The best thriller movies to watch on Netflix right now

When Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom) first moves into an L.A. apartment complex where people actually seem to care about their neighbors, any denizen of a major city will think they know where 1BR is going. And it is—for a little while. What’s interesting about writer-director David Marmor’s feature debut is the fact that, 45 minutes in, the film reaches what would be the natural end point of most horror movies about cults. Then it keeps going. Real-life details culled from ex-members’ accounts of life in groups like Scientology and NXIVM give the film an edgy ripped-from-the-headlines quality, as well as reinforcing the sheer L.A. of it all. If you enjoyed The Invitation, keep this one on your radar. [Katie Rife]

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A horror fantasy about the worst fears of parents and children, Before I Wake imagines a married couple, Jessie (Kate Bosworth) and Mark (Thomas Jane), trying to move on after their son’s death by taking in an 8-year-old orphan who’s gone from foster home to foster home under mysterious circumstances. Waiting for the new arrival, Mark screws grab bars to the tub wall (their boy drowned in the bath, which is basically every first-time parent’s nightmare) while Jessie takes down the family photos from the living room, enacting an unwittingly creepy ritual of preparation; skewed in a horror movie’s exposition, the things adults think will make kids safe seem conspiratorial and sick. But slyly, the film keeps turning viewer sympathies about who might be the bigger threat to whom. As the new foster parents soon discover, the kid, Cody (Room’s Jacob Tremblay), possesses a dangerous supernatural power, and when he falls asleep, his dreams haunt the house—projections of a small child’s manias (butterflies are Cody’s favorite subject) and uneasy thoughts about grown-ups and themselves. Often, Cody dreams of the dead son, Sean (Antonio Romero), the little boy’s face unnervingly frozen in the rictus of the only photo of him he’s seen. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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For years now, I’ve found it strange that there were only two or three good movies about the internet, the most important thing in the world. My wish for a film truthfully capturing all the connection, gratification, desperation, and despair of living online came true with this sophisticated thriller, in which a cam girl (Madeline Brewer, making a convincing argument for herself as a bona fide star) discovers that an automated doppelgänger has taken over her channel. There’s a lot to love here, from the low-key sex-positivity to the cringe comedy to the delectable supporting turn from former love witch Samantha Robinson. But I like Cam best as our most ruthlessly honest film about the nightmares of full-time freelancing. [Charles Bramesco]

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Not enough attention has been paid to The Clovehitch Killer, directed by first-timer Duncan Skiles, from a script by Cop Car co-screenwriter Christopher Ford, starring Dylan McDermott as a beloved small-town scoutmaster who may be a serial rapist and murderer. Lean On Pete’s Charlie Plummer plays the man’s son, in a story that unfolds in three distinct parts, each asking two unsettling questions: What if this seemingly upstanding, conservative Christian community leader is actually a dangerous criminal? And what is it about who he is and where he lives that might let him get away with something truly heinous? The Clovehitch Killer takes an unusually slow-paced and experimental approach to mystery and suspense, but it’s also a cogent critique of how “the culture wars” can provide a cover for someone whose sins are far beyond what his neighbors can imagine. [Noel Murray]

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James Wan’s previous film, Insidious, was a well-oiled shock machine, made in the spooky spirit of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. Insidious, however, was a mere dry run to The Conjuring, a shudder-inducing haunted-house movie built on the foundation of an alleged true story. Set in the early ’70s, an era Wan evokes through careful period detail and a heavy coat of “look, it’s the past” sepia, the film dives into the real-life case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, married paranormal investigators whose biggest claim to fame was the Amityville incident. The two are played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson and are introduced via an on-the-job prologue. (Wan gets bonus points for opening on the dead, fixed eyes of the world’s creepiest doll.) Following a thunderously portentous title card, which strains to position The Conjuring as this era’s answer to The Exorcist, the focus shifts to parents Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, who move their family of seven into a roomy Rhode Island farmhouse. The subsequent supernatural happenings—slammed doors, rearranged belongings, yanked limbs—are nothing audiences haven’t seen before, but Wan stages them for maximum heart-in-throat suspense. By tracking his camera through the entire home early on, he can play on viewers’ familiarity with the space. And he refuses to show a fearsome bedroom specter, opting instead to train his lens on the terrified preteen who can see it, pledging his allegiance to the power of suggestion. [A.A. Dowd]

