Suspended Between Gazes: Metatextuality in Alejandro Amenábar’s Thriller Trilogy (1996–2001)

This article argues that Alejandro Amenábar’s first three features—Tesis (1996), Abre los ojos (1997), and The Others (2001)—constitute a systematic investigation of cinema’s fundamental operations through thriller form. These films employ different thriller subgenres to explore cinema’s psychic, phenomenological, and ontological dimensions, progressing from explicit apparatus representation (Tesis thematizes scopophilia) through phenomenological allegory (Abre los ojos uses virtual reality to allegorize cinema as dream machine) to ontological embodiment (The Others makes ghosts figures for cinematic images). Drawing on Martin Rubin’s concept of the thriller as metagenre, Lucien Dällenbach’s typology of the mise en abyme, and psychoanalytic film theory (Mulvey, Metz, Baudry), I show how the thriller’s sadomasochistic rhetoric, its aggressive manipulation of spectatorial response, makes it uniquely suited to metatextual exploration. The trilogy demonstrates that reflexivity intensifies rather than disrupts genre pleasure, challenging conventional oppositions between entertainment and critique, popular cinema and metacinematic practice.