Often you want Netflix to supply you with comfort snacks, and sometimes you want Netflix to get you into the system. If it’s the latter, you’re going to want a decent thriller that might not be high with blood and gore, but still manages to bring you to your core. The subscription service has a good range of genre choices, but they’ve still got a number of other movies called “thriller” that wouldn’t be the right use of your time.
A decent thriller, though, is going to be suspenseful for a variety of reasons. An unstoppable rapist. This is an unsolvable puzzle. This is a gripping universe that pulls audiences into it. A sympathetic character trying to survive. Anything that will keep the crowd on the edge of their seats. And on that basis, here are the 15 best thrillers on Netflix right now.
1. Uncut Gems
It is a mystery thriller film that is deemed by the National Review Board to be one of the best films of 2019. Adam was lauded for his role in the film. The film was worth around USD 50 million, making it the highest-grossing film of its A24 distributor. Adam plays Howard Ratner, who runs a jewelry store and is a gambling addict, but one day he’s selling a precious diamond to pay off his debts. Now he’s got to get this gem back in order to save his kin. The two brothers of Safdie proved to be a reliable hand in the adrenaline-pumping fun of Good Time. Uncut Diamonds, though, has a leading couple working absolutely on a separate basis. Adam Sandler stars as Howie a Jewish jeweler living in new york. Howie owes a lot of money to a lot of people and is addicted to gambling. Cause a film that hurts your heart when you watch the strangely likable main character do something wrong.
2. Taxi Driver
it is one of the earliest and best films of legendary director Martin Scorsese. In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a disillusioned cabbie dreaming of assassinating Presidential candidate Charles Palantine. He also has it in his heart to save a prostitute (played by 12-year-old Jodie Foster) and murder her pimp. The history of the Vietnam War looms large over the film, as Bickle’s vigilance renders him a hero to some and an anti-hero to others, building toward a climactic shootout and an unforgettable conclusion that continues to be viewed to this day.
3. Drive
Don’t let the college freshmen who watched Drive and then immediately become cinephiles persuade you to get away from this movie. Nicolas Winding Refn’s noir about a Hollywood stuntman by day/night (Ryan Gosling) is really sweet. It’s beautifully stylish, saturated in neon-lit film recording LA’s grim underbelly followed by a Chromatics soundtrack, and Gosling’s mix-up with his neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her husband (Oscar Isaac) is performed in a way that looks properly elevated and melodramatic like an Old Hollywood thriller. The drive may have ushered in a certain taste of 2010’s independent cinema, but it sounds like a classic.
4. The Interview
What begins off as a Kafka tale turns into a dramatic match between a seemingly innocent man (Hugo Weaving) and a threatening detective with his own demons (Tony Martin). The former is caught up and interrogated by the police for motives that are slowly known to him, and as the hours go by, both men get more and more desperate. Weaving knocks him out of the park, leaving the detectives and the viewer wondering that his real behavior is continually being called into question. Nor is Martin slouch as he does his utmost to reveal Weaving’s character to the beast he sees, even though it costs him his career and his sanity. Writing is taut and the setting is claustrophobic, which propels the mysteries behind the two main characters.
5. The Gift
The Stalker thrillers tend to be by-the-numbered and repetitive. The Gift cracks the mold, though, by tossing genuine confusion into the mix. Joel Edgerton wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Gordon “Gordo” Moseley, a man who puts together his “friend,” Simon Callem (Jason Bateman). Simon’s wife, Robyn (Rebecca Hall) appears to have no trouble with Gordo’s love or his extravagant presents. Yet Simon believes that Gordo is pursuing him for vengeance. The fact is that it turned out to be more elusive. If the acts of Gordo are suspicious, it is Simon’s character that comes into question. Is he really the target of a life-long scheme? Or is Simon really a master of manipulation? The Gift plays his cards tight to the vest before eventually revealing his back.
6. Zodiac
The identity of the Zodiac killer remains one of the most thrilling unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. But that didn’t deter director David Fincher from turning Zodiac into an impressive thriller that combines truth and fiction. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Robert Graysmith, a satirical cartoonist who gets himself swept up in the Zodiac case because of his desire to decode the cryptic texts of the murderer. Crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) continues exchanging details with Graysmith as the Zodiac Killer escalates his reign of terror in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The search to locate Zodiac is all-consuming for Graysmith as he and Avery continue to hunt the hunter. It’s a dynamic film, featuring Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Chloë Sevigny, Brian Cox, John Carroll Lynch, and Dermot Mulroney.
7. Nightcrawler
Journalism ethics is a hot subject today, but it has never been more fictionalized as it was in Nightcrawler. Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a stringer who goes to whatever extent possible to record raw video on his camera and sell it to a local TV station in Los Angeles. Bloom is not above exploiting the crime scene or even taking a stronger personal interest in the action if it maximizes his recordings — not to mention his influence over Nina, the morning news owner. Ethics are cast aside by the force of the all-powerful dollar, telling the viewer, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Jake Gyllenhaal is as convincing as ever in a film got an Oscar nom.
