They’ll make your blood pressure skyrocket, heart race, and have you gripping your seat with unbearable tension: Psychological thrillers are adrenaline injections in cinematic garb. At their best, these movies take us by the hand and accompany us into the deepest abysses of the human soul.
Shady characters play with the minds of both the protagonists and the viewers. Often the focus is on a question we ask ourselves repeatedly, a question that has burned itself deep into our brains and suddenly makes us see the world through different eyes: Which is real? What is not? Am I real?
Long regarded as unfilmable, scandalous author Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 cult bestseller of the same name was too brutal, aesthetically challenging, complex and, oh yes, brutal! So director Mary Harron took up the challenge and created an ice-cold, intransigent, achingly intense, and yet highly complex study of character and society in the 1980s.
Sadistic Wall Street yuppie Patrick Bateman, a sadistic sociopath in a perfect suit who chops up women out of boredom in his luxury apartment while listening to hip hop music, tells us about a protagonist whose nature runs full force against all boundaries and only cements them even more in the process.
We do not become witnesses of moral decay; everything and everyone in “American Psycho” is doomed to failure right from the start, so dulled are they by consumerism. The cinematic conglomerate of black comedy, suspense and horror unite into a bloody and fierce tour de force, penetrating deep into the human abyss and not stopping at the finish line. As controversial as the literary original – with Bale being frighteningly authentic.
