10 Most Anxious Movies of All Time, Ranked

2 weeks ago 16

Published Feb 14, 2026, 3:17 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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Anxiety is the sort of thing that might be hard to describe, but you know it when you feel it. It’s not something that’s nice to feel ordinarily, but when a movie makes you anxious, it can be a different sort of thing. It’s the same reason being scared in real life sucks, but a horror movie making you scared can be kind of cool. Well, unless it’s a heavy or traumatic kind of horror.

But speaking of heaviness and traumatic-feeling movies, that’s what the following do, but with the feeling of anxiety, rather than a feeling of fear. That’s to say that most of the highly anxious movies below fall within the bounds of the thriller genre, rather than the horror one, though there is a little crossover with some other genres when it comes to some of these, and some are intense enough to indeed make for borderline horrifying viewing experiences, at least at times.

10 'Nightcrawler' (2014)

Jake Gyllenhaal looking intently in Nightcrawler

There’s something about the world of journalism that merges well with the thriller genre, maybe thanks to the whole investigative thing and the inherent danger of taking on certain stories. Still, most movies set in such a world don’t get quite as dark and gritty as Nightcrawler manages to do, largely thanks to the central character here being far from heroic, and increasingly willing to cross moral lines with just about every new scene.

It’s a movie about a moral descent, basically, and focused on someone who seems initially shady. Nightcrawler is a lot, and it’s also unpleasant, but if you don’t mind thrillers getting dark, it is indeed very thrilling. Some of it works in a very darkly comedic or satirical way, though even then, if it were classifiable as a comedy, it’s about as far from a nice or pleasant one as you can possibly get.

9 'Threads' (1984)

Easily one of the most miserable sci-fi movies ever made, if it even counts as science fiction, Threads lays out what would probably happen to the world if nuclear war ever broke out. The first stretch of the movie feels a little like the more recent A House of Dynamite, but then Threads chooses to showcase the aftermath in a whole lot more detail than you'd expect.

Threads goes horrifically far into the future, showing subsequent generations of the few survivors devolving and ending up less than human.

And the aftermath is not pretty, to put it mildly. Also, Threads goes horrifically far into the future, showing subsequent generations of the few survivors devolving and ending up less than human, perhaps fittingly inhabiting a world that no longer looks or feels like Earth. It’s not anxiety-inducing in an “Oh God, I have no idea what’s going to happen,” and more anxiety-inducing in an “I know this is going to get worse, but I don’t know how bad it could possibly get” sort of way.

8 'After Hours' (1985)

Griffin Dunne at the bar in After Hours.

There will be two Martin Scorsese movies featured in this ranking, but two very different ones, it should be stressed. The first is After Hours, which stands out in Scorsese’s filmography for being one of his funniest films, even if it’s a very dark sort of comedy that might not be for everyone. It’s still a little broader and more frequently comedic than the likes of The King of Comedy and The Wolf of Wall Street, the latter of which does get more serious as it goes along.

For basically the whole of the runtime of After Hours, it’s a comedic nightmare of a movie, with a man trapped in a nightmarish situation late at night, running into obstacle after obstacle. It escalates and continually gets crazier in a way that'll put you on edge, or tickle your funny bone, or, ideally, maybe do a bit of both at the same time.

7 'No Country for Old Men' (2007)

Javier Bardem standing firmly in No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is technically a Western, albeit one of the most relentlessly heavy ones perhaps ever made. More specifically, it is a neo-Western, with the events here taking place a few decades ago, rather than well over a century ago, so it’s kind of modern-day. It’s also very far removed from some of the simpler and less morally complex sorts of stories you might more often associate (whether fairly or not) with more traditional Westerns.

It’s a movie where the sheriff is indeed an old man, and consistently one step behind the film’s ruthless villain, who’s after another man who took a bunch of money from the site of a drug deal that turned deadly. No Country for Old Men has got that whole intense cat-and-mouse thing going for it, but the cat is actually like a full-on lion, and so any and all mice end up seeming particularly outmatched.

6 'Inglourious Basterds' (2009)

Brad Pitt as LT. Aldo Raine and Eli Roth as SGT. Donny Donowitz looking down at the camera in Inglourious Basterds.

So, the good news here is that some of Inglourious Basterds is exciting and fun, especially for a war movie, but then other parts are unbearably suspenseful. Truth be told, it leaps back and forth between cathartic and grim without much warning, but in a way that kind of works in the moment, because this is Quentin Tarantino at perhaps his most balanced and well-controlled (arguably even his best overall, but Inglourious Basterds does admittedly have some tough competition).