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The main plot of The Conjuring 2 revolves around a real-life incident known as the Enfield Poltergeist, an extremely well-documented case of a supposed ghost who terrorized the Hodgson family of North London from 1977 to 1979 and was apparently a fan of the classics: knocking on walls, shaking beds, throwing furniture, and even the occasional haunted kid’s toy. And as malevolent spirits often do, it picked on one of the children in particular, 11-year-old Janet Hodgson (Madison Wolfe). Call it a collective delusion, or a desperate cry for attention from a disturbed child. Or call it what the movie very explicitly calls it: The Devil. With this installment, the Conjuring movies may have overtaken The Exorcist as the most Christian of horror franchises, taking place in a universe where the Catholic Church is the spiritual S.H.I.E.L.D. and demon hunters Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) its holy roller super-agents. [Katie Rife]

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It takes just two words superimposed over Gwyneth Paltrow’s sickly face to establish the mood of Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s clinically staged, chillingly plausible film about a devastating pandemic. Those words: “Day 2.” Whatever has happened to make Paltrow look so ill is already underway, and for most of the film, characters play a game of catch-up, always one step behind a disease that spreads via simple contact, takes hold quickly, and leaves little but bodies and unanswered questions in its wake.

In a cast that includes everyone from Marion Cotillard to Jude Law to Bryan Cranston, Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne play a few of those dedicated to figuring out how to stop a disease that has math and momentum on its side, to say nothing of misinformation and emotion. The film’s title has multiple meanings, referring both to the way the virus spreads and the way talk about the virus spreads, along with a mounting sense of panic that also gets passed from person to person. [Keith Phipps]

Let’s make something clear up front: Creep 2 is not a scary movie. Despite a plot that concerns a serial killer and the unsuspecting woman who answers his Craigslist ad and drives to his remote home in the woods, there is nothing about the film that would inspire much in the way of goosebumps. (A few small jump scares are played more for laughs than shrieks of fright.) Whereas the first Creep wrung tension from the familiar tricks of the found-footage style, the new one assumes the viewer already knows the situation with its homicidal subject, and doesn’t really try to generate chills from it. Instead, it’s a serial-killer midlife crisis: Within the first five minutes, Mark Duplass’ character has already desultorily cut someone’s throat, sat morosely as the blood congealed, and said, with heavy existential ennui straight to the camera he snuck into the house, “What’s happening to me?” A slasher sequel this is not. But for fans of the original who don’t mind the loss of scares, Creep 2 improves on the first film in nearly every way, from tone to dialogue to plot. Aesthetically, the two films are more or less identical, as director Patrick Brice maintains a straightforward functional approach to the material. As in the first, the protagonist is a filmmaker, or at least a wannabe filmmaker, thereby narratively justifying a steadier and more professional level of camerawork. This series isn’t all that pretty to look at, but as far as found-footage cinematography goes, it sits firmly in the upper tier. [Alex McLevy]

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This exemplary low-budget noir that benefits from director Mike Hodges’ steely malevolence and bone-dry sense of humor. In an unusual opening screen credit, Hodges shares authorship with veteran writer Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose script exposes the seedy world of mid-level British casinos while nursing a plot with many twisty convolutions. Sad-sack gamblers have always been a crime-genre staple, but Mayersberg’s simple change of perspective to the tuxedoed dealers across the table gives it a refreshing spin. The pallid, dead-eyed Clive Owen stars as a blocked writer who accepts a job as a casino croupier, manning the roulette wheel and blackjack table to earn his keep and gather material for a novel. An expert card sharp, he prides himself on his hard efficiency (40 spins an hour) and confesses to feeling “waves of elation” at watching suckers lose their money. As addicted in his own way as the degenerates he services, Owen gets lured into a robbery scheme by a seductive South African émigré (ER’s Alex Kingston) and her nefarious associates. Similar in manyways to David Mamet’s House Of Games, Croupier obsesses over the sleight-of-hand involved in the trade and how even a master “conjurer” can’t expect to stay on the right side of the odds forever. To add another layer of ingenuity, Owen’s omniscient narration is taken from his completed novel, providing a witty and bemused running commentary on his own misfortune. It may take several viewings to sort through all the tangled intricacies of the story, but Hodges and Mayersberg assure that every one is a sordid pleasure. [Scott Tobias]

