bell is a history professor with a monotonous and repetitive life. One day, while watching a movie, he notices an actor who is his perfect double. Obsessed with this discovery, Adam tracks down his doppelgänger, an actor named Anthony Claire, and his life spirals into a vortex of paranoia and confusion. The encounter between the two men triggers a dangerous psychological battle that also involves their respective partners, threatening to destroy their lives.

Denis Villeneuve, adapting José Saramago’s novel “The Double,” creates an oppressive psychological thriller, wrapped in a sepia-toned cinematography that reflects the protagonist’s alienated state of mind. Enemy is not simply the story of two look-alikes; it is an immersion into the subconscious of a man at war with himself. Adam and Anthony are not two distinct people, but the two split halves of the same psyche: the repressed and dissatisfied professor versus the confident and unfaithful actor.

The film is filled with powerful and ambiguous symbolism, particularly the recurring image of the spider, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for oppressive femininity, control, or the trap of married life from which the protagonist tries to escape. The famous and shocking final scene is not a twist for its own sake, but the keystone of the entire film: it represents the uninterrupted cycle of temptation and guilt, the realization that, despite the internal struggle, his unfaithful nature has won again. Enemy is a work that requires the viewer to abandon conventional logic to embrace an allegorical exploration of duality, guilt, and identity.

Possession

Mark, a spy, returns home to West Berlin, divided by the Wall, to find that his wife Anna wants a divorce. Her request is inexplicable and violent, and she begins to exhibit increasingly erratic and terrifying behavior. Obsessed, Mark hires a private investigator to follow her, discovering that Anna takes refuge in a dilapidated apartment where she hides a monstrous secret: a tentacled creature with which she has a symbiotic and sexual relationship.

Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is an extreme work, a cinematic experience that transcends genres to become a primal scream about the pain of separation. The film is the most visceral and terrifying metaphor ever made about the end of a marriage. The Berlin divided by the Wall is not just a backdrop, but a mirror of the irreparable fracture between the two protagonists. Isabelle Adjani’s performance is legendary, a physical and emotional tour de force that culminates in the infamous miscarriage scene in the subway underpass, a moment of pure body horror that represents the physical birth of psychological trauma.

The creature that Anna nurtures and cares for is the materialization of her pain, her anger, and her desire to create a “perfect” partner, a doppelgänger of her husband who can completely satisfy her. The film explores duality in a radical way: not only does Anna have a look-alike, the teacher Helen, but the creature itself evolves to become a perfect double of Mark. Possession is a film that offers no consolation; it is a total immersion in emotional chaos, a psychological horror that uses excess and the grotesque to tell the story of the disintegration of love and identity in an unforgettable and heartbreaking way.

Pi

Max Cohen is a solitary and paranoid mathematical genius, convinced that everything in nature can be understood through numbers. Using a self-built supercomputer, Euclid, he tries to identify a mathematical pattern in the stock market. His research leads him to discover a mysterious 216-digit number that seems to be the key to the universe. This discovery attracts the attention of both an aggressive Wall Street firm and a group of Kabbalistic Jews who believe the number represents the true name of God.

Shot in grainy, low-budget black and white, Darren Aronofsky’s debut is a feverish and pounding intellectual thriller. Pi is an exploration of obsession in its purest form: the pursuit of knowledge as a path to madness. Max’s paranoia is not just a character trait, but becomes contagious, transmitted to the viewer through frantic editing, a techno-industrial soundtrack, and direction that completely immerses us in his fragmented mind.

The film stages the conflict between order and chaos, rationality and mysticism. Max’s search for a universal pattern is a metaphor for the human search for meaning in a seemingly random universe. However, the knowledge he seeks proves to be forbidden, not because it is divine, but because the human mind is unable to contain it without self-destructing. Max’s obsession does not lead to enlightenment, but to unbearable physical and mental pain. The ending, in which Max drills into his own brain to free himself from the number and the obsession, is a desperate and tragic act: the only path to peace is oblivion, the renunciation of absolute knowledge. A powerful debut that anticipates all of Aronofsky’s cherished themes, from the pursuit of perfection to the destruction of the body.

