Who doesn’t love a great thriller movie with a series of unexpected twists and turns, which grips your attention and keeps you glued to the screen throughout, making you keep guessing the end? Some movies give you an opportunity to explore possibilities and dimensions to reality that you never knew existed. Over the several decades of cinema, a number of great suspense and thriller movies have been made, with a lot of sub genres such as crime, science fiction, psychology, mystery, political and so on. Here is a list of our top 10 picks that you shouldn’t miss out on:
1. Us (2019)
Adelaide and her family plan to go to their home in Santa Cruz for a family trip. However, their peaceful beach vacation takes a dark turn and everything turns chaotic when their doppelgangers show out of nowhere and start attacking and terrorizing them. A gritty series of events follows as each member of her family is taken by their respective doppelgangers and it turns to a rescue mission.
2. Shutter Island (2010)
This mystery and suspense psychological thriller starring heartthrobs Leonardo diCaprio and Mark Ruffalo is a story about two US Marshalls, Teddy and Chuck who are sent for the investigation of the case of disappearance of a murderer from a remote mental asylum on a secluded island where the duo learns shocking truths about the place as well as their own reality.
3. The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Sixth Sense is a supernatural psychological thriller that revolves around the life of Malcolm Crowe, a disheartened child psychologist in Philadelphia. He is approached by a young boy, Cole Sear who had a history of physical harm and possessed the ability to see and talk to spirits that walk around like the living, not knowing that they’re dead, because of whom, he started to view things differently in his own life.
4. Inception (2010)
Inception is considered to be one of Christopher Nolan’s greatest pieces. Leo diCaprio plays the role of Dom Cobb, a thief that uses dream sharing technology to enter the minds of his targets and steal important corporate secrets. When he is accused of playing a role in his wife’s murder, Cobb’s only way out is by doing the inverse of what he usually did, to perform an inception and plant a dream in the mind of a CEO.
5. The Departed (2006)
Hollywood remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, this Martin Scorsese film is a crime thriller which is based on the lives of an undercover police agent and a mole who constantly try to attack and counter attack each other in order to protect their identities and prevent themselves from being exposed to their respective authorities while attempting to infiltrate the same Irish gang.
6. Psycho (1960)
This 1960 thriller is definitely one of our favourite picks! Based on the 1959 novel of the same name, the story centres on the life of a Phoenix secretary, Marion Crane, who ends up at a remote motel after having embezzled money from her employer and its consequences. This is considered to be one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest works.
7. Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs is an American psychological thriller that is an adaptation of a 1988 novel of the same name, by Thomas Harris. It is based on the life of Clarice Starling, a youthful FBI trainee who attempts to understand the mind and work of a serial killer, Buffalo Bill, who skins his victim’s corpses. To get into the mind of this killer, she seeks help of an imprisoned Dr. Lecter, an excellent psychiatrist, who is also a gruesome cannibalistic serial killer.
8. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
This 1992 crime thriller, directed by the renowned and widely loved director Quentin Tarantino is ranked as one of the most gut wrenching, gripping crime dramas of all times. Controversial for its trademark utilisation of profanity and display of sheer violence throughout its screen time, this movie revolves around the story about a diamond heist by six thieves, which are complete strangers to each other, that goes terribly out of hand and totally not as planned. The film shows the incidents before and after the actual heist happened. These six thieves, not knowing each other’s identities, on being ambushed and taken by the police start believing that one among the six of them is an undercover officer or a police informant.
9. Chinatown (1974)
Chinatown, a popular crime thriller, released in the year 1974 was directed by Roman Polanski. Los Angeles’ private detective, Jake Gittes, a specialist in matrimonial matters, is hired by Evelyn Mulwray to look into her doubts about her husband’s infidelity and philandering. Unknown to the gravity of the twisted situation he was getting himself into, Jack thought it was a regular case of marital problems, until he gets to meet the real Evelyn Mulwray, realizing that he was hired by a woman falsely posing to be Mrs. Mulwray. Mr. Mulwray’s sudden death only adds to the confusion and web of lies, deceit and corruption that Jack had so naively had gotten himself into.
10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The 2015 movie is a psychological thriller based on the 2005 Swedish novel by Steig Larsson. Starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, this movie tells the story a journalist, Blomkvist and his journey of investigating about what happened to a wealthy woman who mysteriously disappeared 40 years ago. For fulfilling his investigation, he seeks the help of Salander, a young computer hacker.
There are several directors and filmmakers who have created their niche in the thriller and suspense genre of movies and given us cinephiles great pieces of work over the decades. Some of these names like Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan are really popular and have bagged many prestigious awards and definitely could not have been left out from our list of top picks. However, there are some of our favourites that are also brilliant films but were not included in the list such as Vertigo (1958), Gone Girl (2014), Zodiac (2007) and many more. These movies are widely loved by both the audience as well as the critics as they do not only come with great plots, storylines and direction but also keep us on our toes and give our lives and minds a new perspective of the world we live in and what we consider to be our reality.
Do let us know in the comments if we’ve missed out any of your favourite suspense movies!