If you have finished The Shards and are already pacing the room looking for something to scratch that itch, The Informers, Bret Easton Ellis’s 2008 film adaptation, is the most direct place to go next. Same author, same city, same decade, same sense that beautiful people are capable of genuinely terrible things.
Before getting into the film, a bit of context on the show itself. According to TV Insider, The Shards premieres on 5 August on FX and Hulu at 9pm ET / 6pm PT. Igby Rigney has been cast as a young Bret Easton Ellis in the series, which is adapted from Ellis’s semi-autobiographical novel. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the novel was key to helping the cast understand their characters, and Ellis himself has been only lightly involved with the production, selling the book and penning a draft of the first two episodes. Worth knowing, too, that the book was something of a long time coming: as W Magazine points out, the novel, released in 2023, was Ellis’s first in 13 years, following 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms.
Why The Informers, Bret Easton Ellis’s Film, Is the Obvious Next Watch
Like The Shards, The Informers is drawn from Ellis’s fiction and set in Los Angeles in the 1980s. The sweat-slick, monied atmosphere carries straight across. Where The Shards builds around a central mystery and the threat of the Trawler, The Informers works differently: structured as separate narratives about characters who don’t always meet or realise how they’re connected.
At the centre of it is Graham (Jon Foster), a drifting, bisexual rich kid who deals drugs and hates his film producer father. When Graham’s friend Bruce is killed outside a party, Graham carries a trauma he can’t quite connect with, crossing paths in ways both direct and indirect with a zonked-out rock star (Mel Raido), a kid trying desperately to survive a soul-killing vacation with his father (Lou Taylor Pucci), and his girlfriend (Amber Heard) and boyfriend (Austin Nichols).
There’s no Trawler in The Informers, no single throughline mystery pulling everything together. But the same existential dread is everywhere. It’s easy to imagine the Trawler working in the background of these stories, unnoticed precisely because these self-absorbed people have no reason to look up. The ending delivers a gut punch: a moment of revelation that makes clear that wealth, good looks, and privilege offer no protection whatsoever.
The cast helps enormously. Billy Bob Thornton, Winona Ryder, Kim Basinger, and Mickey Rourke all feature alongside the younger leads, and it is, in the end, a very entertaining film about very unpleasant people making very bad decisions. The Informers is available to rent on Prime Video.
More Films Worth Watching After The Shards
If The Informers still leaves you wanting, there are several other films that share The Shards‘ particular flavour of dread.
Heathers (1988) has the same black heart, just with more sarcasm and considerably more Ohio than California. Winona Ryder plays Veronica Sawyer, part of a popular clique whose social cruelty she is already conflicted about when she meets Jason “J.D.” Dean (Christian Slater). Much like the suspicions around Robert in The Shards, J.D. turns out to be far more disturbed than Veronica suspected. Stream it on Pluto TV or Tubi, or rent it on Prime Video.
Summer of 84 (2018) leans into the serial killer angle. In a small Oregon town in 1984, 15-year-old Davey (Graham Verchere) comes to suspect his neighbour Mackey (Rich Sommer) is responsible for the disappearance of more than a dozen kids over the previous decade. The paranoia is the point. Rent it on Apple TV.
Cruel Intentions (1999) is pure reptilian cool. Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe) and Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) are wealthy, manipulative, and utterly without conscience, which puts them in very familiar company. Reese Witherspoon plays the naive new girl who becomes the target of a bet. Stream it on Netflix, The Roku Channel, Kanopy, Hoopla, or Tubi.
Super Dark Times (2017) is less glamorous than The Shards but digs into the same anxiety: what happens when you begin to suspect someone close to you is a monster? When an accident leaves a teenager dead and the two friends who were present cover it up, the fallout is exactly as bleak as the title suggests. Stream it on The Roku Channel or Tubi.
Saltburn (2023) trades the 1980s Los Angeles setting for a very different world, but the slow burn of darkness and violence among the obscenely wealthy is identical in spirit. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver, a scholarship student at Oxford who gradually invades the life of the wealthy Catton family with sociopathic precision. Rent it on Prime Video.
The Shards arrives on FX and Hulu on 5 August at 9pm ET.