Memento

Leonard Shelby suffers from anterograde amnesia: he is unable to create new memories. The last thing he remembers is the murder of his wife. To overcome his condition and hunt down the killer, Leonard relies on a system of Polaroids, notes, and tattoos on his body. His investigation leads him to interact with ambiguous characters like Teddy and Natalie, but his fragmented memory makes it impossible to distinguish truth from lies and friends from enemies.

Christopher Nolan builds a masterpiece of non-linear narrative that is not just a stylistic flourish, but the very form of the film. Memento unfolds on two timelines: one in color, which proceeds backward, and one in black and white, which moves forward chronologically. The two meet in the finale, revealing a shocking truth. This brilliant structure forces the viewer to experience the same disorienting experience as the protagonist, forced to piece together the puzzle of his existence without the certainty of the recent past.

The film is a profound reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and truth. Nolan shows us how memory is not an objective record of events, but a subjective narrative we construct to give meaning to our lives. Leonard’s obsession with revenge is not a search for justice, but a mechanism of self-deception, a loop he creates for himself to give purpose to an otherwise empty existence. The real twist is not the identity of the killer, but the revelation that Leonard manipulates his own memory system to continue his hunt indefinitely. It is a psychological thriller that questions our own ability to trust what we remember and, ultimately, who we are.

Caché (Hidden)

Georges and Anne Laurent, a bourgeois Parisian couple, begin to receive anonymous videotapes. The tapes show long shots of their house, filmed from a fixed observation point across the street. Soon, disturbing and childish drawings are added to the videos. The surveillance becomes increasingly personal, forcing Georges to confront a repressed memory from his childhood related to an Algerian boy named Majid, and threatening to bring down the facade of his perfect life.

Michael Haneke is a master at dissecting the malaise of the European bourgeoisie, and Caché is one of his most powerful and ambiguous works. The film uses the mechanism of the paranoid thriller to explore much deeper themes: guilt, memory, and repression, both on an individual and collective level. Georges’ paranoia is not just the fear of being watched, but the fear that his past, and the guilt that comes with it, will resurface.

Haneke plays with the viewer, constantly confusing the point of view of the film’s camera with that of the anonymous camera, making us complicit in the surveillance. The film never reveals who sends the tapes, because that is not the point. The videotapes are a MacGuffin, a catalyst that forces Georges to come to terms with an act of childhood cruelty linked to French colonial history and the Paris massacre of 1961. Majid’s suicide scene is one of the most shocking and unforgettable moments in modern cinema, an explosion of violence that shatters the film’s controlled surface. The enigmatic ending, a long take in which the sons of Georges and Majid meet, suggests that guilt and its consequences are passed down from generation to generation, leaving the viewer with a sense of deep and unresolved unease.

The Vanishing (Spoorloos)

A young Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, are on vacation in France. During a stop at a service station, Saskia disappears without a trace. Three years later, Rex is still obsessed with her disappearance, unable to move on with his life. His desperate search attracts the attention of the kidnapper, a seemingly normal man named Raymond, who contacts Rex and offers him a terrible choice: he can find out what happened to Saskia only if he agrees to suffer the same fate.

George Sluizer’s The Vanishing is an anti-thriller, a work that subverts every convention of the genre to create a unique experience of existential terror. The film reveals the identity of the kidnapper halfway through the narrative, shifting the focus from “who” to “why.” The real suspense lies not in the mystery of the disappearance, but in the disturbing psychology of Raymond, a man who commits evil not out of passion or madness, but as a philosophical experiment to test the limits of his own nature.

The heart of the film is Rex’s obsession. His need to know the truth becomes stronger than his survival instinct. It is this desperate need for closure that Raymond exploits as a weapon. The ending is one of the most chilling and nihilistic in cinema history. There is no catharsis, no justice, only the terrible and suffocating realization of Rex’s choice. The Vanishing is not a film about violence, but about the horror of knowledge, proving that sometimes the unknown is preferable to an unbearable truth. A masterpiece that explores the abyss of the human psyche with terrifying clarity.

Berberian Sound Studio

Gilderoy, a shy and meticulous English sound engineer, is hired to work in Italy on the mixing of a horror film titled “The Equestrian Vortex.” Accustomed to nature documentaries, Gilderoy finds himself uncomfortable in the visceral and violent world of Italian giallo cinema. As he is forced to create sounds of torture and murder using vegetables and makeshift tools, his sanity begins to waver, and the line between the film’s fiction and his reality becomes increasingly blurred.

