The best psychological thrillers of all time

Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak star in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller 'Vertigo' (1958) — ‘Vertigo,’ starring Kim Novak and James Stewart, is as smart and trippy as it ever was

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‘Rear Window’ (1954)
‘Vertigo’ (1958)
‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1990)
‘Open Your Eyes’ (1997)
‘Memento’ (2000)
‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)
‘Caché’ (2005)
‘Black Swan’ (2010)
‘Watcher’ (2022)

The best psychological thrillers use their characters’ paranoia and uncertainty to create similar feelings of dread and doubt in their viewers. These nine classics skillfully keep audiences guessing while depicting different kinds of waking nightmares, making the protagonists’ traumas our own for a few entertaining hours.

‘Rear Window’ (1954)

Endlessly imitated but rarely, if ever, equaled, director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” stars James “Jimmy” Stewart as Jeff, a photographer laid up with a broken leg trying to pass the time people-watching from his window during a stifling New York City summer. One night after hearing a woman scream and the sound of breaking glass, Jeff notices his neighbor, Lars Thorwald, behaving strangely.

When Thorwald’s wife is nowhere to be seen the next day, Jeff is convinced that Thorwald murdered and dismembered her. Jeff enlists his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), to help confirm his suspicions. “Witty, suspenseful, sad, funny and wise,” it is “at once accessible to a mass audience and deep enough to be worth dozens of reviewings and critical analyses,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (Prime Video)

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Possibly the best-known and beloved of director Alfred Hitchcock’s library of psychological thrillers, “Vertigo” is both a literal rendering of the main character’s syndrome as well as a description of what you feel as you watch the film. Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective with a well-earned fear of heights, who is hired by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to surveil Elster’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who Ferguson instead falls for.

Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran and postal worker who lives with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Peña), in mid-1970s New York City. When he begins to experience hallucinations and seemingly unexplainable phenomena (like being told by his VA clinic that they have no record of him being a patient), he comes to believe that a haunting memory from the war might help explain the strange things occurring around him.

This disturbing film was prescient in its deployment of trauma as a plot device in psychological thrillers as well as a unique entry in the anti-war canon. Director Adrian Lyne’s movie “enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind and lives there,” while it “evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Paramount+)

Memory, or the absence thereof, plays a prominent role in so many of the most effective psychological thrillers, including director Alejandro Amenábar’s “Open Your Eyes,” which was remade in the U.S. as “Vanilla Sky.” After he meets Sofía (Penélope Cruz in her breakout role) at a party, César (Eduardo Noriega) is disfigured in a car crash that kills his ex-girlfriend, Nuria (Najwa Nimri).

Sofía can’t bear to see him, and during one evening of self-medication, he awakes into what appears to be a different reality, with his good looks restored and an adoring Sofía at his side. Which reality is the real one? A “ambitiously complex, disturbing and terrific-looking thriller” whose “nightmarish, demanding plot giddily leaps from past to present, from fantasy to reality and back again,” said Jonathan Holland at Variety. (HBO Max)

The twisty, mind-bending hit that began director Christopher Nolan’s journey to Hollywood royalty, “Memento” stars Guy Pearce as Leonard, a man whose difficulty forming new memories means that he has to scribble notes on his skin and mirrors. While looking for his wife’s killer, he gets involved with Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a bartender who may be helping or manipulating him. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) is a cop with his own agenda.

But the plot loops and falls in on itself, rendering the dreamlike first half open to interpretation, and leaving viewers to sort through its many possible explanations. A film that offers “certain truths about the grotesque desires at the heart of the American project,” it simultaneously asks viewers to “interrogate ourselves, again and again, in search of some kind of absolution,” said Suzanne Enzerink at the Los Angeles Review of Books. (Prime Video)

Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) are comfortable Parisians who begin receiving videotapes of the house they share with their teenage son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), being surveilled. Then more arrive, with increasing menace, turning husband and wife against one another and leading to inevitable revelations, both about an incident from Georges’ childhood as well as France’ brutal colonial past. Renowned director Michael Haneke brilliantly “transforms the viewer into both the author and the participant” in its central mystery and the film stands as an “astounding unification of form and content,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics." He's a frequent contributor to Newsweek and Slate, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Nation, among others.