The art of creating tension in a film is a delicate thing. Get it wrong and you risk the viewer becoming disconnected from the events on screen. But get it right and you can catapult an audience into a world far beyond their own. This holds true across genres. In recent years we have seen it in thrillers like 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the film climaxes with a dizzying fight in the mountains for a nuclear trigger, and subversive horror like 2017’s Get Out where director Jordan Peele extracts a creeping sense of dread from a simple dinner party.

I recently experienced two films that embody the infinite possibilities of creating feelings of tension and urgency on screen. Their narratives could not have been more different. Uncut Gems follows New York jeweller Howard Ratner (played with the performance of his career by Adam Sandler) as he attempts to outwit everyone to secure the deal of a lifetime. 1917, by contrast, tells the tale of British soldiers in WWI on a perilous journey across No-Man’s Land to try and save thousands of lives. Nevertheless, within each are fascinating common ground about the form of cinematic craft that kept so many on the edge of their seats in 2020.

Uncut Gems is structured around a cacophony of chaos of Sandler’s making. As Ratner, we see him juggle countless bets for hundreds of thousands of dollars all at once, balancing money from sports betting against selling a watch against a future auction price for a jewel. This spirals on and on, taking over family possessions and relationships with everyone around him. It is compelling, and terrifying, to be drawn into this world where everything – including people’s lives – are constantly on the line. Directors Josh and Benny Safdie elegantly structure the film to subvert the expectations of the viewer. Again and again we think Sandler has done the deal to finally put his life back on track – each time we quickly learn it is in fact just another step in the wrong direction. Dinah Ratner, played with fiery scorn by Idina Menzel, stands in stark relief as the symbol of all Howard has lost and seems unable to claw back in this film; particularly memorable is her cold laughter in one scene when Howard fails to win her over.

In 1917, director Sam Mendes pulls us into the dark heart of warfare. George Mackay and Dean Charles-Chapman play two ordinary soldiers caught up in a world on fire. As they enter the dangerous world of No-Man’s Land, they are forced to rely on each other, both for protection and for simple camaraderie – conversations about home and the world beyond war feel beautifully authentic in their mundanity. Mendes’s triumph in 1917 is to leave us feeling anchored to the fate of Mackay and Charles-Chapman. This owes a huge debt to cinematographer Roger Deakins, who guides the camera deftly through the world in a much lauded ‘one-shot’. This gives everything a relentless energy, from tight shots that pull us into the actor’s eye line and out to soaring wide views of the scorched heartland of Europe in 1917.

Sound is intrinsic to both films. There is, of course, plenty of classic heavy beat, pounding tones that deepen the tension onscreen; chase sequences are remarkably similar whether they involve Adam Sandler in a New York car park or George Mackay in a ruined French town.

Uncut Gems deploys a synth-heavy, futuristic soundtrack from Daniel Lopatin. This gives Sandler an almost otherworldly energy, a man playing sport stars off against gangsters to get what he wants. 1917 feels much more contemporary to the setting, guided by Thomas Newman with orchestral pieces and one stunning choral number in a forest glade. The real impactful moments in 1917 come in the absence of sound. Lengthy moments of silence drag out the emptiness of war and quietly point to the imminent confrontation with the enemy. As a consequence, the first bullets fired are jaggedly jarring, almost a reprimand to the audience for ever believing life could be peaceful for long.

Claustrophobia takes tension to darker, sickening levels. 1917 has the WWI trenches, tight underground worlds always on the brink of devastation. In Uncut Gems, however, it is emerges in a seemingly mundane setting: a jeweller’s shop. The Safdies’ found a way to mine this space for an endless torrent of anxiety for the viewer. This all revolves around a buzzer. Every scene in the shop is defined by the incessant buzz as characters are let in and out through the locked security doors. It took a brilliantly singular vision of cinema to exploit such a simple item and create scenes of boiling intensity, with characters trapped inside the shop, outside the shop, and even within the antechamber before the inner door. You feel trapped in a cascading nightmare, as your ears fill with the harsh, insistent buzzing as Howard constantly teeters on the edge of oblivion.

At their core, 1917 and Uncut Gems share common ground of a world that is cruel and unjust. The former is structured as a journey through a kind of living hell. Moments of peace in the film appear tragically poignant because as the viewer we know this dark world cannot let our characters rest – the camera is restless to continue the journey. Scenes of terrible darkness, epitomised by a fiery apocalyptic scene in the charred remains of a French town, are often followed by delicate and piercing moments of sunlight on clear hillsides and woodland groves. Uncut Gems diverges somewhat here with its main character. Sandler portrays Howard Ratner as someone absorbed by greed. Every glint in his eyes, every manic stride across New York is there to make more money. In 1917 we see good men trying to just survive and escape a cruel world. Uncut Gems presents a dilemma – how to engage an audience with a morally questionable man in a cruel world? The Safdie brothers answer that question with a triumphant exploration of a man’s soul, and the lengths he will go to survive and take everything he can. It is testament to Sandler’s stunning performance that he manages to evoke simultaneous feelings of revulsion and a perverse desire to see him succeed.

Ultimately, it is the lingering question of death that hangs over these films. Bodies pile up to such a degree in 1917 that they are part of the landscape. Uncut Gems literally opens with a quantum, sci-fi esque journey from a kaleidoscopic vision of a diamond’s core and into Sandler undergoing a medical exam – wealth and his own mortality walk hand in hand. Main characters face death in both in a way that feels disturbingly mundane. After so much work building through intricate scenes, conducting beautiful music, and giving intense performances, death arrives without warning and crucially any fanfare. This ensures it hits us with the full weight these moments deserve, something that no amount of cinematic fanfare can portend.