Berberian Sound Studio is a meta-cinematic homage and a sensory immersion into the world of 70s giallo. Director Peter Strickland makes a radical and brilliant choice: never to show a single image of the film Gilderoy is working on. The horror is entirely evoked through sound. We hear bloodcurdling screams, stabbings, drownings, but we only see Gilderoy stabbing cabbages, smashing watermelons, and boiling vegetables. This dissociation between image and sound creates a profoundly unsettling experience, exploring our own complicity in creating and consuming violence.

The film is a journey into psychological disintegration. Gilderoy’s cultural and linguistic isolation, combined with the disturbing nature of his work, leads him to a genuine identity crisis. Paranoia creeps in, his mother’s letters become increasingly strange, and the reality of the recording studio begins to merge with the narrative of the horror film. The ending, in which Gilderoy himself seems to be absorbed by the film, with his voice dubbed in Italian, is a fascinating and terrifying reflection on the power of cinema to shape and destroy our perception of reality. A cerebral and unique thriller.

Compliance

In an Ohio fast-food restaurant, manager Sandra receives a phone call from a man who introduces himself as Officer Daniels. The man informs her that a young employee, Becky, is accused of stealing money from a customer. Following the alleged police officer’s instructions, Sandra detains Becky in the office. What begins as a routine investigation turns into a nightmare of psychological and physical humiliation and abuse, as Sandra and other employees obey increasingly degrading orders given over the phone.

Inspired by a series of real events, Compliance is an almost unbearable film to watch, but essential in its exploration of the psychology of obedience and the abuse of power. Director Craig Zobel does not create a conventional thriller, but a claustrophobic drama that exposes the fragility of our defense mechanisms in the face of an authority figure, even when it is just a voice on the phone.

The horror of the film lies not in explicit violence, but in its frightening plausibility. Zobel shows us how ordinary people, under pressure and eager to “do the right thing,” can become complicit in terrible acts. The film is a powerful demonstration of the concept of the “banality of evil” and recalls psychological experiments like Milgram’s. Becky’s passivity and Sandra’s blind obedience are not signs of stupidity, but the result of a complex dynamic of power, manipulation, and fear of challenging authority. Compliance is a profoundly disturbing work that forces us to ask: what would we have done in their place? The answer is far less reassuring than we would like to believe.

Hereditary

After the death of her enigmatic mother, artist Annie Graham tries to process a complicated grief. Her already fragile family is shattered by a second, terrible tragedy that strikes her younger daughter, Charlie. As grief consumes the family from within, Annie begins to uncover dark secrets about her mother’s past and her lineage, revealing a terrifying and inescapable destiny that threatens to destroy them all.

Ari Aster’s debut is a masterpiece of contemporary horror cinema, a film that transcends the genre to become a devastating family drama disguised as a supernatural tale. Hereditary is first and foremost a heartbreaking exploration of grief and hereditary trauma. The supernatural is not an external force that invades the family, but a metaphor for the mental illness, secrets, and dysfunctions that are passed down from generation to generation, like a cursed inheritance.

Toni Collette’s performance as Annie is monumental, a raw and unfiltered portrayal of a mother’s pain that transforms into anger, guilt, and finally, madness. Aster builds tension with surgical precision, using Annie’s miniatures as a symbol of the characters’ control and lack of free will, trapped in an infernal diorama orchestrated by forces greater than themselves. The film is a slow-burn nightmare that explodes into an apocalyptic and blasphemous finale, proving that the real haunted house is not made of bricks, but of blood ties. The deepest horror is not that of a demon, but the realization that you cannot escape your family’s destiny.

The Babadook

Amelia, a widow still traumatized by the violent death of her husband, which occurred while he was taking her to the hospital to give birth, struggles to raise her difficult six-year-old son, Samuel, alone. One night, Samuel finds a disturbing pop-up book titled “Mister Babadook” and asks his mother to read it to him. The story is about a monstrous creature that, once you are aware of its existence, can no longer be driven away. Soon, a sinister presence begins to manifest in the house.

