>From weak knees to sweaty palms, we're taking a look at those cinematic sequences
that best kept us feeling nervous and on the edge of our seats.
These are our picks for the top ten tensest movie moments of all time.
(Music)
As we kick off our list at the number ten spot and begin our investigation into
tension and what exactly makes it tick, we wanna start light and comfortable and
work our way towards bad and worse, upping the intensity as we go.
So first up, we're looking at romantic tension,
moments where we all want to yell at the screen, just kiss already.
Some of our favorites come from the trunk in Out of Sight, the hallway in Drive,
the secret whisper of Lost in Translation, the dance in Sound of Music and
the entirety of In the Mood for Love.
However, for our first pick,
we're going to give it to the unbeatable listening booth scene from Before Sunrise.
- Do you wanna go see if their listening booth still works?
- Yeah, okay.
(Music)
- The listening booth scene is just about the most feel-good tension
we've ever seen, hovering on the cusp of love so visibly enamoured and adoring.
There's little doubt which way their relationship will go, but it's so
frustrating that they won't just hurry up and fall for each other already!
And that's one of the keys to tension,
giving the audience something they want and then delaying it,
making us wonder if we might get what we're hoping for after all.
And here, it plays itself out in a visual game of chase, with eye contact that has
us waiting for their gaze to meet, finally admitting what we already know.
(Music)
Of course, it's not always just kiss we're shouting at the screen.
We can't forget the more animatistic variation that is sexual tension.
Where it isn't so much tugging on our heartstrings as it is our, well, you know.
This is chess in the The Thomas Crown Affair, the subway in Shame,
Jack Rabbit's slims in Pulp Fiction, the library in Atonement,
Aragorn and Arwen in Return of the King, Sam and Frodo in Return of the King, and
in Two Towers and in The Fellowship.
And as much as we obviously thinks Sam and Frodo make a steamy couple,
there's nothing quite so
sexually pulse pounding in recent memory as the beach in Moonlight.
- Why are you always calling me that?
- What, black?
- Yeah, black.
- That's my nickname for you.
You don't like it?
- No, it's just what kind of dude goes around giving other dudes nicknames?
- The kind of dude what just sat down and is about to put you onto this blunt!
(Laugh) Yeah.
You like the water, well, I can introduce you to some fire.
- Suspense isn't always about a delay of the inevitable,
it is also about some of the anxiety that comes with predicting whether that
inevitable will actually come.
The tension that we're talking about is a tension between competing pieces of
evidence about which way the story is heading, towards our desired outcome or
away from it.
In moonlight these are the mixed signals of two teens grappling with their
sexuality and attraction.
In one moment, seeming like they might connect, in the next,
as if their guards couldn't possibly let them.
And as we try to calculate whether Chiron is going to end up accepted or rejected,
he's trying to decide whether to be vulnerable or guarded.
And we feel the tension about whether or not he's going to get hurt.
(Music)
Extending this hopeful tension beyond intimacy,
we get the more general positive tension.
Tension where we as an audience are really hoping and expecting and rooting for
a good outcome, while the narrative toys with delaying that gratification.
This is the tear-jerkingly protracted revelation to his father in,
A Knight's Tale.
It's the realization of his identity in, The Princess Bride.
And the build up to the moment of recognition in Paris, Texas.
However, for our number eight pick,
we actually want to look at the dueling banjo scene from, Deliverance.
(Music)
- $4.99.
- Fine.
(Music)
- Talk about genetic deficiency, pitiful.
- Now this is definitely an odd pick for tension, because it doesn't
necessarily give us the queasy feeling we so often associate with it.
But it does work masterfully to create an expectation and then delay it,
key elements of tension, which makes it an important example for
us to focus on and learn from.
The difference is, here all of the expectation and delay is musical.
It uses our shared knowledge of typical musical conventions to give us a sense of
incompleteness and then expectation from whence comes the tension.
But it brings to the foreground what a lot of tension sequences hide in
the background, namely the soundtrack, and it makes it the explicit subject of
the sequences emotion, which is why we love it so much.
- (Laugh) God damn, I could play all day with that guy.
- I believe you could too.
- Next up we're looking at tension centered around our protagonist making
the right decision.
The one we know they need to make.
Catching us between the hope that they'll do the right thing and
the dread that they'll fail.
This is Godfather, crossing our fingers that Michael shoots Sollozzo.
And it's Pan's Labyrinth,
hoping that the captive soldier can make it to three without stuttering.
And it's our number seven pick, Saving Private Ryan,
hoping that Upham makes it up the stairs to help his fellow man.
- A bomb!
- (Noise)
(Crosstalk)
- Saving Private Ryan's up
sequence is a crystal clear example of the hope dread dynamic of tension.
