20 Best Thriller Movies on Netflix This Week
The best thriller movies on Netflix will drop you off in a futuristic setting, send you racing through the streets, or have you battling for your life in a remote area.
There are nearly too many white-knuckle watches on the streaming service to go through.
Here’s where we get involved! We’ve compiled a list of the top thrillers available on Netflix, ranging from timeless masterpieces to current blockbusters.
Great Best Thriller Movies on Netflix
We’ve compiled a list of the top Netflix thrillers below so that your next movie night doesn’t have to be terrifying. Plus, all of our selections are available for streaming in both the US and the UK.
1. Wind River
In Wind River, Taylor Sheridan employs the traditional framework of a police procedural to tell a story about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a pressing real-life issue that is sadly rarely covered by the media.
In the movie, Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a tracker for Fish and Wildlife, discovers the body of Natalie, an 18-year-old Native girl, frozen in the snow on Wyoming’s Wind River reservation.
Jane Banner, an FBI agent assigned to Elizabeth Olsen, shows up to assist in the investigation alongside Cory, who is troubled by the unresolved case of his teenage daughter, a Native girl who vanished years prior.
2. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Choosing which of the four Mission: Impossible movies to recommend to you is the most difficult task (really, just watch them all).
In the end, though, there’s nothing more exhilarating than witnessing Tom Cruise scale the world’s tallest building—the Burj Khalifa—using just one hand.
Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt and his team set out to track down a man who had the codes needed to launch a nuclear weapon in the fourth installment of the M:I franchise.
3. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore
Some of the best thrillers deal with everyday problems that ordinary people encounter rather than elaborate murder mysteries or large-scale heists.
That regular person in Melanie Lynskey’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is Ruth, a depressed nursing assistant having a bad day. She just wants her goddamn laptop and grandma’s silverware back after her house was broken into.
Ruth embarks on a vigilante mission to find her belongings and make amends, leading a series of violent shenanigans with the assistance of her neighbor Tony (a crazy Elijah Wood spitting a rattail).
4. Jaws
Jaws, a film directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1975, not only served as a blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster but is still a very scary and unsettling watch almost fifty years later.
The tale of a shark attack during a packed beach day in the summertime is enough to give anyone nightmares.
But the main reasons Jaws is still regarded as a suspense classic are Spielberg’s direction, Bill Butler’s camera work, and John Williams’s memorable score.
5. The Old Guard
The movie directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, which is based on the comic book by Greg Rucka, centers on Theron’s character Andy, and her group of ancient assassins who can quickly heal from severe wounds and pop bullets out of their bodies.
Along with Matthias Schoenaerts as Booker, Chiwetel Ejiofor as their former CIA boss Copley, an elderly gay couple named Joe and Nicky, and the newest member of the team, a young Marine named Nile who is only now learning about her regenerative abilities, round out the team.
A Big Pharma CEO ambushes the team after sending them on their most recent mission to steal their skills to profit from it, of course.
6. Eye For an Eye
Mario (Luis Tosar), the head nurse of an assisted living facility, is tasked with caring for an unexpected new patient in the Spanish dramatic thriller Eye For an Eye: a retired, notorious drug lord.
Due to his failing physical condition, Antonio (Xan Cejudo), who was just released from prison, would rather spend his last days in a nursing home than with his volatile sons, who have taken over the cartel business.
However, as Mario tends to Antonio, unexpected memories of an earlier incident surface, exposing the nurse’s covert plans for the drug lord. A film as dark as hell, Eye For an Eye deftly examines the lengths one will go to exact retribution, propelled by powerful performances.
7. Good Time
This is the movie for you if you’re the kind of person who enjoys thrillers that seem like unfathomably terrifying nightmares.
The audience is immediately thrust into the center of chaos as Robert Pattinson’s Connie and his brother Nick, played by Benny Safdie, carry out a bank robbery in the 2017 crime thriller from brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.
Things rapidly get worse; after eluding the police, Nick is detained and taken to Rikers Island, while Connie manages to get away.
8. The Irishman
For the first time since Heat in 1995, De Niro and Pacino are directing each other on screen! What more information is required? It might take some persuasion, though, to convince you to settle in for The Irishman’s enormous three and a half hours.
In actuality, Scorsese merits that amount of screen time with this expansive crime epic that masterfully explores the psychological effects of being both a witness and a participant in a life of crime.
In the film’s opening scene, an aging Robert De Niro plays hitman Frank Sheeran, who describes his life as a younger, computer-generated-aging hitman who worked with the mob, the corrupt Teamsters union, and union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).
9. Non-Stop
A thriller can be created by placing Liam Neeson in a difficult situation, most often one that involves the safety of bystanders and takes place in some kind of public transportation.
Everything is going great on his current flight until Bill receives a text on his personal Air Marshal phone from an unidentified passenger threatening to kill another passenger.
After learning that he is the primary target of the attack, Bill begins to doubt everyone he knows due to the twists in this fast-paced thriller. After watching this, get ready to completely reevaluate any future airline travel.
10. The Beguiled
There are moments when a man’s presence alone is enough to create a foreboding atmosphere. Colin Farrell plays a wounded Union soldier who becomes ill near a Confederate all-girls school in Sofia Coppola’s Gothic Civil War thriller The Beguiled.
