Best Thriller Movies on Netflix to Watch Right Now
Calibre, Limitless, Cam and all the best Netflix thrillers to stream into your eyeballs right now.
| | You’d have to be a slightly odd kind of person to say you don’t like thrillers. Nope! No thrills for me please, just lots of peace and quiet! Ok, peace and quiet is good too, but still. Thrillers.
Netflix is a wonderful haven of all sorts of content so we’ve scanned their offerings and picked out a list of the best thrillers the service has right now. We’ve tried to aim for a bit of a mix, so in this list you’ll find comedy thrillers, psychological thrillers, sci-fi thrillers and horror thrillers – hopefully something for everyone. Everyone who likes thrillers, obviously…
Calibre
Compact Brit thriller which is way better than it looks, and almost too stressful at points to be actually enjoyable, though it’s brilliant nonetheless. Jack Lowden and Martin McCann star as two city boys who go hunting in a remote part of Scotland.
After a tragic accident the two find themselves in a spiralling nightmare with the locals as they try to extricate themselves from the situation. Shades of folk horror surround this economical and quickly escalating thriller to great effect. Highly recommended.
Cam
This unusual psychological thriller takes place in the world of ‘cam girls’ – girls who make a living posting videos online that get tips and upvotes from viewer. Madeline Brewer plays Alice, a cam girl who goes by the handle of Lola_Lola who discovers that her account seems to have been hacked with videos appearing from what seems to be her doppleganger who is similutating extreme acts of violence against herself.
A fascinating, slightly trippy Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass thriller, this is one of the quirkiest titles on offer and well worth a look.
Green Room
There are no monsters or the supernatural in Green Room. Instead all monsters are replaced by vengeful neo-Nazis and the haunted house is replaced by a skinhead punk music club in the middle of nowhere in the Oregon woods, making this the ultimate horror-thriller.
The band The Aint Rights, led by bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) are locked in the green room of club after witnessing a murder and must fight their way out.
I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore
This Netflix original starring Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance where it premiered. It’s a black comedy thriller following Lynskey’s nursing assistant who’s on a mission with her slightly weird neighbour to confront the burglar who broke into her house and stole her laptop.
It’s a quest that leads them into a world of violence and crime in a quirky cool take on the ‘one crazy night’ subgenre.
The Invitation
Hell is other people in this excruciating dinner party-set thriller where a man (Logan Marshall Green) is invited over by his ex-wife (Tammy Blanchard) for the most uncomfortable social event ever. His he being paranoid, or are they really out to get him?
read more: The Invitation Review
It’s the journey as much as the resolution that’s the joy of this taut movie from Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama.
It Comes at Night
Surviving the apocalypse comes with a certain amount of questions. For starters, what do you do after you survive a global pandemic thanks to your secluded cabin in the woods…and then someone comes knocking? That’s the situation that the family consisting of Paul (Joel Edgerton), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) find themselves in in It Comes at Night.
When Paul and his family come across another family in the woods seeking shelter and water, they hesitantly welcome them in. But this soon proves to be a dangerous decision. Having guests in the real world is annoying enough to deal with and it only becomes harder when you suspect that any one of them could be sick with a highly-contagious, utterly fatal illness.
Limitless
Yes, there is quite the plot hole in this movie, but if you can overlook that, Limitless is a super-fun thriller which seems to carry the message ‘it’s ok to take drugs, as long as you never STOP taking drugs’. Morally dubious? Perhaps. Fun? Definitely!
read more: Limitless Series Premiere Review
Bradley Cooper plays a struggling writer who is given a mind enhancing drug which gives him an incredible memory for everything he’s ever seen or read and a better personality to boot. The trouble is, it doesn’t last that long. Oh and there are side effects. Aren’t there always. A break-neck, visually inventive film that’s a bit nonsense but highly enjoyable nonetheless.
Panic Room
Panic Room – both the movie and the concept of panic rooms themselves – seem like they should be an antidote to horror rather than the horror, itself. After all, what’s the “solution” to the horror of having your home invaded? Why, having a safe room in that home to retreat to, of course! The interesting thing about David Fincher’s Panic Room is that the panic room is where the real terror begins.
read more: The Best Haunted House Movies and TV Shows of All Time
Jodie Foster stars as recently divorced mother Meg Altman with Kristen Stewart starring as her daughter Sarah. When three burglars break into their four story home on the Upper West Side, Meg and Sarah retreat to the mysterious panic room built by the building’s previous occupants. While in there they must figure out a way to dispatch the intruders and survive the night.
Triple Frontier
Triple Frontier is one of Netflix’s biggest action-thriller hits…and all it takes is one quick glance at the cast to figure out why.
Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, and Pedro Pascal all star as former Special Operations soldiers in need of some cash following their military careers. As fate would have it, Santiago “Pope” Garcia (Isaac) works as a private military advisor in Colombia and comes to find out where a major drug lord is hiding his cash.
further reading: Triple Frontier Director Wants to Subvert Expectations
Pope and his friends then reunite for a spectacular South American heist job.
You Were Never Really Here
Lynne Ramsay’s intense, stripped back thriller is a character study of a hitman with depression and PTSD tasked with rescuing the daughter of a senator. Joaquin Phoenix gives a quiet, but powerhouse performance (he won best actor in Cannes were the film premiered) and he carries this brutal, but intimate portrait of a troubled man.
Looking for more Netflix suggestions? Here’s our pick of the best horror on Netflix.
And here are the best action movies Netflix has to offer.
Alec Bojalad is TV Editor at Den of Geek and TCA member. Read more of his stuff here. Follow him at his creatively-named Twitter handle @alecbojalad