10 Most Thrilling Documentaries of All Time

Documentaries shouldn’t always try to be entertaining in the same way a feature film might be entertaining, but it does honestly depend on what it’s about. If something isn’t too high-stakes, or the subject doesn’t involve a great number of genuinely tragic events, then maybe tackling it in a way that proves engrossing is okay. In the right hands, something heavy-going might also be made almost entertaining without that approach feeling disrespectful.

Related to all that, these are some of the most thrilling documentaries ever made, standing out for the way they’re unpredictable, generally fast-paced, and always interesting to watch. Most of them are about the kinds of things you’d expect drama and/or thriller movies to be about, and a few even blur the line between the documentary format and that of a feature film in surprising and overall compelling ways.

10

‘Touching the Void’ (2003)

Image via Pathé Distribution

Touching the Void is one of a handful of sports-related documentaries worth mentioning for present purposes, with the sport (of sorts) being mountaineering. The focus is on mountaineering at first, at least, but the story here does shift into being one more concerned with survival, with Joe Simpson and Simon Yates both recounting how they nearly perished in the Peruvian Andes after climbing the West Face of Siula Grande.

There are plenty of dramatizations here, which ensures Touching the Void manages to function as something close to a traditional drama and a documentary at the same time. You could almost liken it to something like The Revenant, because even though Touching the Void isn’t as violent, visceral, or deadly, it’s similarly cold and suspenseful throughout. You’re unlikely to find anyone calling it an easy watch, but might well be similarly hard-pressed to find someone willing to suggest it’s anything other than very engaging.

9

‘Shirkers’ (2018)

Image via Netflix

Shirkers is here partly because it’s about the making of an independent thriller that happened about two decades earlier that was never finished, because the person who had the footage mysteriously disappeared. Years later, the footage did resurface, and there was a whole story behind that loss and recovery that proved potentially more thrilling and unpredictable than the intended film itself.

So, Shirkers, the documentary, ends up being about that story, all the while still managing to use some of the footage that was originally shot back in the early 1990s. Surprising, emotional, and thought-provoking places are gone to quite effortlessly throughout the whole thing, making it easily one of the most underrated documentaries on Netflix (and there are arguably too many, but Shirkers is one that really stands out from that whole crowd).

8

‘The Nightmare’ (2015)

Image via Gravitas Ventures

Much of The Nightmare feels more like a traditional horror movie than a true documentary, or it’s at least fair to say that the movie rides the line between documentary and feature film. The main topic is sleep paralysis, and part of The Nightmare try to give you the experience of having sleep paralysis if you’re someone who’s lucky enough to not know what it feels like in reality.

There’s probably a more scientific or informative way to approach the subject, and look into why people see such horrific imagery when they’re going through sleep paralysis, but this more visceral/emotional tackling of the topic is engaging. And it does mean The Nightmare stays pretty tense as a viewing experience throughout, being one of those rare horror documentaries that’s about something besides just other works of horror.

7

‘The Rescue’ (2021)

Few films, documentary or otherwise, are as difficult to watch as The Rescue, if you’re someone who tends to have a fear of water, claustrophobia, darkness, or all of the above. It’s about the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, and given that it happened fairly recently, and was a big news story at the time, you’ll probably be aware of how the mission turned out before watching The Rescue. It’s unavoidable a lot of the time, but not necessarily detrimental to finding something suspenseful.

Like, here, knowing the outcome does very little to change how intense diving back into the whole story feels. The Rescue finds genuinely cinematic ways to recap and visualize what the whole rescue process involved, doing so in a way that manages to be a whole lot more gripping and visceral than the bigger-budgeted 2022 film Thirteen Lives, which was about the same event, but done as a feature film (so without documentary elements).

6

‘Jackass Forever’ (2022)

Image via Paramount Pictures

As it’s part of the Jackass series, which spans both TV and film, Jackass Forever really isn’t a documentary in the traditional sense, though it does “document” a variety of things, in a way. Those things mostly involve incredibly dangerous stunts performed by a group of once-young men who, by the time of Jackass Forever, aren’t really all that young anymore.

