This document discusses common psychological themes in films, including guilt, mystery, imagination, and suspense. It provides examples and summaries of four films that effectively incorporate these themes: 1) Shutter Island explores guilt and ambiguity regarding reality through the story of a man investigating a disappearance at a mental institution who may actually be an incarcerated patient. 2) Inception uses themes of guilt over a wife's death and ambiguous reality through a character who implants an idea in his wife's mind that causes her suicide. 3) Black Swan portrays the psychological breakdown of a ballerina obsessed with perfection through the contrast of her "white swan" and "black swan" personas. 4) Z

1. Films With a Psychological Theme
As me and my production team, are producing a short psychological thriller film, we have
came across common themes that are in this type of genre. It is important for us to include
these themes, because without them it would be pointless making a psychological thriller.
There are two overarching themes that tend to pop up which are guilt, mystery, imagination
and suspense. Sometimes each of these films can generally stand alone as the core of the
film, but often at times, they are combined with a context of ambiguity regarding what is
real and what has been imagined.
In our Film, the girl Eve who is portrayed as a normal person to Richard, but at the end he
finds out that she died four years ago and she is possibly a spirit/ghost. Eve is portrayed to
have a guilty conscience as she ran away from home to attend a party which her father
David did not let her go to. The mystery and suspense is why did Richard see Eve? What
they meant to?
Shutter Island (2010)
In this film, directed by Martin Scorsese, based on the novel by Dennis
Lehane, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshal investigation
a mysterious disappearance at a institution for the criminally insane. As the
story continues. The audience see’s a bizarre occurrences that becomes
highly fantastical in nature. We learn that DiCaprio’s character is really an
incarcerated patient at the institution, as he killed his wife Michelle
Williams after she drowned their children. His guilt over this crime has
caused him to elaborate the story in his mind that gave him a new identity
and could make him cope with what he had done. His feeling to escape
from this misery subjects to himself to a lobotomy to free and clear his
mind. Therefore, Shutter Island is an example of a filmthat combines the
theme of guilt with ambiguity regarding reality, creating a mind bending
experience that even has a horror like element
Inception (2010)
The filmInception is highly categorised as a psychological action film, but
the elements of guilt and ambiguous reality are present at the films
beginning. This is also yet anther example of a film that came out in 2010
where a character played by Leonardo DiCaprio is plagued by guilt over his
wife’s death. In the filmwe learn that his character, Dom Cobb has planted
an idea in his wife: Marion Cotillard’s mind that their world was not real so
that she would eventually want to leave the dream world they have been in
for an extended period of time, However since this idea was planted deeply
they still had a belief in the real world, she had killed herself thinking that
this would allow her to return back into the real world. Dom Cobb felt guilt,
and finds that an opportunity arises for him to return to his children. His
emotional peace is confirmed at the end of the film when he reunites with
his children.

2. Black Swan (2010)
While this film Black Swan is a theatrical ballet filmit also has
psychological aspects. Natalie Portman’s character, Nina Sayers, is
obsessed with achieving perfection as a professional ballerina. Her
stress of trying to reach perfection in her lead role Swan Lake causes
her to have a psychological breakdown throughout the film. We see a
dark sinister Black Swan side of her which contrasts the white swan
side of her that we see previously. In portraying her mental struggle,
makes us completely unaware of what is real and what is simply
imagined in Nina’s head. In the end, Nina finds out that she cannot
reach perfection with a huge sacrifice.
Zodiac (2007)
This filmwas a masterpiece from the director David Fincher (The girl
with the dragon tattoo, The social network, Fight club) that is in so
much detail, the series of murders in California in the 1960’s and
1970’s were attributed as the Zodiac Killer. Rover Graysmith (Jake
Gyllenhaal) is a politician at the Sab Francisco Chronicle but soon
becomes obsessed with trying to uncover the identity of the Zodiac.