Jennifer Kent, in her directorial debut, creates one of the most intelligent and moving psychological horrors of recent years. The Babadook is not the story of a monster haunting a house, but a powerful and terrifying allegory of repressed grief, depression, and the anxieties of motherhood. The Babadook is not an external entity, but the personification of the pain and resentment that Amelia has never processed. It is the “monster” that lives in the basement of her psyche.

The film courageously explores the dark side of parenting, a subject often taboo. It shows how unprocessed pain can turn into a destructive force that threatens to consume not only oneself but also the people we love. Amelia’s fight against the Babadook is her fight against her own inner demons. The ending is emblematic and moving: the monster cannot be defeated or eliminated, but it can be confronted, acknowledged, and confined. Grief, the film tells us, does not disappear, but one can learn to live with it, feeding it in the dark to prevent it from taking over.

Midsommar

Dani, a young student, is devastated by a terrible family tragedy. To try to overcome the trauma, she joins her boyfriend Christian and his friends on a trip to Sweden to attend a legendary midsummer festival in an isolated commune. What begins as an idyllic vacation in a land of perennial sunlight slowly turns into an increasingly unsettling and violent nightmare, as the community’s pagan rituals are revealed to be sinister.

After Hereditary, Ari Aster confirms himself as a master of “horror drama” with Midsommar, a film that takes place almost entirely in the blinding light of the sun, proving that horror does not need darkness to thrive. The film is a folk-horror fairy tale about the end of a toxic relationship and the processing of grief through a cathartic and terrifying experience. The commune of Hårga, with its smiles, its songs, and its flowers, is a metaphor for a dysfunctional family that offers Dani what her emotionally unavailable boyfriend cannot: a sense of belonging and shared empathy.

Dani’s journey is a perverse path of emancipation. Initially a victim of her pain and Christian’s emotional neglect, she finds in the commune a community that not only recognizes her suffering but shares it physically, screaming and crying with her. This radical empathy, although coming from a murderous cult, offers her a form of liberation. The ending, with Dani smiling as her ex-boyfriend burns alive, is as disturbing as it is cathartic. Midsommar is a visually sumptuous and psychologically complex work that explores how the need for a family and emotional support can lead one to embrace horror.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Steven Murphy is a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon with a seemingly perfect life: an ophthalmologist wife, Anna, and two teenage children, Kim and Bob. His orderly existence is disrupted when he takes under his wing Martin, a strange and persistent boy whose father died years earlier on Steven’s operating table. Martin places a curse on the surgeon’s family: if Steven does not kill one of his family members to “restore the balance,” they will all die of a mysterious illness that will progressively paralyze them.

Yorgos Lanthimos, a master of the “Greek Weird Wave,” transposes the Greek tragedy of Iphigenia to an aseptic and alienating American suburb. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a cold and ruthless psychological thriller, a parable about guilt, justice, and retribution. The film is characterized by Lanthimos’s unmistakable style: surreal and monotone dialogue, detached acting, and direction that uses wide-angle lenses and high-angle shots to create a sense of oppression and clinical detachment.

The film explores the conflict between the rationality of science, represented by Steven, and the irrationality of an archaic and supernatural justice, embodied by Martin. Steven, a man who plays God in the operating room, refuses to accept his own fallibility and guilt (having had a drink before the fatal operation). Martin’s curse forces him to confront the consequences of his actions in a terrible and impossible way. The climax, in which Steven is forced to make an atrocious choice, is a moment of pure existential horror that questions every notion of morality and justice, leaving the viewer in a state of shock and profound unease.

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

A Greek couple keeps their three children, now teenagers, completely isolated from the outside world in a fenced villa. The children have never left the property and have been educated through a system of bizarre rules and a distorted language, where words like “sea” mean an armchair and “zombie” a small yellow flower. The precarious balance of this closed world is threatened when the father introduces an outsider, Christina, to satisfy his son’s sexual needs.

With Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos kicked off the “Greek Weird Wave,” a surreal, disturbing, and allegorical cinema. The film is a fierce and chilling satire on family, control, and authority. The house is not a refuge, but a psychological prison where the parents, patriarchal and oppressive figures, shape reality to their liking to protect their children from a supposed external corruption. The result is a terrifying social experiment that generates monsters of innocence and ignorance.

