Common story lines in psychologically thrillers

Common story lines in psychologically thrillers

Two themes that tend to pop up: guilt and obsession. Guilt is something that we will incorporate into our film as shown with Sister Judith and the loss of her son and getting excommunicated.

Shutter island-

Shutter Island is a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal investigating a disappearance at an institution for the criminally insane.

As the story unfolds, we see bizarre occurrences that become increasingly fantastical in nature. Ultimately, we learn that DiCaprio’s character is actually an incarcerated patient at the institution, as he killed his wife after she drowned their children.

His overwhelming guilt over this crime had caused him to create an elaborate story in his mind that gave him a new identity and could make him cope with what he had done.

Feeling unable to escape, he willingly subjects himself to a lobotomy to free his mind from this plight.

Thus, Shutter Island is an example of a film that combines the theme of guilt with ambiguity regarding reality, creating a mind-bending experience that even has horror-like elements. The story is so meticulously constructed that a second viewing is, in many ways, more rewarding than the first one.

Inception-

Inception might be better categorized as a psychological action film, but the elements of guilt and ambiguous reality are present at the movie’s forefront.

Leonardo DiCaprio is plagued by guilt over his wife’s death. His character planted an idea in his wife’s mind that their world wasn’t real so that she would eventually want to leave the limbo dream world they had been in for an extended period of time.

However, since this idea was planted so deeply that she still had this belief even in the real world, she killed herself thinking that would allow her to return to the real world.

 Weighed down by guilt, finds purpose when an opportunity arises for him to return to his children (he had been unable to stay in the United States because of a murder charge against him) if he can complete a difficult mission involving inception — the very thing he did to his wife.

The mission is nearly destroyed by Cobb’s guilt-based projection of his wife in the dream worlds, but he comes to terms with what happened and seems to get past his guilt.

His emotional peace is confirmed at the end of the film when he reunites with his children. While the reality of this reunion is left undetermined, the big takeaway is that Cobb has overcome his guilt by at least believing that he has not left his children behind like his wife did.

The Machinist-

The Machinist is an independent films that stars Trevor Reznik, an emaciated insomniac who has bizarre visions that include notes on his fridge that convey a game of hangman.

 After falling down a vicious spiral of paranoia, Trevor comes to learn that he had killed a child in a hit and run accident; at this point, the answer to the hangman game is revealed: “Killer.”

As a result of his guilt over the incident, Trevor had lost weight and been unable to sleep for a year. Most of his visions involved elements of this tragic event. Finally facing his guilt head-on, Trevor turns himself in to the police, and upon being imprisoned, he is finally able to sleep.

Obsession is another common theme in psychological thrillers. This is another thing we will incorporate into the story line of our film. Father Abraham will be obsessed with Sister Judith and ‘saving’ her. There will be a small implied subplot of Sister Mary being in love and infatuated with Sister Judith. Sister Judith will be controlled by religion.

Black Swan-

Black Swan is a film about theatrical melodrama (ballet) gives this approach plenty of validity. Natalie Portman’s character, Nina Sayers, is obsessed with achieving perfection as a professional ballerina.

The stress of trying to achieve perfection in her lead role in Swan Lake causes her to undergo a gradual psychological breakdown throughout the film.

We see a sinister “black swan” side of her emerge, contrasting the “white swan” side of her that we had seen previously, and in so doing, drawing parallels to the storyline of Swan Lake. In portraying her mental struggle, Aronofsky makes us completely unaware of what is real and what is simply imagined in Nina’s head.

In the end, Nina cannot achieve perfection without a huge sacrifice.

Take shelter-

Take Shelter is an overlooked independent about a man named who has apocalyptic-like visions of an impending storm.

Whether they represent an actual storm, some other type of doom for him and his family, or just a symptom of mental illness is left largely ambiguous throughout the film.

In any event, Curtis becomes obsessed with trying to prevent this nasty fate from reaching him and his family, using his family’s savings as well as unethical means to build a storm shelter.

 It looks as though this obsession and his lack of explicitness about it will drive his family away forever, but once he finally confides in his wife, things take a turn for him — though, like the rest of the film, even that part is ambiguous. 

Zodiac-

This film chronicles in impeccable detail the series of murders in California in the 1960s and 1970s that were attributed to the “Zodiac” killer.

Robert Graysmith  is a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle but soon becomes obsessed with trying to uncover the identity of the Zodiac. Graysmith’s obsession alienates him from his wife and creates tension with others, particularly San Francisco police detective Dave Toschi.

In the case of this film, however, the theme of obsession is not placed in the context of an uncertain reality — only the identity of the killer is ambiguous. Nevertheless, this theme and the overall tone of the film work extremely well together.

If you know anything about the Zodiac murders going into this film, you know that the killer was never caught. But somehow, the obsessive fervor of Graysmith (played exceptionally well by Gyllenhaal) and Fincher’s directorial talents make this a thoroughly suspenseful and entertaining 160-minute feature.