Genre Research - Psychological Thriller

For our film idea we have decided on the genre of psychological thriller. This mean that our film must contain elements from thriller films and psychological/mystery films.

Codes and Conventions:
Thriller films typically contain a strong male lead character, and our film will follow this convention, along the with the female supporting actress who play the victim in our film. We are going to include a female doctor in our film however, which could be seen as unconventional in such a stereotypically 'macho' genre.

Thriller films typically contain violence, and our film is no exception. One of the main audience pleasures in thriller films is the ability to see violence and death on screen, otherwise they wouldn't have their 'thrill' factor. Our film will contain quite strong violence as it contains a murder scene and a suicide, so you could say our film is conventional in this sense.
One way that our film differs from conventional thrillers is that there is no antagonist or villain in a conventional sense, the antagonist in our film is Damian's personal battle with mental    
illness, the driving force which is equivalent to the protagonist is Damian's desire to be re-united with his wife.
The themes of thriller films are quite realistic, as most thriller films take place around events that could potentially happen to them. Examples could be films like Taken which is based around a man's daughter being kidnapped or Nightcrawler which is based around a freelance journalist who do anything to succeed. Our film falls into this category of realism, as mental illness is quite a common occurrence in society.

 

With our film having a psychological element in its storyline I researched films with the theme of mental illness. Two films I found useful were Shutter Island and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Although One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is a drama, it is set in a mental asylum like our film and also contains a suicide scene. Shutter Island is very similar to our film in it's plot as Teddy became insane after failing to deal with the deaths of his entire family. Codes and Conventions seen in these films are in line with our chosen genre - strong male lead, strong violence and a complex approach to the antagonistic features of the films, the only real enemies to the protagonists in these films are themselves.