Inter-cutting between two sequences, one indicating how close we are to success,
and the other, indicating how close we are to failure.
It is a masterfully executed way to visualize and
hear how close we are to competing impulses.
One towards an outcome, and the other away, in the constant push and
pull of tension.
As we continue our pivot from hope dominated tension to dread dominated
tension, we want to look at the tension of collapsing dramatic irony.
A situation where we know something that an antagonist character doesn't, and
very much don't want them to find out.
This is the opening of, Inglorious Bastards, and
the first half of it's bar scene.
Its Seven's box, Silence of the Lamb's house call.
Catch Me if You Can's secret service con.
And The Lives of Others house search.
But for our dramatic irony pick,
we would be remissed to pick a flick from anyone but Hitch.
And we think he never did it more obviously and in our face than in Rope,
with a maid clearing off the trunk turned dinner table that we already know
hides a dead body.
- We might have a better chance of finding out where he is now if we knew where he
was this afternoon.
What do you think, Brandon?
- I haven't the least idea where he was this afternoon.
- But don't you think it would help if we found out where he was?
- I suppose so.
- I know he went to the club this afternoon to play tennis, and
I know that he got there.
- Why?
- Because someone phoned from there with a message that David would meet us here.
- Well, do you know who gave the message?
- No.
- Well, then obviously David ran into someone at the club who changed his plan.
You weren't there this afternoon, by any chance, were you, Kenneth?
- No, I wish I had been.
- I don't suppose you or Brandon were, Phillip.
- No.
- Hardly, we had our hands full getting ready for the party.
- Famous for breaking suspense down into various variations of sitting people at
a dinner table with a bomb underneath and showing the audience the bomb,
it's no wonder Hitchcock is our pick for dramatic irony.
And just like his dinner bomb, this is a master class in dreadful tension.
Show the audience a possible outcome that we would very much like to avoid, and
then watch us squirm as he moves his characters closer and
further away from stopping the outcome.
Here, the exploding bomb is a dead body being found, and
the dinner table is very literally a dinner table.
And we're stuck both fascinated and
terrified by the possibility that it might go off.
But it gets even more uncomfortable as we keep moving to number five,
with our favorite characters trying to hide themselves from danger.
It's a different more immediate sort of dramatic irony.
We know where they are and we want somebody else not to.
This is Jurassic Park's Raptor Kitchen, Rear Window's like last 20 minutes.
Rififi's silent heist, The Departed's silent phone call.
No Country for Old Men's (Bleep) brilliant silent hotel room standoff.
And one of our favorites, The Matrix's hiding in the walls.
But we're actually going to go with an even more intense wall hiding moment.
This time from The Raid.
(Sound)
(Music)
Good tension is a balancing act between escape and discovery.
A cat and mouse game that keeps both in sight.
If your protagonist is too well hidden and
will too obviously escape, there's no feeling of risk.
If we don't believe they even have a chance to get away,
the feeling is just hopelessness.
A sequence of tension needs to be like Schroedinger's cat,
neither alive nor dead for as long as possible.
If we open the box too soon, we let all the suspense out.
And this raid sequence rides the line so thin,
creating an almost just impossible to escape scenario and
then intervening with a way to avoid discovery in the last possible moment.
We're never quite thinking all is lost as he's stabbing into the walls, and
never quite breathing easy when he's dodged it by an inch.
There's still a question of the spacing, the blood, that he might come back,
which is exactly why it's genius.
For our number four slot,
sometimes the thing that's in hiding lies in the subtext of the scene.
Two characters square off and don't quite say what they mean.
But if they did, things would surely spiral out of control.
You see this in No Country for Old Men's gas station, Drive's first encounter
between Gosling and Isaac, Goodfellas' funny how in a brilliant subversion.
True Romance's Sicilian scene, Training Day's card game, Hell or High Water's end,
and Heat's diner, but for our number four pick, there's nothing creepier and
with subtext closer to the surface than Zodiac's basement.
- This tip is how you got it in your head that Rick is the Zodiac.
- That and the poster.
- The poster?
- The poster that Rick drew.
The handwriting is the closest that we have ever come to a match.
- Rick didn't draw any posters.
- No, he drew this one.
- Mr. Greysmith, I do the posters myself.
It's my handwriting.
- I won't take any more of your time.
- Why don't I just go and find out when we played that film.
- Well that's all right.
- It's not a problem, just down in the basement.
- Not many people have basements in California.
- I do.
- Hovering on the brink of disaster, danger is on every side,
even a wrong word seems like it might set everything off.
We don't even really understand why Jake Gyllenhaal's character would ever go into
that basement, or why Vaughan so obviously makes no attempt to not creep him out.
But we think that's kind of the point.
Venture even addresses this phenomenon later in another great
tension sequence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
- Why don't people trust their instincts?
