10 Most Unbearably Suspenseful Movies of All Time, Ranked

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Adam Sandler holding a gold necklace in 'Uncut Gems'

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Jeremy has more than 2200 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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Suspense maybe shouldn’t be bearable, but sometimes, the milder thrillers out there kind of are. You can also talk about suspense in movies that aren’t necessarily thrillers, or that aren’t entirely thrillers. Comedies can be suspenseful and even anxiety-inducing (see Shiva Baby and After Hours), and if a funny movie can also be tense and unnerving, then any movie of any kind can be, really.

Returning to the idea of suspense being bearable or unbearable, the following titles lean toward the latter. They're thrillers (alongside some crime, drama, and horror films) that go particularly hard on being intense. Your mileage may vary somewhat, so if you don’t find these unbearable, then good for you. But there’s a good chance that at least some people will find some films below quite hard to get through, especially if you're not well-prepared for a disquieting sit.

10 'Zodiac' (2007)

Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) hunches obsessively over his desk while Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) loiters casually behind him in 'Zodiac' (2007).

With his first few movies, released in the 1990s, David Fincher proved he could make some pretty damn suspenseful stuff, but it’s probably 2007’s Zodiac that ends up being his most consistently unsettling. It has the dread you'd expect out of a movie covering the ultimately fruitless search for a notorious serial killer, and finds ways to keep being unsettling even after all the leads seem to dry up.

Zodiac pivots to being about obsession in its second half, and while the paranoia there might not be as in-your-face, there are certainly sequences found closer to the end that feel even more harrowing than the comparatively grislier first half. It’s all very well-controlled and paced throughout, keeping things engrossing even in the quieter moments, and all-around being a much better experience than reading the book it was based on.

9 'The Wages of Fear' (1953)

A wounded man leaning on another one in The Wages of Fear

The Wages of Fear was remade as Sorcerer, and that film’s also very suspenseful for sure, but the original might be more of a nail-biter. It’s also easier to appreciate the original for holding up remarkably well, since it’s about a quarter of a century older, feeling timelessly intense as a movie about men on a desperate mission through dangerous territory where any false move could result in their fiery deaths.

It might all sound a bit too simple to work as well as it does, and the 153-minute runtime might also be questionable, or even something of a deterrent, but in execution, The Wages of Fear nails things. It’s also a movie that proved influential on the films of Christopher Nolan, and he’s generally good at crafting suspenseful works, so that’s another reason this one is very much worth checking out, even if you're not usually the fondest of movies that are many decades old.

8 'Parasite' (2019)

Cho Yeon-jo climbs a staircase in a scene from Parasite.

Just a perfect movie all around, Parasite has been praised to death at this point. Like, every part of Parasite has been praised to death, truth be told. It’s a very good social dramedy that feels agonizingly relevant and of the times, all the while also being a genuinely exciting thriller. And it lurches into some more genres throughout, but mostly sticks to being a comedy/drama/thriller kind of thing.

The less said about the plot, the better, because all you really need to know is that it’s about two families (one poor, one very well-off), and a strange dynamic/conflict that plays out between the two. The bleak parts make the humorous parts funnier, and then the funny parts contrast with the bleak parts to make them feel all the heavier. It’s a chaotic blend of genres and tone, but ultimately functions incredibly well.

7 'No Country for Old Men' (2007)

Javier Bardem standing firmly in No Country for Old Men

Capturing the harrowing and nightmarish quality of Cormac McCarthy’s writing very effectively, No Country for Old Men is a neo-Western, a thriller, and a very dark crime movie all at once. It’s about a man finding some money at the site of a drug deal that turned deadly, and when he takes it, he ends up making himself the target of a relentless assassin who’s trying to track down the immense quantity of cash.

If it’s not the best Coen brothers movie, then it might well be the best-directed Coen brothers movie, which is saying quite a bit. No Country for Old Men has an inherently intense premise that’s made a whole lot more grim because of the approach taken, not to mention the strength of the acting on offer (Javier Bardem did indeed deserve the huge amount of praise heaped upon him for his performance here).

6 'Psycho' (1960)

Marion Crane driving and looking pensive in Psycho.

Psycho might well be the definitive psychological horror/thriller movie made before, say, 1970. What it did for its time was undeniably bold and subversive, to such a famous extent that the biggest surprise Psycho has in store will likely be known ahead of time, should you choose to watch Psycho for the first time decades after it first came out.

