There are few finer things in life than a good thriller, and Netflix is crammed with them – some of the best Netflix movies are gripping mysteries, and there’s usually a good haul added each month among the new Netflix movies that appear on the streamer.
But as with trying to watch pretty much anything on any of the best streaming services these days, it can be hard to find and settle on something to watch. You want the tension of your evening to come from the story, not the endless scrolling.
So, I’ve picked out five thrillers on Netflix with near-universal critical acclaim to put straight on your watchlist.
The Call (2020)
RT Score: 100%
Age rating: TV-MA
Length: 112 minutes
Director: Lee Chung-hyun
This is the first movie from the director of Netflix’s super-stylish Ballerina – which has a far more interesting ending than any of the rest of the many (many) John Wick-alikes – and it’s a fascinating one. Kim Seo-yeon visits her ill mother in the middle of nowhere and finds an old phone… which rings. The caller is Oh Young-sook, and Seo-yeon realizes that Young-sook is calling her from 1999, when she lived in the same house. They bond over their shared troubles with their respective mothers and eventually realize they can work together to change events.
First, they combine to save Seo-yeon’s father from a tragic death, which improves her life massively but only makes Young-sook jealous of the benefits. Seo-yeon then realizes that Young-sook will be killed by her mother soon because her mother is convinced that she’s seen the future and Young-sook will cause the death of many people. They succeed in averting Young-sook’s death, but her mother may have been right… in Seo-yeon’s world, Young-sook has been a serial killer for 20 years, which she suddenly has to reckon with.
And that plot only takes us halfway through the movie! The movie becomes a battle between someone with knowledge of the past and someone who can affect it. It’s a wild ride.
Burning (2018)
RT Score: 95%
Age rating: Not rated (but think R rating)
Length: 148 minutes
Director: Lee Chang-dong
Our second Korean thriller, which was Oscar-nominated, is an entry in the “Something very bad is happening around me, and I don’t entirely understand it, but it’s going to end with bloody revenge” thriller sub-genre. It follows Jong-su, a young man who meets an old classmate, Hae-mi, and strikes up a friendship (and more) with her—so she asks him to feed her cat while she travels to Africa for a while.
When Hae-min returns, it’s with a man named Ben (played by the always-fantastic Steven Yeun), who is very wealthy, and it’s not very clear why. Hae-min seems distraught in moments and comfortable in others, but it’s clear something is off – and that goes double once Ben confides in Jong-su that his hobby is arson. But only of abandoned greenhouses, and he has one in mind right now.
When Jong-su gets a disturbing call from Hae-min’s phone, things fully unravel. It’s a slow-burn film full of ambiguity and an intentional lack of clarity to put you fully in Jong-su’s perspective, and it’ll sit with you long after it’s done.
The Novice (2021)
RT Score: 93%
Age rating: R
Length: 94 minutes
Director: Lauren Hadaway
This short and sharp movie about the obsessive pursuit of a dream does an incredible job of making you feel like you’re being pulled into someone’s long-running fever dream and it means I’ll now take an interest in any that director Lauren Hadaway and star Isabelle Fuhrmann do in the future.
Fuhrmann (who appeared in bonkers-but-great horror movie Orphan as a child, and then spectacularly returns in its prequel 13 years later) plays Alex just as she’s joining university. From the start, it’s clear that Alex is compelled to meet some level of high standards, and when she joins the rowing club, you get the sense that it’s not that she has any particular goal in mind; she just needs to be the best.
The movie explores her inability to balance this with friendships or really any kind of self-care and does an amazing job of putting you in the perspective of her hyperfocus while still leaving room for you to view this critically from the outside. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, but it’s so impactful and interesting in what it depicts, and well worth a watch for its 90-minute runtime.
Watch The Novice on Netflix now
Looper (2012)
RT Score: 93%
Age rating: R
Length: 119 minutes
Director: Ryan Johnson
Ryan Johnson might be the guy you go to for cozy mysteries with Knives Out and the Benoit Blanc movies now, but among his earlier movies, he leaned far deeper into full-on thriller territory. Brick is still one of my favorite movies of all time, but let’s talk Looper today: the movie in which Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is tasked with killing his own older self, played by Bruce Willis.
In the future, time travel is possible, and so naturally, criminals use it as a way to murder without consequences. It’s basically impossible to hide a body in the future, so people are sent back in time while alive to be killed by a ‘looper’ in the past, who is compensated for their trouble. The catch? The last person a looper kills will be their own future self, to close the loop.
When Joe’s future self appears, he’s not bound and helpless, as he’s supposed to be. Old Joe overpowers Regular Joe and escapes, and the movie then follows both characters with two potential timelines. It turns out that Old Joe has come back to the past to fix the fact that a crime boss killed his wife while attempting to ‘close his loop’, and he plans to do that with some good ol’ fashioned ‘taken him out while he’s a baby’ action. But (as we saw in The Call), changing the past isn’t always that simple.
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
RT Score: 92%
Age rating: R
Length: 102 minutes
Director: Carl Franklin
A period crime noir starring Denzel… do you need to read any further? Denzel plays Easy, a down-on-his-luck veteran who is introduced to a private investigator who needs help looking into the disappearance of a politician’s fiancée. She frequented the primarily-black dance halls, so Easy will have an easier time blending in to learn information that he can take back to the PI. He quickly discovers that the missing woman was said to involved with a ganster.
In classic noir fashion, things get twisty very quickly for multiple reasons. Easy might be the right man to learn what’s been going on via the social scene, but being a black man in 1948 Los Angeles means he’s targeted by the police or just people on the street. It’s such a great idea to expand the usual tangled web of PI intrigue and muddy motivations with the question of whether they’re acting suspicious around Easy simply because of who he is.
It’s a beautiful-looking movie, too, shot by the great Tak Fujimoto, who also shot moody masterpieces The Silence of the Lambs and The Sixth Sense.
Watch Devil in a Blue Dress on Netflix now
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matthew.bolton@futurenet.com (Matt Bolton)
