In this entry I will be looking at case studies of iconic directors who have directed psychological thrillers and some these include: Brad Anderson, Darren Aronofsky and Alfred Hitchock.
First off let's look at Brad Anderson. He was born in 1964 and is an American film director. He is a director of thriller and horror movies but he is probably best known for The Machinist (2004), which starred Christian Bale. He also produced and directed several episodes of the TV show Fringe.
The Machinist:
The Machinist is a Spanish psychological thriller film which was directed by (as mentioned above) by Brad Anderson. The plot of the movie is about a machinist called Trevor Reznik who works in a factory, but due to a very extreme case of insomnia hasn't slept in a year and this has caused his body to wither away to almost nothing. The only person he has trusted with his emotions, so to speak is Stevie, a prostitute although he has an infatuation with a waitress named Maria who is a single mother and works in an airport diner. His co-workers, not knowing what has led to his physical deterioration shy away and avoid him. However, a workplace related incident causes his co-workers to alienate with him even more and to top off that he has been finding unfamiliar pieces of paper in his apartment, Trevor believes that there is someone who is out to get him (possibly a former co-worker) by using a phantom employee named Ivan. As Trevor continues to find evidence he may come to find the true nature of what caused his insomnia.
By the critics it was well received and Empire Magazine said:
"Given the current obsession with high-impact dieting, Christian Bale should think about marketing his own brand of weight-loss expertise. For this deep-set thriller, lurking somewhere in the hinterlands of the horror genre, the actor has shed so many pounds he’s barely intact. The almighty gulf between the full-pumped vision of American Psycho and this shocking skeletal shadow, just bones and sinew bound together by the translucent parchment of his skin, is enough to throw you into tailspin. What the hell is up with this guy?
The hideous imagery it references, that haunting footage of emaciated Holocaust survivors, all but threatens to tip Brad Anderson’s brute nightmare completely out of whack. But give Bale his due — in a striking physical performance, he gives the film far more than xylophone ribs. The death mask is incidental — it’s his mind where things are truly coming apart.
There’s also the cold imagery to admire, a twilight of metallic hues and stark bathroom floors so drained of primary colour the film almost strays into a ghostly black and white. We’re being presented with a conundrum. Why is this lowly, polite machine operator losing the plot? We’re told he hasn’t slept for a year, and, boy, it looks like it. He has passing sex with kindly hooker Jennifer Jason Leigh and, when we first glimpse him, he’s rolling up a corpse in a carpet. Like a manic-depressive David Lynch, Anderson wants to freak us out, to rattle our own ribcages; we’re only seeing the world through Reznik’s eyes and they’re not to be trusted.
Yet, for all the frozen wastes of his style, Anderson is not a subtle manager of mystery. With not-so-furtive symbolism, he has his sunken character reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot to give us a little nudge. Add the presence of Polanski’s The Tenant, Fight Club, Memento and Hitchcock’s psychological leering, and Reznik isn’t the only one suffering déjà vu. A few scenes into the gloom and you’ll have a good idea what is generally up, if not the specifics, making the journey toward the eventual, inevitable twist fairly one-dimensional. It’s a result so painfully logical it would make Lynch’s hair stand on end.
The next director I will be looking at is Darren Aronofsky. He is well known for directing harsh thrillers such as Pi, Requiem For A Dream and Black Swan. He often received critical acclaim for his often surreal and disturbing films and his films have gathered a lot of controversy and are well known for their often violent and bleak subject matters.
Requiem For A Dream (2000)
A film paralleling the lives of Sara Goldfarb, a lonely, TV obsessed widow, and her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his drug dealer friend Tyrone. After learning that she will make an appearance on a TV game show, Sara tries to lose weight so that she can fit into her prized red dress, and becomes hooked on diet pills. Meanwhile, Harry and his friends are taking heroin and cocaine. We then witness the disastrous consequences and the downward spiral their lives take as a result of their addictions.
The movie, like The Mechanist was well reviewed by the critics and on Rotten Tomatoes as they rated it 78%. This is the BBC's review of the movie.
"Its fair to say that you won't see many films like "Requiem For A Dream". Adapted from a novel by "Last Exit To Brooklyn" author Hubert Selby Jr, this tackles equally tough subjects, in an equally uncompromising fashion.
It follows four Coney Island residents: Lonely Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) and her bored son Harry (Jared Leto); Harry's best mate Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and Harry's girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) - as they follow the path of destruction into drugs hell.
However, this is not strictly a drugs movie. Instead, it shows how anything can become addictive, whether it's the television that rules Sara's life, the post - on which Sara waits with baited breath for her invite onto her favourite TV game show - and of course the crack pipe, heroin needle, or line of cocaine.
