Fall
The only movie I have literally had to take breaks from in order to give my sympathetic nervous system time to downshift out of flight or flight mode, Scott Mann’s 2022 psychological thriller Fall is brilliant in its simplicity. Thrill-seeking climbing influencer Hunter convinces her bestie Becky to do a little immersion therapy after her husband Dan’s sudden death during a climb leaves her fearful, depressed and suicidal. The goal: to climb a decommissioned TV transmission tower deep in the California desert that’s roughly twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. When the rickety ladder that gets them to a tiny platform at the structure’s top falls to smithereens, the women suddenly discover new meanings of SOL. The film is nothing if not an excuse to gloriously parade a series of show-stopping, sweaty-palm scenes, yet it becomes a deeply psychological, intricate twin character study as Mann gradually peels back the layers of Hunter and Becky’s up-and-down friendship, and the latter’s gradual rediscovery of her courage. With word that Fall is being made into a franchise, I am eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to send my adrenal glands into overdrive. Veronica Esposito
Gaslight
Only one thriller ever hit so hard that its title became a pop-psych buzzword for a form of emotional manipulation. And, with respect to your toxic ex, no one is better at gaslighting than Charles Boyer’s villainous Gregory. In Victorian-era London, Gregory moves his new wife, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), into a sprawling gilded cage of a townhouse that just so happens to be the site of her aunt’s still-unsolved murder. There, Gregory slowly and systematically attempts to convince Paula she’s insane. George Cukor’s slow burn remains maddening as ever 80 years since its release, anchored by Bergman’s steely, Oscar-winning performance: even as she unravels, she resists shrinking into fragility. I’ve never seen Gaslight in a theater and I’m not sure if I could, because my last rewatch unnerved me so much that I had to pause the film every 10 minutes to pace around my apartment. Do not watch this one without whatever vice you need to unwind nearby. Alaina Demopoulos
The Vanishing
You can forget your Ringus, your Exorcists or your 127 Hours, the film that reduced me to a quivering wreck was The Vanishing, a (now fairly obscure) low-key Dutch thriller from 1988 whose brilliance and traumatising effect have been somewhat obscured by the fact that the same director (the late George Sluizer) was persuaded to remake it in Hollywood with a ludicrously reconfigured ending. I saw it when it came out without really knowing what to expect – this was the pre-internet era, when films tended to turn up without deluges of advance information. I won’t give away the big ending, but it is the story of a man whose girlfriend goes missing at a petrol station, and after years of looking for her, confronts a man who offers him the chance to find out what happened to her if he takes a sleeping pill. Well, when he wakes up and flicks on his cigarette lighter, I absolutely lost it, like the rest of the audience. I’m not a drinker but only a bunch of whiskeys in the cinema bar after returned me to any kind of normality. Andrew Pulver
Uncut Gems
I first heard of Uncut Gems, fittingly, on Twitter, that locus for terminally anxious scrollers constantly looking for their next hit of controversy. Yet even prepped with ten versions of a tweet hailing the film’s “step on your neck” achievements, I was still stunned by the vise-like grip of boiling anxiety that is the Safdie brothers’ 2019 magnum opus. In the first nine minutes and 59 seconds alone (which Netflix put on YouTube as evidence that Uncut Gems is “quite possibly the most stressful movie of all time”), Diamond District dealer Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) gets a colonoscopy, places a risky bet, gets accosted by hired goons for failing to pay back a $100,000 loan, screams at his loanshark as negotiation, screams at his mistress for no reason, and pawns something from the Weeknd for $23,500. And that is the least stressful part of the movie. The rest is an unrelenting downward spiral of bad bets, Hail Marys, high-risk bullshitting and Howie being, at minimum, incredibly pushy. My cortisol levels have never been the same. Adrian Horton
Full Time
