You’d think we all have enough stress, but we still love those heart-pumping thrillers—whether they’re the quiet, suspenseful kind or the big action spectaculars. It might be simply that the things that get our hearts racing in real life are more often like “wow, look at this medical bill,” so a spy movie, a heist-gone-wrong scenario, or even a dark kidnapping story allow for some vicarious (and comparatively cheap) thrills. Here’s some of the very best of what’s available on Netflix, with a variety of movies that runs from mildly tense to extremely dark.
Prisoners (2013)
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After having had some success with a couple of Canadian indie films, but before turning to science fiction films like Arrival and Dune, Denis Villeneuve had a breakout hit with Prisoners, a chilling kidnap thriller. Hugh Jackman is Keller Dover, whose daughter goes missing, along with her friend, following a Thanksgiving dinner with family friends (Viola Davis and Terence Howard). Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki is assigned to the case, but finds his job complicated even further when Keller decides to take matters into his own hands, taking the prime suspect (who may or may not be guilty) and torturing him for information.
Spiderhead (2022)
While Joseph Kosinski’s Netflix original Spiderhead didn’t make quite the splash of his mega blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, it does make for a smart thriller with sci-fi overtones. Chris Hemsworth plays Steve Abnesti, who oversees a prison program in which prisoners receive less oversight and reduced sentences in exchange for serving as test subjects for a variety of pharmaceuticals. Supposedly, this is the project of some benevolent geniuses who just want to improve humankind, but you might not be surprised to learn (if you’ve ever lived in our world) that a pharmaceutical conglomerate has a lot more to do with it. The experiments grow increasingly manipulative and even deadly, with solid performances from Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett as two of the prison’s inmates.
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)
When nursing assistant Ruth (a fabulous Melanie Lynskey) comes home to find that she’s been burglarized, she sets out with her neighbor (Elijah Wood) to get her stuff back, and get revenge, in the most incompetent manner possible. As a vigilante farce, it nearly reaches Coen-brothers levels of absurdity, but it hits a lot of those beats while alternately challenging and confirming our worst instincts about our fellow humans.
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
This broody mystery is a compelling (and twisty) tale that plays fast and loose with history, even as it conjures up a chilly and brooding atmosphere. Christian Bale plays a retired and troubled detective teaming up with a young West Point cadet you might have heard of: his name’s Edgar Allen Poe, and he’s played here by Harry Melling, who’s great. The two team up to solve a case involving dead students and creepy occult signifiers.
Cam (2018)
Director Daniel Goldhaber (the upcoming How to Blow Up a Pipeline) teamed up with writer Isa Mazzei, who based this Black Mirror-esque story partly on her own memoir. Madeline Brewer (Orange is the New Black) plays online sex worker Alice Ackerman, aka Lola_Lola, who once night discovers there’s another Lola out there—a cam girl who’s identical to Alice in appearance and general vibe, but whose willingness to go further puts her out in front in terms of viewership. It’s a horror movie with a lot to say about the dehumanization of sex workers, with a great central performance from Brewer.
Berlin Syndrome (2017)
Travel broadens the mind and expands horizons—unless you’re American and in a thriller, in which case you should absolutely stay home. Teresa Palmer plays Clare, a photographer from Brisbane on a trip to Berlin who meets and falls for (at least in a one-night-stand kind of way) a local named Andi, played by Max Riemelt. After a night together, the kind-seeming and perpetually calm Andi isn’t keen on letting her leave.
The Guilty (2021)
It’s not quite up to the standard of the Danish original, but this American remake of a 2018 film is still excellent. Director Antoine Fuqua is joined by screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective) in the film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe Baylor, an LAPD officer who’d been busted down to 911 dispatcher for initially unspecified errors in judgment. He gets a call from a panicked woman that leads him to make some dramatic decisions, not all of them good. An exercise in pure suspense, the contained movie very much rests on Gyllenhaal’s shoulders, though a few famous names show up via voiceover.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Though not without controversy (the movie’s opening and ending in particular are deliberately provocative), this is certainly one of the most fascinatingly crafted thrillers of the past decade, with three interlocking narratives: first, Amy Adams is the owner of an upscale art gallery with a personal life that’s not going great, when her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her a copy of his new novel. From there we journey into the narrative of the novel itself, which we quickly learn is based on the true story of the couple while they were still married. Each story informs the others as we slowly uncover the violent pasts of the film’s leads.
Shimmer Lake (2017)
This crime drama begins on a Friday, with Andy (Rainn Wilson) hiding in his basement while his wife stalls his brother Zeke (Benjamin Walker), who’s also the sheriff. Andy, on the run with a bag of money, will be dead before the day’s out, but we’re going backwards here: writer/director Oren Uziel’s narrative then takes us to Thursday, and each previous day subsequently, until we understand how everyone wound up where they are.
