10 Most Claustrophobic Movies Of All Time
2. Das Boot (1981)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%
An honourable mention should go to Kevin Macdonald's Black Sea here, a dark and oppressive submarine drama from 2014 that is well worth your time, though there was only room for one claustrophobic sub flick in the top ten. 1981's Das Boot (The Boat) follows the crew of a German submarine on patrol in the Atlantic during World War II as they battle with unseen enemies and long stretches of maddening boredom.
As journalist Herbert Grönemeyer attempts to document every-day life on the U-boat, captain Jürgen Prochnow struggles to keep the crew's morale up, and before long the vessel becomes an overcrowded hell hidden in the black depths of the ocean. The threat of the dreaded 'ping' that signifies a nearby enemy sub becomes as nerve-wracking for the viewer as it is for the shipmates.
This is a film designed to bring the audience as close to life aboard a submarine as they are ever likely to get, and the mammoth uncut 293 minute run-time is part of that grueling experience. The longer you watch the crew's confinement, the more uncomfortable yet engrossed you become.
Das Boot is widely regarded as director Wolfgang Peterson's best work and is considered the blueprint for the submarine film, a sub-genre of the war movie with its own particular syntax and semantics that has never been done better than it was here.