10 Best thriller movies of all time
The term thriller encompasses a great variety of subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. Which is why even harder to compare and choose the best amongst them.
The good thriller prompts a spine-chilling response from its audience and keeps them on edge of their seats. For curating this list I have included noir to psychological horrors to crime thrillers films from different eras and it includes only one film per director to capture this genre.
10. Body Double
Body Double is a 1984 American neo-noir erotic thriller film directed, co-written, and produced by Brian De Palma. As the title suggests, the whole film works on a notion of trickery — we are constantly battling to distinguish between dream, reality & the surreal. De Palma effortlessly lampoons the fakery of filmmaking & the allure of voyeurism on the foundations of Vertigo/Rear Window. A seedy thriller loaded with possibility.
9. Memories Of Murder
Memories of Murder is a 2003 South Korean crime thriller film directed by Bong Joon-ho, from a screenplay by Bong and Shim Sung-bo, and based on the 1996 play Come to See Me by Kim Kwang-rim.It tells the harrowing true story of the hunt for a sadistic serial rapist and murderer terrorizing a small province in 1980s South Korea. A murder chronicle that engulfs you into its own mystique. A richly layered film with great cinematic devices, satirical and distant and first, desperate, elusive and suspenseful by the end.
8. Zodiac
Zodiac is a 2007 American neo-noir mystery thriller film directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt, based on the non-fiction books by Robert Graysmith, Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002). Based on the actual case files of the unsolved crimes by the Zodiac Killer this film is one of the best true crime thriller made by Fincher. Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith gives a stellar performance as an obsessive reporter/detective with the poster of ‘The Wrong Man’ on the wall.
7. The Conversation
The Conversation is a 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Probably one of the underappreciated film by Coppola is the story of Surveillance expert Harry Caul played by Gene Hackman. A fascinatingly inverted morality play with ambiguous and fragmentary notions of privacy, guilt and (for this period, almost obligatory) paranoia. Hackman perfectly embodies a socially paralyzed man; he stops himself from listening to conversations on tape and refuses to have meaningful conversations in real life.
6. Decision To Leave
Decision to Leave is a 2022 South Korean neo-noir romantic mystery film produced and directed by Park Chan-wook. The most recently released film in this list one of the most beautiful films made in recent times. A heady, baroque mystery infused with the kind of old-fashioned romantic fatalism that makes noir-darkened hearts flutter, it is a story of impossible love. Although this is a story of murder and death, it is also one of tenderness.
5. Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American black comedy film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, and produced and co-written by Charles Brackett. It was named after a major street that runs through Hollywood, the center of the American film industry. Wilder nightmare of Hollywood affecting everyone’s in it, the ones who watches in the dark room waiting for the final close-up to come on the screen. Haunting, mesmerizing, and everlastingly beautiful.
4. The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon is a 2009 German-language mystery drama film, written and directed by Michael Haneke. The haunting story that shows the story of murders happening in a rural German village in 1913 story doesn’t follow a classical murder mystery narrative. Rather, Haneke vindicates the idea of Arendt that evil begins as micro-fascisms. Chilling, poignant and exquisitely shot images that can haunt for a long time.
3. Diabolique
Diabolique is a 1955 French psychological horror thriller film co-written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Diabolique is tense and atmospheric. Headed by two wonderfully sinister and humiliated women (Signoret and Clouzot), it conjures images of evil incarnate from the close-ups to the dirty water, the corridors, the empty streets and mostly the iconic bath code with Meurisses for which the film should be honored to eternity.
2. Vertigo
Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac. It is hard to pick one Hitchcock film for this list but I have picked Vertigo. Vertigo is arguably Hitchcock’s greatest & most personal film, a sprawling masterpiece about Male Identity, Woman as a work of art & the relationship of the creator and creation taken into the realm of love and sexuality.
- Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive is a 2001 surrealist neo-noir mystery film written and directed by David Lynch. Originally shot as a pilot for the unreleased TV show; Mulholland drive is a cinematic experience that distilled the subconscious directly into celluloid. A thriller that changes gear in the last 40 minutes or so; trying to fit the pilot and scene to deliver a film. The result is nightmarish puzzle-box mystery has become a subject of obsession and rigorous psychoanalytic readings theme that appears in Lynch’s other works most notably in Twin peaks also. It’s an unsettling film than many horror movies, but it’s also somehow funny, sexy, trippy, and tragic; Typical Lynch.