There are two things though that lift this movie above the norm: one is the staggering performances from all the players (Ellen Burstyn in particular produces something which should be watched and marvelled at by any wannabe actors) and the other is the flamboyant and innovative visual style of director Darren Aronofsky ("Pi"). Some say it's merely gimmicks. Well, in this context, the result is frighteningly effective. He has said that he is searching for completely subjective cinema and this is it - as you career headlong, sometimes literally, into the characters' nightmare. This is, without a doubt, cutting-edge film-making.
Be warned: this is not for the faint-hearted. It's brutal, stark, stomach-churning, and unglamorous. But provided you're prepared for the journey, it's one you won't forget in a hurry." 
The third and final director I will be looking at will be familiar to almost everybody, Alfred Hitchcock. After he had a very successful British career in both silent movies and the early "talkies" he moved on to work in Hollywood and from there created a very distinguishable and recognisable directing style, and this included the use of camera movement so that it could mimic a persons gaze. Many of his movies have twist endings although a lot of them features themes of violence, murder and crime. Many of the mysteries that could be found in his movies however were used as decoys to serve the movies themes and psychological examinations of the characters. His films also borrow a lot from psychoanalysis and feature strong sexual overtones. Through his cameo appearances in his own movies, interviews and film trailers and the TV program Alfred Hitchcock Presents he became a cultural icon.
Rebecca (1940):
A shy ladies' companion, staying in Monte Carlo with her stuffy employer, meets the wealthy Maxim de Winter. She and Max fall in love, marry and return to Manderley, his large country estate in Cornwall. Max is still troubled by the death of his first wife, Rebecca, in a boating accident the year before. The second Mrs. de Winter clashes with the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, and discovers that Rebecca still has a strange hold on everyone at Manderley.
'So "Rebecca"—to come to it finally—is an altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played. Miss du Maurier's tale of the second mistress of Manderley, a simple and modest and self-effacing girl who seemed to have no chance against every one's—even her husband's—memories of the first, tragically deceased Mrs. de Winter, was one that demanded a film treatment evocative of a menacing mood, fraught with all manner of hidden meaning, gaited to the pace of an executioner approaching the fatal block. That, as you need not be told, is Hitchcock's meat and brandy. In "Rebecca" his cameras murmur "Beware!" when a black spaniel raises his head and lowers it between his paws again; a smashed china cupid takes on all the dark significance of a bloodstained dagger; a closed door taunts, mocks and terrifies; a monogrammed address book becomes as accusative as a district attorney.
Miss du Maurier's novel was an "I" book, its story told by the second, hapless Mrs. de Winter. Through Mr. Hitchcock's method, the film is first-personal too, so that its frail young heroine's diffident blunders, her fears, her tears are silly only at first, and then are silly no longer, but torture us too. Rebecca's ghost and the Bluebeard room in Manderley become very real horrors as Mr. Hitchcock and his players unfold their macabre tale, and the English countryside is demon-ridden for all the brightness of the sun through its trees and the Gothic serenity of its manor house.
But here we have been giving Mr. Hitchcock and Miss du Maurier all the credit when so much of it belongs to Robert Sherwood, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan and Joan Harrison who adapted the novel so skillfully, and to the players who have re-created it so beautifully. Laurence Olivier's brooding Maxim de Winter is a performance that almost needs not to be commented upon, for Mr. Olivier last year played Heathcliffe, who also was a study in dark melancholy, broken fitfully by gleams of sunny laughter. Maxim is the Heathcliffe kind of man and Mr. Olivier seems that too. The real surprise, and the greatest delight of them all, is Joan Fontaine's second Mrs. de Winter, who deserves her own paragraph, so here it is:
"Rebecca" stands or falls on the ability of the book's "I" to escape caricature. She was humiliatingly, embarrassingly, mortifyingly shy, a bit on the dowdy side, socially unaccomplished, a little dull; sweet, of course, and very much in love with—and in awe of—the lord of the manor who took her for his second lady. Miss du Maurier never really convinced me any one could behave quite as the second Mrs. de Winter behaved and still be sweet, modest, attractive and alive. But Miss Fontaine does it—and does it not simply with her eyes, her mouth, her hands and her words, but with her spine. Possibly it's unethical to criticize performance anatomically. Still we insist Miss Fontaine has the most expressive spine—and shoulders!—we've bothered to notice this season.
The others, without reference to their spines—except that of Judith Anderson's housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, which is most menacingly rigid—are splendidly in character: George Sanders as the blackguard, Nigel Bruce and Gladys Cooper as the blunt relatives, Reginald Denny as the dutiful estate manager, Edward Fielding as the butler and—of course—Florence Bates as a magnificent specimen of the ill-bred, moneyed, resort-infesting, servant-abusing dowager. Hitch was fortunate to find himself in such good company but we feel they were doubly so in finding themselves in his.' Review from New York Times.