The horror of the film is not supernatural, but deeply human and psychological. It stems from the absurdity of the rules, the sudden and impassive violence, and the total moral confusion of the children, who commit acts of self-harm or incest with the same apathy with which they play. The introduction of Christina, and with her, elements of pop culture like Hollywood movies, acts as a virus that infects the closed system, triggering a desire for escape. The ending, in which the eldest daughter mutilates herself to be able to leave, is a powerful and ambiguous image of the desperate and painful search for freedom.

Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh)

In a modern and isolated house in the countryside, two ten-year-old twins, Elias and Lukas, await their mother’s return. When the woman comes home, her face is completely covered in bandages following cosmetic surgery. Her behavior is cold, distant, and severe, and the children begin to doubt that this woman is their real mother. Their paranoia grows, pushing them to tie her up and torture her to force her to reveal the truth.

The Austrian film by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala is a glacial and cruel psychological thriller that plays with the viewer’s perception and the theme of identity. The atmosphere is aseptic and oppressive, and the house, with its large windows and minimalist design, becomes a glass prison where family trust disintegrates. The mother’s bandage mask is a powerful symbol of the unknown that creeps into the heart of the familiar, turning the most reassuring figure into a source of terror.

Goodnight Mommy is a film based on a devastating twist, but its strength lies not only in that. It is an exploration of grief and trauma from the distorted perspective of a child. Elias’s paranoia is not just a product of his imagination, but a psychological defense mechanism to cope with a truth too painful to accept. The film forces us to question what we see, confusing reality with hallucination, until a final revelation that retroactively redefines the entire narrative in an even more tragic and terrifying key. A work that shows how the deepest horror can arise from pain and the inability to communicate.

Funny Games

A bourgeois family arrives at their vacation home on the lake. Their tranquility is interrupted by two young men, Paul and Peter, dressed in white and with impeccably polite manners, who show up at the door asking for some eggs. What seems like a trivial request turns into a sadistic nightmare, as the two young men take the family hostage and force them to participate in a series of “funny games” for their own survival.

Michael Haneke delivers a chilling and provocative work, an anti-thriller that does not aim to entertain, but to criticize our own consumption of media violence. Funny Games is a profoundly meta-cinematic film. Paul, one of the two tormentors, constantly breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer directly, commenting on the conventions of the thriller genre, and making us his accomplices. There is no motivation for their violence; their cruelty is gratuitous, an end in itself, a reflection of our desire for spectacle.

The most emblematic and radical moment of the film is when, after the mother manages to shoot one of the boys, Paul takes a remote control and “rewinds” the scene, nullifying the only moment of catharsis offered to the viewer. Haneke denies us any satisfaction, throws our thirst for violence in our faces, and forces us to question why we find these “games” funny. Funny Games is a brutal and intellectually honest cinematic experience, a punch to the gut that leaves us with a sense of guilt and profound unease, forcing us to reflect on our role as spectators.

Kill List

Jay, a former soldier turned hitman, is haunted by a failed job in Kiev that left him with physical and psychological scars. Under pressure from his wife and his partner, Gal, he accepts a new assignment: a “kill list” with three targets. As they carry out the contracts, the job proves to be increasingly strange and unsettling, and Jay’s paranoia drags him into a spiral of brutal violence and a dark world of pagan rituals.

Ben Wheatley mixes different genres – from family drama to crime thriller, to folk horror – to create a unique, unpredictable, and profoundly disturbing work. Kill List begins as a realistic and tense portrait of a man struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and financial difficulties, only to slowly transform into a Lovecraftian nightmare. The violence in the film is sudden, raw, and difficult to watch, but it is never gratuitous; it is the expression of Jay’s fractured psyche.

The film builds a sense of creeping terror, suggesting that there is something much larger and more sinister at play, a puzzle of which the protagonists know only a few, bloody pieces. The victims seem to almost welcome their death, thanking Jay, a detail that fuels the mystery and paranoia. The ending is an explosion of pagan horror reminiscent of The Wicker Man, a brutal and nihilistic twist that reveals how Jay was never a hunter, but prey, manipulated from the beginning to become a sacrificial figure in a terrifying ritual. A one-way journey into the heart of darkness.

