The Puzzling Rollercoaster of the Psychological Thriller

Abstract

What constitutes a psychological thriller, and the key developments in film production and reception that have encouraged this category of filmmaking to emerge, has been the subject of much debate within Cinema Studies. This project details the ways in which the psychological thriller in many ways exceeds conventional notions of genre and auteur cinema. Furthermore, it argues that examining films made during the 1990s offers an especially rich ground for expanding the definitions of the psychological thriller to account for critical reception in an internet age. I am interested in how films that get referred to as psychological thrillers in the 1990s became characterized as such through their positioning as “indies” and by the high level “buzz” they generated among critics and preview audiences, which encouraged audiences to engage in multiple viewings of these films both in theaters and at home. While narrative and aesthetic devices have been a primary focus of scholars writing on these films, I am interested in how dynamics of reception equally contributed to the films’ mind-bending qualities. The significance of repetition at both the level of the text and in viewing of these films continues to be seen as a central characteristic of psychological thrillers today. I suggest that more recent films, namely Us (Jordan Peele, US, 2019) and Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, Canada and Spain, 2013), further elaborate these dynamics through their innovative use of doppelganger figures.