Warning: This review contains spoilers.

This weekend, Sony Pictures Classics is re-releasing nationwide a remastered print of Damien Chazelle’s blistering Oscar-winning breakthrough, “Whiplash” (2014), in light of its 10th anniversary.

Few could have foreseen this film becoming a cultural phenomenon, even when it premiered to rapturous acclaim at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, but with the help of some guerilla-style word-of-mouth marketing, “Whiplash” enraptured general audiences and earned $49 million in the box office. That’s a little-indie-that-could success story only achieved by a few independent films of the new millennium. Chazelle and Miles Teller became household names, J.K. Simmons earned a well-deserved Oscar and, most importantly, the movie was of a dying breed of low-budget films that so indisputably had the cultural zeitgeist in a chokehold.     

I’ll never forget the first time I saw “Whiplash,” which, like David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999) and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), felt genuinely transformative during my burgeoning stages of cinephilia — shaping my perception of the medium and what it could be. It epitomizes the mantra “simplicity reigns supreme,” as a then-wunderkind Chazelle twists and contorts a deceptively straightforward narrative between an aspiring drummer and a ruthless instructor into a film that is, by some miracle, equally as ruthless to the viewer.

Unmercifully, the film holds back absolutely no punches. Whether it’s the jazzy score that’s pushed up the sound mix, the one-two-punch of dialogue and diegetic music or the constant whip-pans and whip-zooms, the movie creates an apt sensation of psychological whiplash. 

Take the infamous “Rushing or Dragging” scene, where Andrew Neyman, played by Teller, drums Hank Levy’s “Whiplash” in his first ensemble rehearsal; it’s smooth and nice-going, nothing too out of the ordinary. Then Terence Fletcher, played by Simmons, discerns Andrew’s off-tempo drumming; the diegetic music dissipates, and things get eerily quiet. The only thing piercing the ambiance is Fletcher’s deaf-inducing berating as he tries to pressure-cook diamonds from the rough. For those five excruciating minutes, like a Pixies song with its loud-quiet-loud formula, the film calibrates itself into a meticulous horror movie.

In short, as derogatory as it may sound, “Whiplash” is particularly exhilarating sadomasochism — attributable to Simmons’ magnetic and perversely alluring performance — and this is where thematic misinterpretations run wild.

Ask a jazz musician about “Whiplash,” and chances are, they don’t like it too much — or, at least, they’ll tell you it’s a low-grade and deceitful representation of the professional jazz scene. And they’re right, but here’s the counterargument: it’s not a “jazz movie,” and it was never intended to be. It’s a sports melodrama disguised as a movie about music. Chazelle almost speaks that idea to existence in the “Family Dinner” scene, where a pent-up Andrew is repulsed by his family’s attitude that drumming is second-class and dissimilar to football. Because to Andrew, drumming is practically football; music is a sport.

Then there’s the other side of the coin, those who — like Andrew — also treat music like a sport. There’s a reason “Whiplash” is often placed in the same canon of films as “Fight Club” or “Taxi Driver”: they are cinema’s equivalent of a gateway drug, effortlessly appealing to the average moviegoer while retaining its morally challenging nature. They’re the movies that don’t hold your hand, and that’s a dangerous, exciting feeling when everyone is so accustomed to bogged-down, turn-off-your-brain entertainment. Inevitably, this leads to many, frankly, misconstrued thematic readings from an admittedly thematically ambiguous film.

Simmons’ Fletcher is like 2010s cinema’s Tyler Durden from “Fight Club” or Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho,” where bravado and charisma are enough, for some, to overshadow a deeply sinister underbelly. For 107 minutes, Fletcher manipulates and molds our protagonist to his will like a drill sergeant, insisting whenever possible that Andrew is worthless and that he’ll never be like his childhood idol Buddy Rich. And because they share the same philosophy of degrading music into an impossible game of perfection — and because the movie is so deeply embedded in Andrew’s self-destructive psyche — he blindly follows it.

Then again, “Whiplash” isn’t exactly subtle about Fletcher’s manipulation. Early in the film, an otherwise foul-mouthed Fletcher gives a rare, somewhat jarringly emotional monologue about the death of a former prodigy of his, Sean Casey, describing him as a “beautiful player.” What he doesn’t share is how Casey died. And that’s putting it nicely, as he straight-up lies about it. Casey didn’t die in a car crash; he was revealed to have committed suicide after suffering from depression and anxiety allegedly inflicted by Fletcher’s abuse.

However, Fletcher’s manipulation and vision of perfection is arguably at its most misconstrued when the film sporadically strays from its bluntness. As a moral exercise, what makes “Whiplash” so arduous is how much room it gives Fletcher to justify and rationalize his teaching philosophy. When Andrew meets Fletcher in a jazz club, everyone thinks of the infamous line, “There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than ‘good job.’” But, a small detail is missed by many: his story of Jo Jones throwing a cymbal at Charlie Parker. Did Jo Jones throw a cymbal at Charlie Parker with the intent to seriously hurt him? Yes, but even that’s stretching it; Jones threw a cymbal at Parker’s feet, but he didn’t “[hurtle] a cymbal at his head,” as Fletcher claims.

All this leads to the film’s final scene of Andrew achieving the perfection he desires, the elephant in the room. To its objectors, specifically those who believe that “Whiplash” is genuinely endorsing something horrifically evil, it’s easy to read the grand crescendo as the movie upholding Fletcher’s abuse. I mean, it’s cinematic euphoria in its purest form. But there’s one shot that almost single-handedly invalidates this sentiment. This shot, amidst the ecstasy of perfection, is of Andrew’s horrified father — peering through the lobby doors — helplessly watching his son lose himself. That moment is Chazelle adding an asterisk to the film, a burning aftertaste that reminds you that the ending is not so simple. But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide if this is a tale of burgeoning triumph or a disturbing tragedy.