Uncut Gems: The Anxiety Thriller as Endurance Test

Uncut Gems opens inside a body. Josh and Benny Safdie start on an Ethiopian opal mine — a miner has been hurt, there’s blood, there’s a jagged black stone glittering with hidden colour — and then cut, in one of the boldest match cuts in recent American cinema, from the glinting interior of the gem to the glinting interior of Howard Ratner’s colon during a routine endoscopy. The film is announcing its terms. Everything here is guts. Everything is the wet, involuntary machinery of a man who cannot stop.

That man is Howard, a Diamond District jeweller and compulsive gambler played by Adam Sandler in the performance that should have rewritten how people talk about him. The Safdies had spent a decade making sweaty, propulsive New York crime films — Heaven Knows What, then Good Time with Robert Pattinson — and Uncut Gems (2019) is the point where their method and their casting instincts fused into something genuinely great and genuinely difficult to sit through. It is a thriller with no gun to its head for most of the runtime, and it is still one of the most stressful films of its decade.

Noise as architecture

The first thing to understand about Uncut Gems is that its soundscape is the plot. The Safdies build every scene out of overlapping dialogue — three, four, five people talking across each other, phones ringing, a buzzer at the shop’s security door going off, a debt-collector’s muscle raising his voice in the background while Howard tries to close a sale in the foreground. Nobody finishes a sentence. Everybody wants something. The mix is deliberately exhausting, and it is doing the same job Deakins’s descending light does in Sicario: translating a character’s internal state into the physical texture of the film.

Howard lives in a state of permanent overdraft — of money, of attention, of goodwill — and the sound design keeps you inside that overdraft. You are always being pulled at. This is craft of a very high order, and it descends from a specific lineage: the John Cassavetes school of shooting people talking over each other until performance stops looking like performance, filtered through the grimy 1970s New York crime cinema the Safdies plainly worship. Daniel Lopatin’s score, all glassy synth arpeggios and cosmic drift, floats above the chaos like the opal itself — a promise of transcendence hovering over a man drowning in the practical.

Sandler, and the death drive played straight

Casting Adam Sandler is the master stroke, and not as a stunt. Sandler’s comic persona has always had aggression in it — the sudden screaming rage under the man-child sweetness — and the Safdies simply removed the comedy and kept the engine. Howard is charming, quick, genuinely likeable, and he will burn every relationship he has for the next bet. Sandler plays him without a shred of self-pity, which is what makes it bearable. He isn’t asking to be forgiven. He’s asking you to watch him win, just this once, and the film’s cruel genius is that some part of you starts to want it too.

The supporting ensemble is calibrated with documentary precision. Kevin Garnett plays himself, and the Safdies build the whole climax around a real 2012 NBA playoff series, weaving Howard’s insane parlay bet into actual Celtics footage. Julia Fox, in her screen debut, plays Howard’s girlfriend Julia with a startling lack of vanity. Idina Menzel is his wife, LaKeith Stanfield the associate who keeps the schemes moving, The Weeknd turning up as himself in a nightclub. Everyone feels grabbed off a real street, which is exactly the Safdie effect — the fiction is pitched at the frequency of overheard life.

The Garnett subplot deserves its own note because it is where the film quietly reveals what it is about. Howard shows Garnett the raw opal, and the athlete becomes convinced the stone carries some ancestral power, that holding it makes him play better. He borrows it; he wins; he wants to keep it. Two men, then, both projecting the same magical thinking onto the same rock — the gambler and the champion each certain the object is talking to them. The Safdies never underline it, but the whole film is an essay on the stories men tell themselves about luck, about being chosen, about the one score that will finally make the maths work. The opal is a mirror, and everyone who looks into it sees a version of themselves that wins.

Why the anxiety is the point, not a side effect

Some viewers bounce off Uncut Gems because it is unpleasant to inhabit, and I understand the reaction while thinking it mistakes the achievement for a flaw. The film is a formal experiment in sustained dread with almost no conventional violence to release it. Most thrillers use tension as a coiled spring that a shootout or a chase will eventually unload. The Safdies deny you that spring for most of the film. The tension has nowhere to go, so it accumulates in your own body — the endoscopy from the opening turns out to be a promise about how the movie intends to treat you.

The closest cousin in recent crime cinema is Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, another portrait of a man whose sheer forward momentum becomes horrifying, whose hustle you find yourself half-admiring against your better judgement. Both films understand that a character with an unkillable appetite is scarier than any villain, because appetite has no third act where it repents. You can trace the DNA back further, to the anti-glamour crime realism of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, where small-time men make bad calls and the world simply processes them without ceremony. The Safdies share that film’s refusal to treat crime as glamour or tragedy; it is simply a bad job that men do because they have run out of other moves. And Michael Mann’s Thief, for all its cool surface, is likewise about a man whose plan is a self-portrait of his own compulsion. Uncut Gems strips the cool off and leaves the compulsion raw.

The verdict

Uncut Gems is a masterpiece of a very specific and unlovable kind: the anxiety film as endurance test, built to make you feel what its protagonist feels rather than merely observe it. The craft is impeccable — the sound design, Darius Khondji’s restless handheld camera, Lopatin’s shimmering score, and a lead performance that permanently ended the argument about whether Sandler could act. Whether you can bear it is a separate question from whether it is good, and it is very good.

Watch it when you have the constitution for it. Then chase it with Nightcrawler for the companion study of American hunger, or the neo-noir round-up if you want the wider map of where this kind of modern crime cinema lives.

Spoilers below

The ending is the reason the film exists, so stop here if you haven’t seen it.

Howard’s grand play pays off. He has bet everything — an absurd, escalating parlay on Kevin Garnett’s performance, funded partly by pawning and re-pawning the opal, and he has locked the bookie’s enforcers, Arno’s men, inside the glass security vestibule of his shop so they can’t stop the bet before the game finishes. The game breaks his way. Garnett delivers. Howard wins something like a million dollars. For one radiant moment the film gives him, and us, the transcendence the opal kept promising — the man was right, the compulsion was vindicated, the death drive turned out to be a winning strategy.

And then Phil, one of the trapped enforcers, shoots him in the face. Just like that, mid-celebration, the reward and the punishment arrive in the same breath. The Safdies hold on Howard’s stilled, staring body and then the camera pushes into the wound, back through the blood and tissue, and dissolves into the cosmic swirl of the opal’s interior — closing the loop that the endoscopy opened. Guts to gem to guts to gem to the universe.

It is one of the most morally exact endings in modern crime film. Howard doesn’t lose because he was wrong. He loses because winning changed nothing about the world he built, in which a locked door and a furious man are always in the next room. The bet was never the danger; the life was. The Safdies refuse the consolation that his death might mean something, that the money might save his family, that the cosmos into which we drift at the end is watching. It is indifferent, and beautiful, and it swallows him whole.