Ever feel like you’re being watched? Can’t shake the feeling that you’re being followed? As if there’s some kind of unseen plan moving against you from shadowy forces? Well, these films probably won’t help with that and some fresh air would do you a lot better. But if you’re lucky enough to feel like you could do with more nail-biting tension in your life, then do we have a list for you.
From the 1940s to the 2010s, these are some of the most paranoia inducing films to ever grace the silver screen. Close the curtains, turn off the phone and get ready to shift nervously in your seat.
Bug
William Friedkin’s claustrophobic psychological horror movie just keeps making things smaller and smaller until there’s nowhere left for it to go except right under your skin. It tells the story of a timid woman named Agnes, played by Ashley Judd, who steadily falls into the increasingly crazy world of a mysterious drifter named Peter, played by Michael Shannon, who she begins a relationship with.
Superficially, Peter seems like a step in the right direction for Agnes considering her lonely life and the haunting memories of her abusive past. Peter’s fixation on increasingly unbelievable conspiracies involving the government, however, feed directly into the codependent nature of Agnes’ problems and that’s when things really start to get tin foily.
Three Days Of The Condor
When his entire CIA codebreaking office is assassinated while he’s out to lunch, Joe Turner’s life takes a sudden nosedive. On the streets of Manhattan, entirely alone and with no idea who to trust, Joe has only a random woman, who he’s effectively taken hostage, to help him try to survive and find a way out of his situation. Even when it becomes apparent that his own government wants him dead.
Sidney Pollack’s ice cold conspiracy classic was Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the 1970s, only with a much younger Robert Redford. There were far fewer explosions but the threat and paranoia were all the more real.
Side Effects
Steven Soderbergh’s commentary on the pharmaceutical culture in American middle-class life quickly transforms into a taut noir drama of murder and seduction as a psychiatrist’s life begins to unravel in the wake of patient’s violent drug-induced crime.
Side Effects, like the rest of the scripts that Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns worked on together, is different from your usual conspiracy thriller in that the institutions of its world are mostly portrayed as the good guys. While it’s the treachery and desire of the individual manipulating the system that poses the greatest threat. It’s easy to think that a faceless villain would be scarier because it’d be unknown but Side Effects gives a stark humanity to an often-intangible kind of evil.
Ministry Of Fear
Made during the height of the Second World War, Fritz Lang’s tale of Nazi spy rings in genteel Britain has the precision of Hitchcock and the rightful paranoia of a director who had already been forced to flee his native country to escape the grip of the Third Reich.
When a man recently released from a mental hospital accidentally stumbles into a bizarre exchange of top secret information between a secret cell of undercover Nazi agents, he’s thrust into a surreal adventure where no-one is quite who they appear to be. Funny, action-packed and made all the more striking by the conditions that it was made in, Ministry of Fear is an almost-incomparable gem.
Les Diaboliques
Proof that making the conspiracy smaller only serves to make the paranoia more intense. At a remote boarding school, the headmaster’s wife and his mistress conspire together to murder him while the school is empty and leave his body to be found in the swimming pool. It’s a tense gambit to begin with but, when his body goes missing from the pool without explanation, things enter a new world of anxiety.
Les Diaboliques was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s followup to The Wages of Fear (generally considered to be one of the most nerve-shredding films ever made) and he certainly hadn’t lost his touch. Its ending surviving in horror movie infamy.
Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick’s hugely controversial final film divides critics and audiences to this day but its stunning sets and use of color only become more enveloping with each passing year.
While reading too deeply into a film is a very easy thing to do sometimes, it’s not really possible with Kubrick and certainly not with a film like Eyes Wide Shut. If anything, it will remain under-analyzed for decades as different generations obsessively work to decode the psychosexual commentary and visual meaning in the meticulously rebuilt Manhattan that Kubrick created on soundstages in England. The dreamlike story of Tom Cruise’s sexually frustrated doctor, menaced by a secret orgy society, inspiring its own conspiracy theories to this day.
Cutter’s Way
A gem so hidden that it was almost lost to obscurity. Cutter’s Way is an almost otherworldly noir about a sleazy doctor who becomes a witness in a brutal crime only to fall deeper and deeper into a web of vague conspiracies thanks to his unhinged Vietnam veteran friend, Alex Cutter.
Cutter’s fixation on the invisible powers who sent him to war, and maimed his body, spills out onto those around him and becomes more and more convincing the more that the raconteur-ish Cutter is allowed to talk. His drunken ramblings making a frightening amount of sense with each turn in the mystery. The guilt of the war and the spectre of ‘The Man’ looming over everything.
The Parallax View
The quintessential vision of government conspiracy cinema, Alan J. Pakula’s dread-soaked journey into the heart of a secret organization for political assassination was born out of an era of lone gunmen and mind manipulating psychological warfare. It only becomes more and more relevant with each passing year.
You could call it political satire, you could call it a surreal comedy or you could call it a social horror movie and you’d be right each time. From its upbeat score to its bursts of unpredictable action, it’s almost impossible to pin The Parallax View down to just one thing. One thing it absolutely isn’t is forgettable.
Blow Out
A semi-remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic film Blowup, Brain De Palma’s Blow Out brings the director’s flair for creative presentation and murderous psychos to a classic paranoid mystery. The latter facet providing John Lithgow with one of his most terrifying roles to date.
The movie follows John Travolta’s movie sound technician as he realizes that he accidentally recorded evidence of a political assassination. The mystery unfolding as he listens to his recordings, breaking them down through the particular means and methods of analog cinema. While pretty much perfect, it’s a film that still finds a way to be too darkly funny to be called fully paranoid and, aside from Blowup, it owes a lot to the number one film on our list.
The Conversation
Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece of paranoia and hellishly sinister conspiracies has stood the test of time as an all-too detailed exploration of a mind plagued with the knowledge of how easy it is to surveil people without their knowledge. It perfectly captures that uncanny feeling that everyone around you knows everything about you, even the things that you haven’t realized yourself.
Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, an audio recording expert in the field of surveillance who’s tasked with deciphering his masterpiece – a single conversation between two people, recorded in public from multiple sources and without the subjects’ knowledge. As he gradually puts the pieces together, and unwinds the seemingly-endless spool of secrets lying just out of earshot, his task begins to feel increasingly like a battle for his very soul.