They sense something is wrong, someone is walking too close behind them.
You knew something was wrong.
You came back into the house.
Did I force you, did I drag you in?
No, all I had to do was offer you a drink.
- This scene plays with what exactly it is inside us humans that holds the subtext
inside, and how scary it is that even we don't really understand what it is
about us that keeps the conflict at bay.
Next up, we're looking at tension in the build-up where conflict looms so
clearly on the horizon that the terrifying question that keeps us on edge isn't so
much if as it is when.
This is Dallas in the tunnel in Alien, swimming at night in Jaws.
The pawn shop heist in Drive, and the wheelchair scene in It Follows.
Its standoffs like those in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Once Upon a Time in
the West, the ending of the basement scene in Inglorious Bastards, and most recently,
It Comes at Night.
However, for our number three pick, we are,
and always have been massive fans from
the Juarez bridge standoff from Sicario.
- Take your service weapon out.
Red impala two lanes over on my ten.
- Copy that, red Impala two lanes left.
- Roger that.
- Sicario's Juarez is a master class in constantly ramping up our suspicions that
there might be violence without confirming it until finally confirming it.
But still keeping the violence mercilessly at bay and making us wait for it, and
wait for it, and wait for it.
And it does it so brilliantly and effectively and with every part of
the filmmaking toolkit that we couldn't possibly cover all of its brilliance here.
Which is good because we don't have to because we already have.
Last year we spent about ten minutes analysing the hell out of the sequence and
we're still proud of it.
So check that out for an even deeper look at the minutia of tension.
But in the mean time we've still have two slots to go and
our next slot is like the last one on crack.
We'll call it, the powder keg tension, it's not so much building up an up and up,
until we think it can't possibly get any more tense.
But that it starts at just about a constant eleven and doesn't let up,
walking us through a minefield until something's gotta give.
This is Mission Impossible 3 counting to ten with shots ringing out well before
expected, or Prisoners hammer torture, or Schindler's List hinge execution.
Wages of Fear and Sorcerer have quite literal powder keg
scenes while transporting nitroglycerin and Deerhunter's
first round of russian roulette is just about as crazy as it can get.
In fact, the only thing we think maybe edges it out, is our number two pick,
the drug deal from Boogie Nights.
- We got something here?
- There it is.
- All right. - That's about half a ki right there.
- (Laugh) All right, now that is some quality
- (Sound)
- If you want, I can cross that out.
- No, don't worry about it.
- I mean, go ahead, you know, If you wanna.
- No, no, no, wait right here.
(Sound)
(Music)
- I love that song.
(Sound) - This Boogie Nights sequence is basically
cinematically induced PTSD.
Paul Thomas-Anderson creates landscapes so chaotic and volatile that we as
an audience struggle to get our footing with any kind of reasonable expectation.
We have seen a Chekhov's gun and
everything in the air is telling is that there must be violence, and
hell as an audience we might even be looking forward to it.
So why are our buttholes so clinched, but
it's not just about getting what we want with tension.
It's about a fear of the unknown, of not being able to predict how things will
play out we lose a secure grip on the expected direction of the narrative and
we start to feel unease.
Which is why we all know how this scene will end but
still worry that we don't know when or how.
And finally at number 1,
at the very top of the intensity scale is the race against time.
The sprint against impossible odds, the last chance mad dash.
Where the agents of getting us what we want must compete
against the ever-nearing finality of locking us into what we most fear.
This is prisoners driving to the hospital and Misery's relocking the door.
Climbing the staircase in Interstellar's saving grace of a docking sequence.
It's Room's escape and most of the Hurt Locker diffusing sequences and
Get Out's mad dash out the door.
However for our top and final pick we're going with Back to the Future's climax.
(Music)
- (Music)
- In Back to the Future the obstacles are constant and varied,
with each problem solved opening up a new one.
With so many different pieces that need to line up at exactly the right time and
right speed and right place.
With each one falling into line causing another to fall out,
it seems almost impossible that they'll make it work.
But in this case,
it's the genre that provides the positive balance to the negative tension.
The comedic nature of the film reassures us of eminent success in contrast with
the competing narrative indications that Marty and Doc Brown will fail.
Because in a genre with such strong expectations of a happy ending,
it takes that many mishaps to bring our assumptions into enough doubt to get our
hearts really pumping.
But Back to the Future does it brilliantly.
Which is why we think it is the b, well, it's, I mean look.
We're pretty sure it's not the best but it's just so damn good and
it serves to complete this episode's arch.
So, it's our number one-ish-est pick for this week of all time, okay?
So, what do you think, disagree with any of our picks?
Did any other scenes make you inappropriately soil your
drawers in dread?
Let us know in the comments below, change your underpants, and
be sure to subscribe for more CINEFIX Movie Lists.