Who Can You Trust?

The Thriller is truly the genre for our unsettled times – an era in which truth is evasive, the news might be fake and chaos lurks behind a facade of political stability. The new BFI Compendium ‘Thriller: Who Can You Trust?‘ explores how onscreen thrillers have always captured the unease of the times, while holding us on the edge of our seat, gripped in suspense.

Here we find political conspiracy thrillers with heroes caught in webs of paranoia, in fear of the systems that surround them; film noirs about murderous husbands and imperiled wives; psycho thrillers about menacing strangers; and erotic shockers featuring seductive femme fatales. It casts a truly international eye over the genre, taking in the great tradition of the British spy thriller alongside the unmistakably French domestic thriller. And finally it looks inward to those psychological thrillers where characters come to doubt even their own mind, and where the very reality of their existence can no longer be trusted..