It’s a grand and ambitious World War II film that has some basis in history, with a few actual historical figures, but then it eventually proves very willing to subvert – or even outright – what actually happened, and in a way that also somehow works. There is a sense of things being provocative here, to some extent, but it’s provocation backed up with great writing, filmmaking, acting, and all the other things, so it gets a pass.

5 'Whiplash' (2014)

If you want to see how exciting a drama can be without including any traditional thriller, horror, or action elements, then Whiplash is very much worth checking out, if you haven’t already. You probably have already, because it’s famous, and it’s also famous (or maybe, more accurately, notorious) for being a pretty gruelling and anxious watch, though all that intensity is very much purposeful.

After all, Whiplash wants to explore the destructive side of pursuing perfection in a creative field, and does so brutally well. The dynamic here between the protagonist and antagonist (calling the former a “hero” would be a stretch, with where he’s willing to sink to morally throughout) is also endlessly fascinating, and the way Whiplash refuses to offer easy answers with its explosion of an ending makes it further anxiety-inducing, like, just to think about, even once it’s well and truly over. It lingers and stuff.

4 'The Wages of Fear' (1953)

You know how most adventure movies are kind of fun? The Wages of Fear is not most adventure movies. It still involves a journey over a great distance, so it qualifies, but that journey is often done at a snail’s pace, since the people journeying are driving trucks filled with highly explosive material, and so any collision or route through terrain of a too-rough nature will result in fiery deaths.

This isn't literally the whole movie, since The Wages of Fear spends a bit of time setting the characters and some other things up, but then once the whole driving part gets underway, it’s just non-stop suspense. It’s easily the oldest movie in this ranking, since sometimes, what was intense multiple decades ago doesn’t get the heart rate up quite so high decades later, but the stress found in this particular film is of a rather timeless nature.

3 'The Departed' (2006)

After After Hours, the other Scorsese movie worth highlighting for how anxiety-inducing it manages to be is The Departed. This is slightly more conventional territory for Scorsese, compared to the comedy of After Hours, but The Departed does differ from some of his other gangster movies by being more of a thriller, and also splitting its time between prominent characters on both sides of the law.

It’s also the intersection of those sides of the law that makes everything suspenseful, admittedly, with two individuals both effectively going undercover and trying to out the other, and some moral complexity that comes from highlighting how there aren’t always obvious differences between the two sides, in some regards. The Departed tells a story that succeeds in always feeling dangerous, with the sense that anything could happen at any time making it a nerve-wracking watch.

2 'Zodiac' (2007)

Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) look intently ahead in Zodiac.

A little over a decade on from directing Se7en, David Fincher helmed the comparably unsettling Zodiac, with both movies revolving around the hunt for a serial killer. Se7en might be more depressing, in the end, but Zodiac is arguably more anxiety-inducing, since it’s about a real-life serial killer, and one who was also never caught, so the idea of him still being out there somewhere (or even just being someone who died in relative peace and took his secret to his grave) is tremendously troubling for hopefully obvious reasons.

It’s impressive how Zodiac has that inherent lack of closure without feeling like a disappointment in the end, because it cleverly becomes about obsession and the way it can be self-destructive. A serial killer can obviously end your life, but a serial killer can also ruin your life, it turns out, should you become absolutely consumed by desperately trying to find them, and neither outcome’s great, you know?

1 'Uncut Gems' (2019)

Adam Sandler with sunglasses on looks amused in Uncut Gems.

So, you’ve probably heard it before, but it’s a common sentiment with good reason: Uncut Gems might well be the most anxiety-inducing movie of all time, or at least has to be considered as a serious contender for such a crown. The more recent Marty Supreme was also relentless in how tense it was, but was only directed by one of the Safdie brothers, and it feels like maximum anxiety is achieved when they work together, showcased by Uncut Gems and also Good Time (that one’s worthy of an honorable mention here).

Uncut Gems begins with people yelling at each other, and ends with people yelling at each other while also shooting at each other. And then in between the yelling and the yelling and the shooting, there’s more yelling, and a general frantic sense of being rushed from one grim situation to another. It’s one of the most effective character studies of someone with an addictive personality perhaps ever, and it’s also an unconventional blast of a movie to watch, if you don’t end up feeling too panicked by all of it (and it’s honestly understandable if you do).