Filmmaker David Fincher has an excellent grip on the genre, films like Seven, Zodiac and Gone Girl all imbued with an almost tangible sense of uneasiness.
Nevertheless, there have been some brilliant additions to the genre.
Of course, Alfred Hitchcock is the master of the thriller, perfecting the genre with a string of classics that, to this day, remain unmatched. Suspense and a sense of tension, be it narratively or between characters, is key, and there are generally some recurrent themes such as murder, political intruige, espionge, conspiracy, criminal activity or psychological manipulation (and sometimes they include all of the above). While other genres like science fiction, horror films and romance movies are fairly easy to quantify, there are no hard or fast rules with regards to what constitutes a thriller.
