Pearly white teeth and a jet-black heart: 10 movies like ‘American Psycho’
Leaving no genre off-limits in its pursuit of cinematic excellence, American Psycho throws everything at the blood-splattered wall and lets all of it stick, creating a cult classic for the ages that gained long-lasting life as a murderous takedown of corporate culture, materialism, and the very concept of truth.
Christian Bale justified his decision to persevere with the part of Patrick Bateman by launching himself headlong into a complex, frantic, ferocious, unhinged, and regularly hilarious performance that still ranks as one of the finest turns in a career that’s become synonymous with top-drawer acting.
Whether it’s a psychological thriller, jet-black satire, claret-red horror, or character study, American Psycho thrives on its embrace and subversion of countless tropes, leaving a trail of destruction behind in its wake that refuses to offer any concrete answers even in its final moments.
There are no films identical to American Psycho, but there are more than a few that carry similar themes, motifs, or strands of spiritual DNA. All of the following ten titles have at least a couple of things in common with Harron and Bale’s tour-de-force, admittedly without the added bonus of Huey Lewis and the News.
Twisted, murderous psychological thrillers like American Psycho
It remains unclear just how many bodies Bateman dropped during American Psycho, but for those who prefer their murderous tendencies to be a little more concrete, Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built makes no bones about it. Matt Dillon’s title character is a raging sociopath, just like Bale’s sharp-suited protagonist, except his murders are immaculately planned, executed, and treated like works of art.
Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle kills two men at the brothel where Jodie Foster’s Iris prostitutes herself, and much like Bateman, the central figure in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is a loner played by one of the best actors of their generation who tries to make sense of the world they live in, despite barely even fitting into it at all.
In Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon’s title character ingratiates himself among those of wealth and status before pretending to be someone he’s not eventually tips him over the edge. Along similar lines, Rosamund Pike’s Amy Dunne grew tired of pretending she was a murder victim in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, only to return with a vengeance and a smile plastered on her face to live a dream life that’s nothing but an unsettling, eerily empty façade.
American Psycho packs a hefty satirical punch, and while it’s a home invasion thriller first and foremost, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games revels in pulling the rug from under its audience by critiquing the very genre it occupies while asking both figurative and literal questions of why the audience is deriving so much enjoyment from the reprehensible actions depicted therein.
Movies about the downsides of rampant capitalism
The core characters of American Psycho are almost entirely comprised of self-centred, vain, ego-driven, financially-motivated yuppies who milk a capitalist society for all that it’s worth. It’s a distinctly corporate environment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t similar films to shine a light on the dark side of capitalism.
Michael Douglas gets stretched well beyond breaking point when unemployment, divorce, and car trouble befall him in Falling Down, causing him to continually lose his grasp on sanity while grappling with his frustrations towards the system holding him down. Jordan Belfort experienced the exact opposite, but The Wolf of Wall Street nonetheless exposes what happens when unchecked greed and rampant debauchery create immense wealth for a select few while causing hardship and misery for many.
Fight Club has been completely misunderstood and embraced by the wrong crowd, but for those who appreciate Fincher’s classic for what it is, the reflections on toxic masculinity, emotional repression, and the consumer-driven modern world are all reflective of American Psycho in one way or another. That applies to a different and lesser extent to Nightcrawler, too, with Jake Gyllenhaal’s bug-eyed ambulance chaser displaying no compassion or empathy for victims of shocking crimes when there’s a quick buck and a career boost to be enjoyed at their expense.
For a Bateman-adjacent look at societal rage shot through with dark comedy and no shortage of satire, Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America finds a man diagnosed with a brain tumour teaming up with a teenage girl to go on a killing spree after growing so disgusted with what’s happened to American culture they decide the best way to rectify it is to eliminate the worst offenders.
10 movies like American Psycho:
- Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
- The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018)
- Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 2007
- Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)
- The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)
- Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993)
- God Bless America (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2011)
- Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)
- The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
- Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
