20 Psychological Thrillers You Must See Before You Die

3. The Pledge

Starring a classic late-Jack Nicholson performance (surely his most underrated), Sean Penn's The Pledge is an underseen, undervalued film, a masterwork were it not for one or two odd directing choices. Those meagre faults aside, The Pledge is magnificent, with Nicholson playing a cop convinced a child-murder case he worked on wasn't solved, despite the 'killer' confessing before killing himself. Obsessed by his idea, and driven by the pledge he made to the girl's mother, Nicholson's Jerry Black concocts a plan to find the real killer, which ends up lasting years to send Black spiralling into madness. (It hasn't been mentioned anywhere that I can find, but The Pledge is a definite influence on Prisoners, both in their tales of young girls gone missing and in the aforementioned prisoner-suicide scenes, which are nearly identical.) A film deserving of a bigger fanbase, The Pledge should be regarded as a classic, not only in the realm of psychological thrillers, but in general, too. The closing scene, which sees a virtually insane Nicholson muttering to himself years down the line - his clothes dusty, the garage he bought early on in the film derelict - is a devastating portrait of a man driven to madness by his obsession.