Directors

One director known for psychological thrillers is Christopher Nolan. Directing films such as Inception, Insomnia and Memento, Nolan is known to often focus on the themes of personal identity, memory and the construction of time, as well as exploring morality, and philosophical, sociological and existential concepts. His use of metafiction, a term that links to the relationship between fiction and reality, allows him to emphasise the psychological aspect of the film, so that it affects the audience as much as he proposes to. Auteur theory states that the director and his or her style influences the film as if he or she were the author. He shows this through his use of nonlinear storytelling. Putting a film in non-chronological order can change a film’s response from the audience considerably because it can change the significance of particular events as they can be arranged much closer together or further apart, for example. His protagonists are also known to be psychologically damaged, such as Dom Cobb in Inception, due to the suicide of his wife, which can reflect how particular events or objects can affect people.

His use of mise-en-abyme in the film Inception is one of the most well known in the modern era of film. In film, mise-en-abyme describes the idea of “a dream within a dream”. This emphasises the psychological aspect of psychological thrillers as it leaves the audience with a dark feeling that everything around them may not be real. Other ideas that Nolan uses that can affect the audience is leaving the protagonist’s fate ambiguous, meaning the absence of a happy ending, and unreliable narrators and switching points of view, so the audience doesn’t know fully who to sympathise or empathise with.