There’s not much in Jaws that can be faulted, really, to the point where calling it a flat-out masterpiece isn’t likely to raise too many eyebrows. Sure, not everyone is going to love it equally, because there’s always some level of subjectivity when talking about any movie’s quality (or lack thereof), but probably less of a variety of opinions when it comes to something like Jaws. It does everything right, starting with confidence and then building patiently – but never tediously – toward a more adventure-filled (yet still scary) final act. It’s about killing a shark that is responsible for killing quite a few people, basically. There’s a really efficient exploration of the people who live in the fictional town of Amity Island, so you’re given a reason to care about the mission succeeding, once that mission has to be undertaken. It makes things more intense, in other words, and the sense of suspense is also heightened by the way Jaws builds gradually, revealing more of the shark as the desperation of the characters grows greater, making use of the idea that sometimes less is more (though, for what it’s worth, most of the special effects used to bring the shark to life later on hold up better than you might expect).
So, Jaws could be seen as the gold standard for a bunch of things, including how to bring a novel to life on screen and arguably elevate it, and it’s also a contender for the crown of Steven Spielberg’s most entertaining movie (which is saying a lot). The sheer suspense of it all, though, is what’s important here, because Jaws really is about as suspenseful as movies get… well, almost. There’s more subjectivity here, in terms of what gets viewers most sweaty-palmed and on edge, and that subjectivity means you might not agree that the following movies are actually more suspenseful or intense. They are also, admittedly, not horror movies, whereas Jaws is at least in part a horror film, but there can be a distinction between a movie being scary and a movie being suspenseful. And suspense isn’t the only thing Jaws is going for, so it’s not necessarily the case that these movies are all better than Jaws. At the end of the day, they just got the person who typed these words feeling even more jittery/nervous than Jaws did.
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‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953)
Of the movies being mentioned here, The Wages of Fear is the most similar to Jaws, because while it’s not a horror movie, it does fit into both the thriller and adventure genres, and that’s an area that Jaws also occupies, at least in part. Structurally, it’s also not too dissimilar from Jaws, because it takes its time establishing stakes and setting all the characters up before getting to the meat of the film in the second half. It works, because that intense stuff is easier to get invested in and care about. If the movie were just its second half, it’d probably work as a B-movie kind of thing, but it’s the first half (on paper, less exciting) that makes the film as a whole something better and more impactful. It’s a movie that’s about two and a half hours long, and it’s about four men who take on a job that involves transporting nitroglycerin, by truck, through rough terrain. You come to understand why they take on the job, and just what it means if things go wrong. The kind of tension you get out of a well-executed bomb defusal scene is maintained pretty much the whole time they’re driving, with the stakes being, naturally, life-and-death, and everything feeling sufficiently dangerous to the point that the mission being successful does not feel inevitable, by any means.
The Wages of Fear holds up incredibly well for something that’s now more than 70 years old.
There’s a huge amount of tension and unease here, even without the movie being in-your-face when it comes to violence or even action, really. The characters just keep driving in what feels like real time, owing to the unnerving quality of it all, and that’s really all the film needs in its back half to be gripping (again, helped by all the equally expertly-done set-up in the first half). The Wages of Fear holds up incredibly well for something that’s now more than 70 years old, and though the English-language remake, Sorcerer, is also very good (and intense), the original, in this instance, is still the best. There are other thrillers made around this time, in the 1950s and 1960s, that don’t feel as intense when watched nowadays as they might’ve back then, but The Wages of Fear is the rare movie that really still hits hard, in that regard. When you’re in the middle of it, it’s easy to forget just how old it actually is.
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‘Whiplash’ (2014)
Whiplash is a movie with more yelling and intensity than you might expect if you go into it just expecting a music-related film focused on the experiences of a young drummer. The thing is, he’s an absolute perfectionist, aspiring to be one of the all-time greats, and his time at a prestigious music school has him cross paths with a tyrannical instructor who believes abuse is a way to get the best out of the students he’s teaching. So begins a very destructive dynamic between the two, who are equally motivated and also equally unwilling to back down or compromise. Someone’s the unstoppable force, and the other’s the immovable object, and everything gets incredibly intense because of these clashing personalities. The drummer sacrifices other relationships and falls behind in various non-music-related areas of his life, and the instructor goes far enough in his abuse, on an almost daily basis, it seems, to put his professional career in jeopardy.
On this goes from pretty much the opening scene, and without saying too much more about the plot, Whiplash ultimately ends in an even stronger fashion, because the whole finale here really is one of the best movie endings of all time. Whiplash makes drumming feel like the most intense thing in the world, for 100 or so minutes, and as far as cinematic explorations of perfectionism and the drive to be great are concerned, it’s one of the best to ever do it, doing for drumming what The Red Shoes and Black Swan did for ballet. Another factor in Whiplash being as intense as it is comes from the lack of easy answers, and different people are going to have different feelings regarding the point at which certain characters crossed (or didn’t cross) a certain line, morally speaking. There’s a surprising level of suspense here, even if the film’s not really a thriller, and it all builds until that aforementioned finale. After that point, when the end credits have finished rolling, there’s still this lingering sense of dread, or at least unease, because Whiplash – and the questions it raises – are honestly hard to stop thinking about, even once the movie’s well and truly over.
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‘Uncut Gems’ (2019)
Most movies about addiction focus on a substance of some kind, but Uncut Gems is a little more abstract, being initially about gambling and the difficulty of quitting, but eventually – and probably more – being focused on the addictiveness of adrenaline and chasing some kind of unknown/unattainable high. The surreal imagery at the very start and very end of the film kind of supports this sensation, but between those sequences, Uncut Gems is almost entirely focused on being gritty, realistic, and uncomfortably down-to-earth. Its protagonist is a jeweler who comes into possession of a very rare opal, and he has a whole plan to sell it for a higher price than he bought it for, but it’s also a lot more complicated than that, given the other things he wants to do with the money he has, or believes he’ll soon have, and all that being a problem in the first place because of how much money he’s already borrowed (and the dangerous individuals he’s borrowed from).
If all that sounds chaotic, it’s because Uncut Gems is. It’s almost nothing but chaos. If you don’t mind dark comedy, lots of it is also quite funny, but stress is the main emotion you’ll feel here. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most anxiety-inducing movies of all time, and almost definitely the most anxious in recent memory, to the point where people who’ve seen Uncut Gems might describe newer releases as “the Uncut Gems of x.” It can be used as shorthand, in a way. If something’s anxiety-inducing, it’ll be compared to Uncut Gems. Is that the same as suspense? Sure. Here, it is. There’s a real escalation to the chaos, even if it starts at what feels like about as intense as a movie can get. It just keeps building and building, somehow, and that sense of things getting so much worse from scene to scene really makes you feel the desperation of the situation the protagonist is in, even if you’re not the kind of person who’d necessarily make the same decisions as him. It’s uncomfortably immersive, in other words, and among the most impressive movies made/released in recent memory, in all honesty.