That’s not a fault of the movie or anything, and more a testament to how iconic it was as a shock-heavy film. Psycho throws certain storytelling rules out the window before the halfway mark, and though the film was quietly tense before that point, it’s more relentlessly suspenseful afterward. You get the feeling that anything could happen, and the sense of a movie feeling genuinely dangerous while being this old is truly impressive.

5 'Misery' (1990)

Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) shaving Paul's (James Caan) face in Misery

Based on a pretty much perfect Stephen King novel that the author himself considers one of his best, Misery centers on an author who finds himself in just about the most nightmarish situation possible for someone in his profession. He’s seemingly rescued from a car accident, but finds he’s actually been kidnapped by an obsessive fan who doesn’t take kindly to the discovery that her favorite book series of his has recently ended.

Misery is all confined, suspenseful, and honestly quite fun/engaging, which might mitigate some of the horror... yet that horror is still nonetheless visceral.

She forces him to continue it, and he has to keep writing something he now hates, or otherwise risk incredible physical pain and, eventually, probable death. Misery is all confined, suspenseful, and honestly quite fun/engaging, which might mitigate some of the horror. Yet that horror is nonetheless visceral, and you do feel the desperation of the whole situation and fight for survival in a very intense way, so the immense suspense factor here can’t be denied.

4 'The Departed' (2006)

The Departed tells the same basic story as Infernal Affairs, with a criminal infiltrating the police force and a police officer going undercover in the criminal world. Both realize that someone else might be an opposing mole, and so there’s a whole cat-and-mouse game that involves one finding the other before said other can expose them. With The Departed, that whole premise is stretched out to about 2.5 hours.

And it really does keep things going – and always intense – for that entire runtime, which is one of the longest Martin Scorsese movies that isn't a full-on epic. It’s sort of another Scorsese gangster movie, but with more of an emphasis on being a thriller, and The Departed does indeed thrill. It’s the kind of thing that’s also riveting if you're rewatching it, or know what happens ahead of time, with that being a sign of a suspense-heavy movie going above and beyond, and truly delivering.

3 'Whiplash' (2014)

Andrew struggling while playing the drums in Whiplash

The second film Damien Chazelle directed, and probably his best one overall too, Whiplash is also the most intense exploration of pursuing art and greatness at the cost of everything else Chazelle’s done to date. It’s mostly just one young man doing a bunch of increasingly risky things because he wants to be a legendary drummer one day, and there’s a tyrannical instructor who’s just as willing to push his most desperate (and potentially vulnerable) students.

Drumming has never been so intense, and it probably won’t be ever again to quite this extent. Maybe that’s okay, though. Maybe the world only needs one music-related film that’s this damn gruelling. It’s about as perfect as psychological dramas get, too, being so introspective and effectively nauseating that it puts a good many psychological thrillers to shame, too (even though it’s not technically a thriller).

2 'Inglourious Basterds' (2009)

Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine at the end of 'Inglourious Basterds'

Kind of an epic movie set during World War II, but not really in the expected way, Inglourious Basterds has a lot of moving pieces and a pretty large cast, too. It takes place in Nazi-occupied France, and many of the characters are people who are either resisting Nazi violence, or taking the fight to the Nazis themselves, and the fact that they're all outgunned and/or underdogs makes so much of the movie all the more intense.

Also, Inglourious Basterds plays around with history and has fictional characters colliding with some real-life historical figures, and the way things are rewritten keeps the suspense high, since you can’t rely on knowledge of actual history to know what’s going to go down. It’s also home to some of the most suspense-filled sequences of the 21st century so far, including the opening scene, the one in the tavern, and then much of the finale inside a cinema.

1 'Uncut Gems' (2019)

Adam Sandler with sunglasses on looks amused in Uncut Gems.

Essentially, Uncut Gems is a movie about a man digging himself into a deeper hole for a bit over two hours. He’s played by Adam Sandler, and he just doesn’t know when or how to quit hustling, betting money on increasingly risky things in pursuit of a big score. And that involves borrowing more and more money from people, some of whom react very poorly to it all, and everything just worsens to an almost comical degree.

If it’s comedic, though, then it’s certainly dark comedy, and dark in a way that some people just might not find all that funny. But either way, Uncut Gems will put you on edge for pretty much its entire runtime, which is a Safdie specialty (see also Good Time, and the more recent Marty Supreme, which was directed by Josh, but not Benny Safdie).