That makes what they do here feel all the more nerve-wracking, compared to the already intense stunts performed and extreme pranks pulled in the pre-existing entries in the Jackass series. There’s a desire to escalate things while members of the core group aren’t quite as sturdy or as able to shrug off injuries as they might’ve been some 20+ years earlier (some younger members join the team, to mitigate this somewhat, but you do still have people pushing 50 in this movie doing some absolutely nauseating things).

5

‘Big River Man’ (2009)

Image via Lightshow Pictures

This one’s underrated, and doesn’t feel that hard to sell to the untold number of people who’ve never heard of it. Big Man River is about a man who wants to swim more than 3000 miles, covering the entire length of the Amazon River. He attempts to do so over the span of about two months, and the documentary shows his efforts to prepare and then carry it out.

Martin Strel is an undeniably compelling figure to follow throughout, and he makes Big Man River a great character study, because he’s a combination of odd and truly admirable (regarding his determination). It’s not only tense or dramatic, because the tone of Big Man River also ensures it’s weirdly funny – and quite quirky – a good deal of the time, yet there is still a certain amount of terror and unease with the sheer overwhelming nature of the task that’s tackled here.

4

‘The Thin Blue Line’ (1988)

Image via Miramax Films

You’ve got too many crime documentaries out there, in all honesty, and most of them made in the past decade or so don’t really hold a candle to The Thin Blue Line. This one does involve a murder case at its center, so calling it “thrilling” might sound a bit tacky, but there is a certain cinematic edge to this film, and the score (by Philip Glass) contributes to this feeling quite heavily.

It’s not so much that it’s trying to be exciting, but more than The Thin Blue Line ends up being remarkably engrossing and successful at staying tense throughout. Plenty of other documentaries Errol Morris has directed over the years deserve attention, too, but The Thin Blue Line is his most approachable and compelling, and deservedly the one he’s most well known for making.

3

‘American Animals’ (2018)

Image via The Orchard

Of all the movies here, American Animals is the one that feels least like a documentary. It’s referred to as a crime/drama/documentary on Letterboxd, but it doesn’t have that documentary label on IMDb. It’s still being counted as one here, though, since despite having actors throughout (including recognizable faces like Evan Peters and Barry Keoghan), there are also interview segments with people who were involved in the actual events.

The event in question was the Transylvania University book heist, and those involved recount what happened while extensive dramatizations make it all more cinematic. Bart Layton does marry documentary and more traditional filmmaking very well here, and it’s a logical mid-point between another film of his that’s more of a straightforward documentary (more on that shortly), and a later film of his, Crime 101, which was an entirely normal/cinematic heist movie without documentary elements.

2

‘Free Solo’ (2018)

Image via National Geographic Documentary Films

Before directing The Rescue, the former husband-wife duo of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi directed Free Solo, which is similarly tense, but in a very different way. The contrast is obvious, since The Rescue was about performing an underwater rescue, while Free Solo is – to put it bluntly – about going up, specifically focusing on Alex Honnold and his attempts to climb El Capitan, a 3000-foot-high rock wall in Yosemite National Park.

Honnold also aspires to do it as a free solo climb, which is rock climbing but without protective gear or ropes. So, obviously, a documentary about a guy trying to climb that high with so little is going to be stomach-churning. It is that, in the best of ways, being so effective as a thriller of sorts, and a depiction of something so few people have ever felt – or will ever feel – a genuine desire to do.

1

‘The Imposter’ (2012)

Image via Picturehouse Entertainment

Back to Bart Layton, before he directed American Animals, he helmed The Imposter, which is easily one of the best documentaries of the entire 2010s, and it honestly might well be the most suspenseful documentary film of all time, too. It’s hard to talk about without ruining things, but broadly, it’s about the tragic disappearance of a 13-year-old boy, and then, um, an unusual discovery made several years later.

Actually, The Imposter is the sort of thing where you might know half the story, but you’ll still likely be surprised by the second half of the story. Or, if you know 75% of the story, there are things in the final 25% that could still catch you off guard. What it has to say, and what it explores, is undeniably riveting and unsettling, with it putting a good many actual cinematic/non-documentary thrillers (hell, even Layton’s generally pretty good Crime 101) to shame.