Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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怪物 (かいふつ) (Monster) (2023)

Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama, again just a smidge too twee, is about people, very young or old, who either throw themselves outside Japan's strict parameters of social propriety or else find themselves pushed outside those lines by circumstance or by others, and billed as a thriller, Kore-eda's movie will keep you guessing who - an arsonist, a drunk, a bully, a domestic abuser, a liar, or a strange elvin sociopath - the real kaibutsu (monster) of the title is, and it could be any number of dead-in-the-eye non-humans who are, the story shows by changing perspectives round and round, so misunderstood and sadly beautiful.

★★★★☆

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Appearances (Les Apparences) (2020)

I've never heard of the Swedish crime author Karin Alvtegena but here one of her books, Betrayal, is adapted for the screen and it is a mostly compelling psychological drama (although one messily over-plotted with a crime hurried in at the end) with a terrific lead performance by Karin Viard as the wife of an orchestra conductor, who 'keeps up appearances' after she discovers her husband has betrayed her. 

★★★☆☆

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Afraid of the Dark (1991)

This always intriguing London-based psychological drama, which starts off being a mystery thriller about a series of escalating attacks committed against the members of a community of blind women, turns up not to be about what you think it is - which is a shame because when the movie inverts suddenly halfway through, making you feel like you've finally had the bandages removed after an eye operation, part of you wishes the first half of the story continued --- although the second half, centred on Lucas, a young boy with a worrying imagination, is equally creepy and compelling.

★★★☆☆

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Another Woman (1988)

Woody Allen's terrific psychological drama concerns an austere philosophy professor and author played by a really wonderful Gena Rowlands, who starts to re-evaluate her life after she becomes privy to, via an airvent (like a synapse she can block or unblock) the therapy sessions of a sad young pregnant woman (Mia Farrow).

★★★★☆

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Who You Think I Am (Celle que vous croyez) (2019)

A newspaper ad billed this Juliette Binoche movie as an "almost Hitchcockian thriller", a Google search suggests it is a comedy-drama, and Rotten Tomatoes lists the genre as "drama, mystery and suspense", but the thing it's most like, with its ponderous music and five-years-too-late Hello, My Name Is Doris subject matter (a middle-aged woman uses a fake online persona to strike up a friendship with her ex's roomie) is a dreary episode of that Catfish tv show, only slightly better than that given the absence of the hosts.

★★☆☆☆

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Verónica (2017)

When a retired psychologist agrees to start seeing a new patient, it turns out she means for her consultations with this mentally ill stranger, who may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of her former therapist, to take place in the psychologist's remote forest hideaway with the two of them magically sharing the knowledge that sleepovers are a part of the bundled service, which is the point it becomes clear this psychological thriller is not going to be very intelligent no matter how many references to Freud and the Platonic forms it bandies around.

★★☆☆☆

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The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Director Yorgis Lanthimos' fascinating, disturbing allegorical tale is about a cardiologist (a shaggy-bearded Colin Farrell looking like serial killer surgeon Harold Shipman) whose wife and children are made to bear the price of his sins, and it is so rhythmic, so hypnotic, by the end you will be able to predict next lines even while the point of the whole eludes you.

★★★★☆

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Glass (2019)

** SPOILER WARNING **

Having in the last unexpected scene of 2016's Split created a connection between that film and his Unbreakable film from sixteen years earlier, M Night Shyamalan continues the unlikely series in this third film by having a new character, Dr Ellie Staple, assemble the old characters in a psychiatric ward for sessions of psychoanalysis designed to break the patients' shared delusion that they are superheroes, which, as a plot, raises interesting ideas about human potential, shared experience and the limits people place on themselves, and with the glut of superhero blockbusters in cinemas, this plot provides a welcome spin on a tired genre, but the movie errs in the end when it seems to choose a side but abandons viewers on the other side of the movie's central question: is anything extraordinary happening on the screen?

★★★☆☆

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Double Lover (L'Amant Double) (2017)

Like an add-on chapter to David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, one that no-one wanted or asked for, this François Ozon movie tells of mentally fragile Chloe's therapy sessions (read 'sex sessions') with a pair of pouty Calvin Klein-model psychotherapists - twins - and is a movie that quickly forgets that one of the twins that Chloe marries - the dowdy cardigan-wearing one - is driving her crazy with his secrets - but that must have been just to progress the story because lickety-split and before you can say, "This is not going to end sensibly," he reverts to being a model citizen, no hint of a lie, while she starts a torrid affair with the twin brother - the wild one with smart shirts unbuttoned to expose a hard, hairless chest - and from that point, things start to make less and less sense with the movie's raison d'etre simply being repetitive sex scenes including a centrepiece involving both brothers.

★★☆☆☆

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Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

The point of this intriguing psychological drama seems to be that film sound engineers are overlooked and should wave their fists and get violent and be heard and appreciated for their input into films such as the giallo horror that Toby Jones' sound engineer, Gilderoy, is helping to make here - we never see a single frame but everything about it, thanks to his watermelon, cabbage, and radish mashing, is visceral and real and when the movie-within-a-movie experiences a setback, we see how sound magic can alter everything.

★★★☆☆

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A Cure For Wellness (2016)

** SPOILER ALERT **

Not since Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island has an actor looked so much like a playacting high schooler in a gumshoe's trenchcoat as Dane DeHaan playing Wall Street stockbroker Lockhart, a man tricked into admitting himself into a sinister sanatorium in this cumbersomely titled fantasy mystery, and that and a good number of other clues peppered liberally throughout this overlong Shutter Island-Soylent Green B-movie hint at the film's big reveal: that it is actually a floundering, ponderous, distasteful mess of other films' ideas including, towards the end, sadly, Spiderman.

★☆☆☆☆

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Dead Ringers (1988)

The identical twin brothers in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller, both played by Jeremy Irons, are indistinguishable to the women they share and pretty much indistinguishable to viewers who will find it not worth trying to keep track of whether it is Beverly Mantel who is the sophisticat and Elliot Mantel who is the snivelling one, or vice versa, and which one is using drugs and going mad and which one isn't, but that seems to be the point - the two big questions here are, "Where does one twin start and the other twin end?" and, "How long will it be before this movie ends and another more enjoyable, less twisted one starts?"

★★☆☆☆

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Magic Magic (2013)

A young female traveller trapped in remote Chile in the company of a constantly whelping puppy and three personality-free travel companions (the worst being Michael Cera's incessantly talking Brink) witnesses animal cruelty, overdoses on unprescribed medication, doesn't have the others' confidence to jump off a rock into the ocean, and so descends gradually into madness and anyone watching this shrill, pointless, infuriating "psychological thriller" will likely do the same before the movie's exceedingly daft final exorcism scene.

☆☆☆☆☆

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What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)

The first of a series of three What Ever Happened...? horror-thrillers and the movie credited with giving rise to the dreadfully termed 'hagsploitation genre', this piece of grotesquery, like a Southern Gothic Sunset Boulevard with Hammer Film aesthetics, features Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as elderly sisters, one of whom (Baby Jane (Davis)) keeps the other (a wheelchair-bound Blanche (Crawford)) locked in an upstairs room while she plots doing away with her entirely, and the whole thing is like an exercise in bad taste.

★★★☆☆

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Based on a short story, Traumnovelle by 'the literary Sigmund Freud' Albert Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick's last film is a slow-burn psychological suspense drama about adult sexual relations and monogamy, pondering whether a wife's erotic fantasy about an American Naval officer constitutes a betrayal of some kind against her husband.

★★★★☆

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