If the sound of a morning alarm or a closing train door reliably gives you a hit of anxiety, you may need to approach this most relatable of urban thrillers with caution. Laure Calamy is superb in Full Time, brittle and grimly aware of each looming obstacle, as Julie, a single mother battling through each day, running on fumes. Her daily schedule pivots on perfect timing – the school run, to the suburban train to her cleaning job in the city – just as her household depends on that chambermaid wage and her ex’s alimony cheques. But the threads unravel – the money is late, the childminder resigns, and a strike cancels all the trains – just when Julie has the chance of an interview for a life-changing job. French-Canadian director Eric Gravel keeps the camera lurching with Julie from crisis to crisis and manipulates a score of rushing electronic beats and antagonising ambient noise, as her taxing routine turns into a desperate, dangerous race. Pamela Hutchinson
Her Smell
In the first segment of Alex Ross Perry’s swirling, strange, ultimately uplifting rock-and-roll drama Her Smell, Elisabeth Moss’s tortured frontwoman Becky Something tears around a concert venue greenroom, haranguing friends, family and collaborators in a drug-addled, mental-health-crisis frenzy. It’s utterly harrowing; Perry and Moss make us desperate for a door, a window, or some other egress through which we might escape this storm. But no such deliverance is available. We must instead sit with Becky as she hits something like rock bottom. Catharsis, even sweetness, comes later in Perry’s garrulous and lovely film. But those beginning minutes are excruciating, verging on unwatchable. What is brilliant about the film is how Perry stops just short of total alienation. And how Moss, in career-best work, allows us brief glimpses of the wounded humanity rippling underneath Becky’s horrible behavior. One hates to watch it, but Her Smell does eventually reward the viewer for their commitment to sticking it out. It is a beautiful metaphor for what it is to know and love an addict. Richard Lawson
Baby Boy
It doesn’t matter how many more Fast & Furious movies Tyrese Gibson stars in or R&B songs he drops on the side. For those of us who opted into seeing Baby Boy when it released in 2001 or were forced into rewatching it from the endlessly replays across cable TV through the decades, he will always be Jody, the titular man child with an exasperating lack of self-awareness. Jody professes to love his girlfriend, Yvette (Taraji P Henson), but won’t give up womanizing. He takes umbrage with his mother taking in a boyfriend (Ving Rhames) even though his 20-year-old hide has no business still living at home. He takes himself for a street thug and immediately retreats into cowardice whenever he comes up against a real alpha (Snoop Dogg’s Rodney). Believe it or not Baby Boy was actually marketed as a coming-of-age film, but Jody gets scared straight instead of learning and growing on his own. And even though director John Singleton really nailed the inviolate narcissism that is seemingly at the core of every wannabe gangster, it just makes Baby Boy all the more uncomfortable to sit with. Andrew Lawrence
Clockwise
Why isn’t Clockwise – Michael Frayn’s immaculate comedy in which John Cleese’s headmaster tries to get to Norwich in time to deliver a speech – more exhausting to watch? I think it’s because Cleese absorbs the trauma on the viewer’s behalf. Brian Stimpson came years after Basil Fawlty and, despite superficial similarities, is a sympathetic and plausible character: a martyr attempting to muzzle his bark, a man well-intentioned beneath the ramrod moustache, the victim of more than his own belligerent efficiency. Cleese is startlingly good and subtle, too – I’m now certain Daniel Day-Lewis nicked the intonation of his milkshake speech in There Will Be Blood from Stimpson’s final meltdown. A word, too, for the fringe stresses endured by Penelope Wilton (weeping kidnapped in a car stuck in a field), and by Alison Steadman and Geoffrey Palmer, both stuck at some point wrangling three elderly women with dementia. The way Palmer’s gallant patience frays into hysteria is especially great. And for the actors playing those women: Constance Chapman, who only wants to go to the loo or the hospital, Joan Hickson, who monologues constantly about an inheritance dispute involving sherry glasses, and – most wonderful – Ann Way, entirely charming and delighted regardless of circumstance. I had forgotten the moment Steadman is speaking to an irate woman on her very suburban doorstep when Way pops up to ask: “Can we see over the house? Is it open today?” I will never forget her trilling rendition of This Is My Lovely Day over the climactic car crash. Clockwise is stress elevated to pure elegance, and a really underrated breakdown. Catherine Shoard
