Love Letters

Love Letters

By Christy Clark & Ed Farley

To the psychological thriller: why it is so influential both on the writer’s love of film and to the film industry

Dear Psychological Thriller,

It’s true that you’re not the sole reason I love cinema. Every genre, film, director, actor, writer, cinematographer, costume and set designer, as well as many more, have lent their own unique contribution, culminating in a glorious whole of appreciation. Yet it’s also true that with your twists, turns, and intricacies, you have forever changed the way that I perceive the multitude of directions a film might take.

As I came upon my love for the screen, films such as Shutter Island, Memento, and The Usual Suspects had a profound impact on me, all bound up within the beauty of you as a genre. Not horrors, per se, but oftentimes equally harrowing, lingering in the mind long after the credits roll.

The best thing about the psychological thriller is its constant willingness to take on the viewer, challenging their perceptions both of film and of reality itself. Even when the audience knows a twist is coming, your magic has so often moved past their ability to second-guess it. Parasite, my personal favourite of the films labelled under your vast banner, is everything I have come to love about the genre: eerily tense, grossly beautiful, and wonderfully conniving.

Through you, generation-defining actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island, Florence Pugh in Midsommar, and Tilda Swinton in We Don’t Talk About Kevin have been given the license to deliver career-peaking performances, playing relentlessly on the audience’s emotions. In a phrase, you’ve brought to the fore the vast number of possibilities alive when the audience takes their seat.

I hope you continue to innovate, exasperate, and expand as a genre in ways thoroughly unpredictable: challenging the psychology behind film in new and mesmerising ways. But regardless of the future, thank you for the ways in which you have influenced me to love film as I do.

Christy Clark

Dear Damien Chazelles’,

I was revising a film for my A level exam. With an offer from a fancy university doing something different, I looked at my notes about this particular film, and realised I was making a mistake. Fast forward: I dropped out of that university. I studied film and TV instead. Now, I’m going to be a master’s student in Film and TV. For that, I must thank your film: La La Land.

In my eyes, it is nothing short of a masterpiece. Though each shot is a work of art through its visual brilliance, it has a permeating message that is just as, if not more, spellbinding. The film simultaneously shows the dizzying heights of dreaming and falling in love, paired with the reality that the world doesn’t often accept those things. It seems dark, but the film portrays how both can coexist. Moreso, they’re reliant on each other. I have a habit of capsizing when dreams turn into nightmares. I believe that it’s the end, not the beginning of a new act. La La Land rejects this quite literally and implores me and others to think differently.

In La La Land’s case, if no one shows up to your one-woman show, or you give up your artistic integrity for a while, it’s not a failure. It’s part of what makes the movie work. If this is the case for the characters, it should be for the audience. Each time we sing, cry, and believe we’re not good enough, we need to remember it’s part of our own movie, and what is a movie without its plot points?

We will acknowledge how tough the world can be, yes- yet we can also learn when to reject it and find joy in romanticising. There’s beauty in loss, and even more in knowing what to fight for, through it all. Like the perfect performances of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, there’s validity in unashamedly believing the journey of your own character.

Thank you, Damien Chazelle, for making me understand that.

Ed Farley