Miss Farnsworth, Nicole Kidman’s headmistress, permits him to remain until his health improves, but as each girl, particularly Kirsten Dunst’s Miss Edwina Morrow, competes for the handsome soldier’s affection, a culture of sexual anxiety and jealousy spreads throughout the school.
The Beguiled rapidly builds to a frantic thrill ride filled with secrets, violence, and one particularly memorable dinner. Coppola gives us a classic line, which is most memorable: a furious Farrell yelling, “You vengeful bitches!”
11. Emily the Criminal
Aubrey Plaza, best known for her bizarre deadpan humor, fully inhabits a high-stress dramatic role in Emily the Criminal, which is a joy to watch.
She portrays Emily, an artist whose $70,000 in student loan debt and criminal record keep her from obtaining steady employment.
All the odds are against her, but then one of her coworkers sets her up with a side business involving credit card fraud, setting her on a new course toward financial success and danger.
12. The Woman in the Window
Should you enjoy thrillers that are extravagant and brimming with drama, allow me to present you to Joe Wright’s delightfully captivating The Woman in the Window.
This thriller, which is based on the same-titled A.J. Finn bestseller, stars Amy Adams as child psychologist Anna Fox, who suffers from severe agoraphobia that keeps her from leaving her Manhattan brownstone.
After downing copious amounts of wine and taking prescription drugs late at night, Anna feels she has seen a murder take place across the street. But Anna also starts to lose her sense of reality as the investigators start to doubt her sanity.
13. Prisoners
While any movie about kidnapping is going to be intense, Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners manages to capture an intensity that is extraordinarily powerful and echoes what any parent of a missing child would experience during an investigation.
Paul Dano is the first suspect after two young girls disappear; however, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki quickly releases Dano after failing to find any evidence.
Playing the father of one of the girls, Hugh Jackman, known for his explosive fury, decides to take the investigation into his own hands and abducts and brutally questions Dano’s character, Alex.
14. Triple Frontier
In a crime movie, nothing beats a strong ensemble, and Triple Frontier boasts one of the best in recent memory.
J.C. Chandor’s thriller stars Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, and Garrett Hedlund as five former Special Forces military operators.
The men, who believe their government is ignoring them, plan to join a drug cartel in a South American jungle to steal $75 million. However, when tensions grow and greed takes hold, things start to spiral out of control.
15. The Nice Guys
To be fair, The Nice Guys is more of a comedy than a thriller, but it’s still a great read if you want a good murder mystery and plenty of belly laughs.
Shane Black of Lethal Weapon delivers a delightful buddy cop comedy that centers on the unlikely partnership between a broken-hearted P.I. (played by the hilarious Ryan Gosling) and the violent muscle-for-hire (played by the endearing Russell Crowe).
The two fight and stumble their way through a bizarre maze of characters from 1970s Los Angeles. Finally, this humorous neo-noir slash erotic thriller throwback includes a superb performance by Kim Basinger.
16. The Guilty
Less is shown on screen, leaving our imaginations to fill in the most intense moments, which creates some of the sharpest tension.
This is the method used by Antoine Fuqua in The Guilty, an adaptation of the Danish film of the same name; most of the action takes place offscreen as the story takes place over a single day in a single setting.
17. The Fear Street Trilogy
Leigh Janiak is deserving of much greater recognition than what her Fear Street films have garnered. Her trio of retro teen horror thrillers honors and deftly reimagines genre conventions, chiefly by elevating queer and female characters to prominent roles.
The director’s three interconnected films span three decades and tell the story of a town under a curse, but each film has a unique genre aesthetic with plenty of gore and spine-tingling moments.
18. Intrusion
In this thriller about a home invasion, Meera, the therapist for Freida Pinto, and her husband Henry (Logan Marshall-Green), an architect, move from Boston to New Mexico, where they settle into a brand-new, contemporary house surrounded by stunning desert scenery.
The couple appears to be a picture-perfect pair, but one night their sense of regular safety is shaken when their home is broken into.
Other odd things happen, and then a group of masked invaders return and it happens again.
19. The Call
In 2019, Seo-yeon is returning to her childhood home following a visit with her sick and estranged mother. When she gets there, Young-sook, a distraught woman who appears to have dialed the wrong number, gives her a strange call.
However, after several more calls from the woman, Seo-yeon eventually learns that she and Young-sook share the same house, albeit not at the same time.
When Young-sook calls from 1999, twenty years ago, Seo-yeon quickly discovers that her destiny is linked to that of her new, enigmatic friend.
20. Obsessed
There are plenty of ways to pass an hour and forty-eight minutes, but few are more entertaining than witnessing Beyoncé hurl dishes, eject Idris Elba from her home and utter phrases like “I’m gonna wipe the floor with your skinny ass” in the middle of a fight scene.
An obsessed woman (Ali Larter) will stop at nothing to win over a man named Derek (Elba) in the incredibly schlocky erotic thriller Obsessed, which is a reimagining of Fatal Attraction.
Lisa in Larter’s film is obsessed with her boss to the point where she will stop at nothing to entice him, including disrobing in his car while only wearing her underwear and committing several other heinous crimes that I won’t reveal.