Heat (1995)
Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) is planning one last, big heist before he retires in the Michael Mann classic that puts De Niro up against Al Pacino as LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna. The cat-and-mouse game between the two men, equal in cunning if on opposite sides of the law, sets the film well above a more typical crime thriller.
The Devil’s Own (1997)
As a movie that does an even halfway decent job of dealing with the conflicts around Northern Ireland during the period of the Troubles, The Devil’s Own isn’t it. But the quiet tension between Harrison Ford’s Irish-American police sergeant and the IRA partisan (Brad Pitt) whom he unknowingly welcomes into his home is compelling enough to make up for some slightly silly plotting. Pitt’s character is in New York to buy arms, while Ford’s character will have to stop him, even as his own sympathies are divided.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
Set entirely in an isolated cabin in the woods, this Stephen King adaptation involves a single immobilized character for much of its running time. Director Mike Flanagan, nevertheless, manages to craft a taut, suspenseful story about a married woman (Carla Gugino) trapped in a remote cabin when her husband played by Bruce Greenwood, dies after having handcuffed her to the bed. Increasingly delirious, she’s forced to face not only her past trauma, but the hungry dog that keeps sniffing around.
Lou (2022)
Lou (Allison Janney) is a quiet loner on Orcas Island in 1986; she’s also landlady to Hannah (Jurnee Smollett). Lou has just come by to tell Hannah that the rent is due when she learns that Hannah’s daughter has been kidnapped by the girl’s father, an ex-Green Beret and war criminal. Fortunately for Hannah, Lou has some very John Wick-esque secrets regarding her past, making her an unexpectedly good ally against the kidnapper.
Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023)
Continuing from the British crime series starring Idris Elba, but also a movie you can watch on its own, the film finds disgraced, imprisoned former DCI John Luther taunted by a serial killer (Andy Serkis) who, he’s pretty sure, can only be stopped if Luther busts out of jail and hunts him down. If you watched the series, this is an essential follow-up. If you haven’t, it’s a perfectly good time to find out why Elba is doing the morally-gray detective thing better than anyone, maybe ever.
Captain Phillips (2013)
We don’t often find Tom Hanks in a genuine thriller, but he’s impressive here in this biopic about the title’s Rich Phillips and the 21st century pirates who hijack his container vessel out of Oman. The result is an impossibly tense two hours, supported by an Academy Award-nominated performance from Barkhad Abdi as the pirate leader. Pirates of the Caribbean, this is not.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Quentin Tarantino came right out of the gate with this indelible crime drama—his feature debut. The set up is pure noir: A diamond heist goes violently wrong for a group of eight jewel thieves. With the nonlinear storytelling that Tarantino employed to even greater effect in Pulp Fiction, we watch the thieves turn on each other as the tension builds. A gut-churningly memorable sequence involving an ear is just one of the scenes that made this movie an instant indie classic.
Emily the Criminal (2022)
Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is a deeply relatable character: She went to an expensive school, and finds herself saddled with a mountain of debt. A relatively minor criminal record has made it hard for her to get a good-paying job. When given a chance to learn all about credit card fraud, the potential benefits are too good to turn down—which is approximately when things go wrong, and get violent. And then we find out exactly what Emily is capable of. Plaza is so brilliant here as the anti-hero that it’s a little hard not to cheer her on.
The Paramedic (2020)
Mario Casas stars here as Ángel, the title’s paramedic—not the greatest guy, really, and one who takes souvenirs from the people he helps, either to sell or to keep. An accident sees him lose the use of his legs, and his turmoil and rage don’t turn him into a better person, but instead sees him letting loose on a world he blames for pretty much everything. In particular danger is the girlfriend who left him. It’s a standard horror/thriller setup, but Casas is impressively compelling in his transformation from run-of-the-mill jerk to complete monster.
The Gray Man (2022)
The Russo brothers took a break from Avengers movies for this other blockbuster—at a cost of around $200m, it’s not like they decided to do a quiet indie drama. Ryan Gosling plays spy Sierra Six, whose latest mission involves taking out a fellow agent. He’s soon on the run from a corrupt agency boss (played by Regé-Jean Page), and helped and hindered by a supporting cast including Billy Bob Thornton, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, and Alfre Woodard. Sierra Six doesn’t make much of an impression as a character, but the Russos know how to craft an action spectacle, and this one kicks up the action early on, and never really slows down.
I Care a Lot (2020)
Rosamund Pike’s Marla Grayson might be the worst character on this list, which is definitely saying a lot. She’s a con artist who specializes in convincing courts to grant her guardianship of old people who, she says, can’t take care of themselves. She then drains their bank accounts at her leisure. It’s all going great (for her) until she fucks with the wrong senior: in this case, Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), who looks like the ultimate score. It turns out that she’s the mom of a scary Russian mobster (Peter Dinklage), and things escalate from there. The tone here is satirical to the point of comedy, but it’s both tense and satisfying to see the screws turn on Marla.