The Invitation

Will reluctantly accepts an invitation to a dinner party at the home of his ex-wife, Eden, and her new husband. The house is the same one where they lived together, a place haunted by the memory of their son’s tragic death. During the evening, Will perceives a strange atmosphere: the guests are overly cheerful, and Eden and her new partner speak enthusiastically about a spiritual group called “The Invitation,” which helped them overcome their grief. Will’s paranoia grows, but he can’t tell if the danger is real or just a product of his unresolved trauma.

Karyn Kusama directs a masterful chamber psychological thriller, a slow-burn work that builds tension almost unbearably. The Invitation takes place almost entirely in a single setting, turning a luxurious Hollywood Hills villa into a claustrophobic trap. The film is a sharp exploration of grief, denial, and the difficulty of trusting one’s instincts when emotionally vulnerable.

The viewer is trapped in Will’s mind, forced to doubt his perception. His friends accuse him of being paranoid, of not having overcome his pain, and for much of the film, we wonder if they are right. Kusama is brilliant at playing with this ambiguity, scattering small, unsettling clues that could be interpreted either as signs of real danger or as projections of Will’s traumatized mind. The ending is an explosion of violence that confirms the protagonist’s worst fears, but the real stroke of genius is the final shot: the red lanterns lighting up across the city, revealing that the horror was not an isolated event, but part of a much larger and more terrifying plan.

Get Out

Chris, a young African American photographer, is preparing to meet the parents of his white girlfriend, Rose, for the first time. Despite his anxieties, the Armitage family proves to be welcoming and overly progressive. However, Chris soon notices strange behavior from the black household staff and other guests, who seem trapped in a trance-like state. What begins as an awkward weekend turns into a nightmare when Chris discovers the terrifying secret hidden behind the family’s smiles.

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is a cultural phenomenon, a psychological thriller that is also a sharp and brilliant social satire on liberal and “post-racial” racism in contemporary America. Get Out uses the tools of the horror genre to explore the African American experience in a society that, behind a facade of tolerance, hides prejudice and exploitation. Chris’s paranoia is not an illness, but a perfectly rational survival mechanism.

The film is a masterpiece of writing and direction, full of symbolism and premonitory details. The “sunken place” is a powerful metaphor for marginalization and the loss of autonomy, the feeling of screaming without being heard. Peele subverts horror clichés, turning the quiet white suburbs into a place of terror and apparent normality into a deadly threat. Get Out is a film that manages to be scary, funny, and politically relevant, demonstrating how genre cinema can be a powerful tool for social criticism.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A young woman, Martha, escapes from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains and seeks refuge with her older sister Lucy and brother-in-law Ted, with whom she has had no contact for two years. As she tries to readjust to a “normal” life, Martha is tormented by painful memories and growing paranoia. Unable to communicate her trauma, her behavior becomes increasingly strange and unpredictable, and the line between past and present dissolves, leaving her in terror that the cult may come back for her.

Sean Durkin’s debut is a devastating and subtle psychological portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder. The film moves fluidly between the present in the luxurious lake house and flashbacks of life in the commune, using almost imperceptible transitions that completely immerse us in the protagonist’s fragmented mind. We don’t know what is real and what is a hallucination, and Martha’s paranoia becomes our own. The title itself, with its four names, reflects her shattered identity: Martha is her birth name, Marcy May the one given to her by the cult leader, Marlene the name used to answer the phone.

Elizabeth Olsen delivers an extraordinary performance, capturing the vulnerability, confusion, and repressed anger of a woman whose perception of reality has been completely distorted. The cult leader, played by a magnetic John Hawkes, is a charismatic manipulator who offers a sense of belonging in exchange for total submission. The open ending is perfect in its ambiguity, leaving us suspended in doubt and terror, just like the protagonist. A work that explores with great sensitivity the long and difficult process of healing from trauma.

Session 9

A team of workers specializing in asbestos removal accepts a seemingly simple job: to clean up a huge abandoned asylum, the Danvers State Hospital, in just one week. As they work, personal tensions within the group begin to emerge. One of them, Mike, finds a series of old recordings of therapy sessions with a patient with multiple personality disorder. Listening to these tapes and the oppressive atmosphere of the hospital trigger a descent into madness.