8. Gerald’s Game
It’s a captivity thriller about a deaf woman facing a masked intruder — Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King version of Gerald’s Game wrings big scares from a small place. Near to the grey plot details of King’s apparently “unfilmable” book, the film chronicles Jessie Burlingame’s painstaking struggle (Carla Gugino) to find herself handcuffed to a bed in an isolated holiday home when her husband, Gerald’s titular, dies from a heart attack while executing his cuddly sexual hallucinations. She’s trapped — and that’s it. The premise is obviously difficult to maintain throughout the entire film, but Flanagan and Gugino turn the potentially one-note set-up into a strong, reflective reflection on trauma, memory, and endurance in the face of near-certain doom.
9. The Guest
Since the writer-director Adam Wingard spotted a semi-sleeper horror success with 2011’s You’re Next, he had won a certain amount of goodwill within the loyal genres and, evidently, with studio brass. How else can we describe the distribution of his atypical thriller The Visitor by Time Warner’s Picturehouse subsidiary? Headlined by soon-to-be megastar Dan Stevens and related flick It Follows’ lead screaming Queen Maika Monroe, The Guest portrays itself as a subtextual impostor thriller, unexpectedly flips into a mixer of the ’80s teen tropes, and eventually exposes its true identity as an expertly self-conscious straight-to-video shoot ’em up, before inevitably circling back on itself with a well-earned grin. To tell more about the hell that Stevens’ “David” is unleashing in a small town in New Mexico will not only ruin the game but potentially kill you.
10. Time To Hunt
Time to Hunt is a South Korean thriller who knows just what a stylistic record he’s playing in, unrelenting in his production of scenes where the guys fire big guns at each other in scarcely lit hollow halls. A group of four friends, including Parasite and Train to Busan Breakout Choi Woo-Shik, knock over a gambling house, catch a hefty bag of money and a package of even more lucrative hard-drives, and then find themselves assaulted by a ruthless contract killer (Park Hae-soo) who runs like the T-1000 and shoots like henchmen in a Michael Mann movie. There are dystopian facets of the world — protests are taking place in the streets, the police are fighting a tech-savvy attack on civilians, assault weapons are readily available to all prospective buyers — but they are all building a simmering environment and raising crippling pieces instead of unnecessary allegorical padding. Time to Hunt uses its elongated runtime to build sequences in a thoughtful way.
11. Suburra
This Italian-language neo-noir crime film, funded by Netflix and RAI, is based on the novel Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo of the same name. The plot is inspired by the true events of the Mafia Capital in 2011 concerning organized crime and politics in Rome. If you really want to get more into the plot, check out the 2017 Prequel TV series, Suburra: Blood on Rome, before or after seeing the flick. Set in 2008, the series looks at the circumstances that lead to what happened in the film. To date, there have been two seasons, with the third and final seasons scheduled to begin in 2020.
12. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
There’s something about Martin (Barry Keoghan), the living son of a man who died under the knife of the surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell). At the beginning of the spine-tingling Holy Deer, Steve stood up to be Martin’s father figure, left and troubled and bubbling with darkness. The friendship inevitably sours, and it is from there that director Yorgos Lanthimos, known for his bitter strains of magical realism, finds the basis for an ice-cold rumination of guilt and obligation. Farrell is blessed with unparalleled sophistication in his Sophie’s Decision, Nicole Kidman tests him in every pass, and Keoghan provides a performance that echoes Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. It’s a maddening and exhilarating moment in the film.
13. Molly’s Game
If you want your thrillers to be more fun than serious, Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game debut is a solid bet. One part poker movie, one part legal thriller, one part character drama, the film stars Jessica Chastain as a woman who becomes the subject of an FBI investigation after the underground poker empire she operates for Hollywood celebrities is revealed. The entire thing is based on a true story, and the film includes some extremely enjoyable poker scenes that have your blood pumping. It may not be as close as some other Sorkin’s material.
14. Velvet Buzzsaw
The easiest way to view Dan Gilroy’s mad Velvet Buzzsaw is to treat it as a slasher film in the art world. Instead of a masked madman creeping through a summer camp full of horny teens, it’s creepy sculpture rampaging through an art world full of selfish profiteers. The storyline is based on a group of art dealers who come across the work of a dead, criminally insane artist and discover that his art may be extremely valuable. However, proximity to art allows other art to come alive and destroy anyone who will want to make money off art rather than engage with it. Gilroy’s goals are very straightforward, but he never sounds like he’s preaching to the crowd because Velvet Buzzsaw is so much fun. It’s a film of art and business on its mind, but never at the cost of giving the viewer a nice time.
15. Small Crimes
It’s still a bit tricky to see your beloved Game of Thrones actresses in movies that don’t call them to fight dragons, wave axes, or at least wear any armor. As Joe Denton, a corrupt cop turned ex-con, Coster-Waldau plays yet another character with a warped moral compass, but he’s not part of a mythical story here. He’s yet another conniving dirtbag in director E.L. Katz’s Coen brothers, with a moral world. Although some of the plot specifics are confusing — Katz and co-writer Macon Blair skimp on the exhibition to the extent that some of the dialogue can sound incomprehensible — the feeling of Midwestern fear and Coster-Waldau’s patient, living-in performance make this one worth checking out. In spite of the absence of dragons.