Good Time
Before going their separate ways, the Safdie brothers (Benny and Josh) made their names synonymous with panic-inducing, anxiety-attack cinema; their films hanging to characters trapped and suffocated by their own worst impulses. The high-stakes gambling thriller Uncut Gems is the sibling duo’s most entertaining – what with the flash, the comedy and the Sandler of it all. But Good Time, starring a fearless and magnificent Robert Pattinson as a conman named Connie, is the one that gets under your skin; especially since skin colour is the capital Connie preys on. He flails between robbing a bank and extorting drug dealers, all in a bid to keep his developmentally delayed brother (played by co-director Benny) out of group homes or jail. Connie has our sympathy. What makes Good Time so unbearably stressful and unsettling is how he takes advantage of that. He pleads and barters, at times politely, always with a desperation that masks his own entitlement. Connie’s unfortunate circumstances outweigh the hardships of the Black people in his orbit, who he victimizes or scapegoats, in this unnerving portrait of being down and out – and clinging to white privilege when that’s all you got. Radheyan Simonpillai
Punch-Drunk Love
In retrospect, Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t really love to inflict suffering on his characters. More of his movies end on an optimistic note than not. But back in 2002, when he had far fewer movies under his belt, that didn’t seem quite so obvious – and moreover, his romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love does such a great job simulating the feeling of a waking nightmare or rising panic attack that during my first viewing, I watched with my fists clenched and sweaty, terrified that something tragic would befall Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), the meek but occasionally rage-prone hero of the piece, or Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), his unlikely love interest. Anderson particularly uses Sandler’s capacity for violence, played off for slapstick laughs in his broad comedies, as a constant threat; you’re not really afraid he will attack Lena, but that he’ll take an intense wrong turn off of a physical or psychological cliff without the armor a normal feelgood (or self-aggrandizing) Sandler comedy provides. Despite that weird intensity, the movie is still frequently hilarious, even romantic; it’s a high-wire act all the more impressive for still working, in its way, as a rom-com. Subsequent viewings, one you know where it is going, play a little differently. But that first time back in 2002 was a different experience entirely. Sandler, of course, would go on to star in the anxiety-inducing Uncut Gems, which I would bet good money is someone else’s choice in this roundup. Who knew the Chanukah Song guy would become such an expert in this form of cinematic stress? Jesse Hassenger
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
I remember going to see Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days on a date. I was aware of its plot in the vaguest of terms but it was a choice made more as a 23-year-old trying to impress a slightly pretentious yet thoroughly handsome older academic, pretending that I had absolutely zero interest in watching Alien vs Predator: Requiem instead. Before the film had started, we were holding hands in the dark, naively unaware of what was about to unfold, and then it began, with a ticking clock and a nosebleed and we were off to the races. What I had assumed would be a considered arthouse drama slowly morphed into one of the most uncomfortably suspenseful thrillers I had ever seen, made that much harder to watch because of how awfully naturalistic it all was. A young woman, Otilia, tries to help her friend Găbița get a black-market abortion in late 80s Romania and every stage of their potentially lethal quest is a nail-biter. But while the procedure itself is obviously a nightmare to watch, it’s the scene soon after that got me. Otilia has left Găbița alone in the hotel room to let it take hold, given impossibly strict instructions by a vile and short-tempered abortionist, and must grimly endure inane dinner talk with her boyfriend’s family, her mind visibly racing toward every awful conclusion. It was at this point that I realised my palms were sweating and, awkwardly, so did my date, gently removing his hand from mine and giving it a wipe. Benjamin Lee