Session 9 is a masterpiece of low-budget psychological terror, a film that shows how atmosphere and setting can be more frightening than any monster. The real protagonist of the film is the Danvers State Hospital, a real place laden with a history of suffering. Director Brad Anderson needs no ghosts or jump scares; the physical decay of the building becomes a mirror of the psychological decay of the characters.

The film masterfully intertwines two narratives: the growing paranoia and disintegration of the group of workers and the story of Mary Hobbes, the patient on the tapes. The two stories mirror and merge, suggesting that evil is not a supernatural presence, but a latent energy, a weakness inherent in the human psyche that the hospital awakens and amplifies. The ending, with the revelation that the source of the horror is not external but internal to the group, is a chilling twist that redefines the entire film. I live in the weak and the wounded,” says the voice on the tape, and this phrase encapsulates the terrifying essence of Session 9.

Primer

Four engineers work in one of their garages on technological projects, hoping to create a revolutionary invention. Two of them, Aaron and Abe, accidentally discover an unexpected side effect of one of their machines: the ability to create a time loop. They build a version of the machine large enough to hold a human and begin using it to go back in time a few hours, mainly to profit from the stock market. Soon, however, they lose control of their invention, and reality fractures into a labyrinth of paradoxes and doubles.

Made on a shoestring budget of just $7,000, Primer is one of the most complex and intellectually rigorous science fiction films ever made. Written, directed, produced, and starring Shane Carruth, a former engineer, the film makes no concessions to the viewer. The dialogue is dense with technical jargon, the plot is an intricate puzzle of overlapping timelines, and the narrative is deliberately obscure.

The terror in Primer is not physical, but conceptual. It is the horror of losing control over reality, of no longer knowing which version of yourself or your friends is the “original.” The film explores the paranoia that arises from forbidden knowledge. The invention does not lead to an adventure, but to the disintegration of a friendship and the loss of identity. Its complexity is not a flaw, but its greatest strength: it forces the viewer to experience the same confusion and disorientation as the protagonists. Primer is a cerebral thriller that requires multiple viewings to be understood, but which rewards the effort with a profound and unsettling reflection on the nature of time and the moral consequences of power.

Coherence

Eight friends gather for a dinner party on the night a comet passes very close to Earth. After a sudden power outage, they discover that the only lit house in the neighborhood is identical to theirs. When some of them decide to investigate, they trigger a series of bizarre and paradoxical events. They soon realize that the comet’s passage has fractured reality, creating an infinite number of parallel universes that overlap, and that in each house there are different versions of themselves.

Shot in five nights with a minimal budget and based largely on the actors’ improvisation, Coherence is a science fiction thriller that is brilliant in its simplicity. Director James Ward Byrkit turns a normal dinner party among friends into an existential nightmare, using the principles of quantum physics (particularly the Schrödinger’s cat paradox) as a narrative engine. The tension does not come from an external threat, but from the paranoia and mistrust that creep into the group when identities become unstable.

The film is a brilliant exploration of how human relationships, with their secrets and lies, can collapse in the face of the unknown. Each character is forced to confront the choices they have made and the alternative versions of their own lives. The protagonist, Em, is faced with a terrifying question: if you could find a better version of your life in another reality, would you be willing to steal it? Coherence is a compelling intellectual puzzle and a psychological thriller that shows how the most frightening ideas are those that question the foundations of our very existence.

Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko is a troubled teenager who suffers from sleepwalking and hallucinations. One night, he is awakened by a voice that lures him out of the house. Shortly after, a jet engine crashes into his bedroom. The voice belongs to Frank, a disturbing figure in a rabbit costume, who informs Donnie that the world will end in 28 days. Guided by Frank, Donnie commits a series of acts of vandalism that disrupt his quiet suburban town, as he tries to unravel the mystery of time travel and his destiny.

A cult classic par excellence, Richard Kelly’s debut film is an unclassifiable amalgam of teen drama, science fiction, social satire, and psychological thriller. Donnie Darko is a profoundly ambiguous film, which can be interpreted both as the story of a boy with paranoid schizophrenia, and as a complex tale about a tangent universe and a hero destined to sacrifice himself to save the world. This duality is its greatest strength, as it completely immerses us in the confused and alienated mind of the protagonist.

