20 Psychological Thrillers You Must See Before You Die

5. The Conversation

Made in between The Godfather Part I and II, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation is a smaller, more intimate portrayal of a man coming to pieces. Obsessed by the idea that a couple he is spying on will be murdered, surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) slowly descends into paranoid madness, eventually ripping up his apartment, convinced that he has been bugged. When he finds no evidence, he simply plays the saxophone, defeated in the debris. The Conversation is a more melancholy picture than many on this list, especially so in the case of Hackman's Caul, who cuts a brilliant but tragic figure too sure of his own theory. Another film tinged with Watergate-era paranoia, The Conversation plays on ideas of security (both home and national) and trust, but also on loneliness, too, ensuring that it works as a character study just as well as it does something greater and more far reaching.