The film perfectly captures the angst of adolescence and critiques the superficiality of American suburban society in the 1980s. Beyond its intricate plot, Donnie Darko is a melancholic meditation on loneliness, love, and the search for meaning in a world that seems absurd. Its dreamlike atmosphere, iconic soundtrack, and unforgettable images (above all, that of Frank the rabbit) have made it a generational work. A film that, like its protagonist, defies all labels and continues to be debated and fascinate years later.

The Lighthouse

In the late 19th century, two lighthouse keepers, the veteran Thomas Wake and the rookie Ephraim Winslow, begin a four-week shift on a remote and inhospitable island in New England. The isolation, hard work, alcohol, and the secrets they both hide push them into a spiral of paranoia, hallucinations, and violence. As an endless storm traps them on the island, the line between reality and madness completely dissolves.

After The Witch, Robert Eggers confirms himself as a unique author with The Lighthouse, a visually stunning and psychologically oppressive work. Shot in expressionistic black and white and in an almost square format, the film is a total immersion into the psyche of two men who are disintegrating. The performances of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are titanic, an acting duel that oscillates between the grotesque and the tragic.

The film is a cauldron of Greek mythology (Prometheus, Proteus), maritime folklore, Freudian symbolism, and Gothic literature. The lighthouse itself becomes a phallic symbol, and its light a forbidden knowledge that Wake jealously guards and that Winslow ardently desires. It is impossible to distinguish what is real and what is the fruit of their drunken and isolated minds. Madness is contagious, and the viewer is dragged along with the protagonists into an abyss of flatulence, sea shanties, mermaids, and primordial violence. The Lighthouse is not an easy film, but it is a powerful and unforgettable cinematic experience, a feverish nightmare that explores the darkest recesses of masculinity and sanity.

Under the Skin

An alien entity takes the form of an attractive woman and travels the roads of Scotland in a van. Her purpose is to seduce lonely men and lure them into a trap, a black void where they are consumed and reduced to their essence. During her hunt, however, the alien begins to feel an unexpected curiosity for humanity and for the body she inhabits, an experience that will lead her to question her own nature and her mission.

Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece is an existential science fiction film, a hypnotic and profoundly unsettling work that uses the perspective of an alien to explore what it means to be human. Under the Skin is more of a sensory experience than a narrative one. Glazer’s direction is detached and almost documentary-like when the alien observes the world (many of the luring scenes were shot with hidden cameras and ordinary men, not actors), and then becomes abstract and surreal in the “trap” sequences.

The journey of the protagonist, played by an extraordinary Scarlett Johansson, is a path of discovery and alienation. Initially a cold and ruthless predator, she begins to develop a form of empathy, an awareness of human vulnerability that makes her, in turn, vulnerable. The film reflects on loneliness, the objectification of the female body, and the cruelty and compassion of which humanity is capable. The final scene, in which her human “skin” is torn away, revealing her true form, is a powerful and tragic image of the impossibility of belonging. A visual and sound work of art that gets under your skin and stays there for a long time.

Oldboy

Oh Dae-su, an ordinary man, is kidnapped and imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years, without any explanation. During his captivity, he discovers from the television that he has been framed for the murder of his wife. Suddenly released, Dae-su has five days to discover the identity of his jailer and the reason for his long confinement. His quest for revenge drags him into a web of conspiracy and violence, leading him to a truth more shocking than he could have imagined.

The second chapter of Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” Oldboy is a baroque, excessive, and unforgettable work, a psychological thriller that transforms into a modern Greek tragedy. The film is a punch to the gut, a visceral journey into the psyche of a man consumed by the desire for revenge. Park’s direction is virtuosic, culminating in the famous long-take fight scene in the hallway, a scene of raw and desperate violence that has gone down in cinema history.

But beyond its stylization, the heart of Oldboy is a devastating reflection on the nature of revenge, memory, and sin. The film shows that revenge is not a liberating act, but a cycle of destruction that consumes both the victim and the perpetrator. The final twist is one of the most audacious and taboo in cinema history, a revelation that not only redefines the entire film, but poses a terrible question: is it better to live with an unbearable truth or to forget? Dae-su’s choice to be hypnotized to erase his most atrocious memory is an ambiguous and heartbreaking ending, which leaves us questioning the nature of guilt and the possibility of forgiveness.