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Transformation remains the primary subject of Gilligan’s work in the Breaking Bad-verse, and with El Camino, he’s once more taken the raw materials of unanswered questions and inessential franchise extension and turned them into intoxicatingly potent entertainment. The movie is more of a nail-biting crowd-pleaser than the relationship-based drama of the often-muted Better Call Saul; it’s also much more interested in reversing the polarity of its parent program. As he lays low and cobbles together an escape plan, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) slinks through the shadows of a hometown so impacted by his criminal activities that even his cozy childhood home bears traces of collateral damage wrought by the Heisenberg empire. It’s like time-lapse photography of Breaking Bad’s eggs being unscrambled: One flashy set piece finds Jesse tearing an apartment apart as if it were the negative image of Walt and him assembling their temporary meth lab in one of Vamonos Pest’s tented houses. Indelible pictures like this emerge, but El Camino keeps one foot planted in serialized television, another in cinematic one-offs. Of course, the filmmaking on Breaking Bad was plenty ambitious to start with, so it’s not like Gilligan, cinematographer Marshall Adams, and editor Skip Macdonald have great leaps to make in order to elevate their POV shots and whiplash time jumps to the level of something grander. [Erik Adams]

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Coming off of the positive critical buzz surrounding 2016’s Hush and Ouija: Origin Of Evil, Flanagan decided to re-team with Hush producer Netflix for a film adaptation of Gerald’s Game. It’s not an easy sell: Not only is King’s book structured in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to adapt—much of it takes place inside the mind of the main character, Jessie (Carla Gugino), as she lies handcuffed to a bed, alone and unable to escape, after her husband dies mid-kinky sex—but it deals with some very challenging themes of sexual abuse and the silencing of women. Thankfully, Flanagan’s film is up to the challenge, thanks in large part to Gugino and her compelling performance, which deftly expresses emotions from panic to grief to despair to rage, sometimes all at once. [Katie Rife]

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There’s something not quite right about David (Dan Stevens), the title character of Adam Wingard’s wickedly entertaining thriller The Guest. At a glance, he seems like the model man in uniform—a polite, soft-spoken war veteran, blessed with both the all-American good looks and aw-shucks charisma of Chris Evans’ heroic Steve Rogers. Arriving without notice on the doorstep of the Petersons, to “look after” the family of his fallen brother-in-arms, David ingratiates himself immediately: The bereaved parents (Sheila Kelley and Leland Orser) see a little of their slain son in this accommodating visitor, while their meek youngest child, Luke (Brendan Meyer), gains a protective, surrogate older brother. Only teenage daughter Anna (Maika Monroe, a terrific Final Girl) senses what the audience does about this mysterious soldier, though her judgment is quickly clouded by a rush of hormones, the only sensible response to such rock-hard abs and old-fashioned congeniality. Who but the most iron-willed could resist the charms of this dashing military man? [A.A. Dowd]

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Somewhere near the nexus of vanity and ambition lies the allure of the one-man show. What actor can resist the siren call of this challenge, the opportunity to detach the tether of support and become a lone pillar of performance? In the single-location, real-time suspense contraption The Guilty, it’s Jake Gyllenhaal who steps, at last, into the spotlight alone. He’s been cast as a disgraced cop chained to a desk, a phone, and a life-or-death crisis unfolding somewhere in the city beyond his view. A couple other actors pass briefly through his periphery, tossing off a line or two, and a few more serve as offscreen scene partners—we hear their voices on the other end of the line. But for most of its brisk 90 minutes, The Guilty is just Gyllenhaal, in tight close-up, constructing a movie out of sweat and tears alone: a glorified radio play of a thriller whose thrills are generated almost entirely through his reactions. [A.A. Dowd]

Quentin Tarantino’s stubbornly theatrical, three-hour-long snowed-in Western is a difficult movie by a director who’s not known for making them. Keeping action to a minimum up until the intermission, it then explodes into the nastiest, most gruesome and nihilistic violence of Tarantino’s career, before ending on a disquieting note of hope. This is the writer-director’s take on the promise of American ideals, even more so than Django Unchained, for which it was originally intended as a sequel. (Hence the protagonist, an anti-heroic black bounty hunter who, in the movie’s post-Civil War setting, is about the age Django would be.) Who could have guessed, in the days of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, that Tarantino would become an overtly political filmmaker? [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Though this tense home-invasion thriller involving sensory impairment went straight to Netflix, Mike Flanagan’s ruthlessly efficient Hush would play like gangbusters on the big screen. At just 81 minutes, the film wastes little time setting up its cat-and-mouse game, which pits a deaf novelist (Kate Siegel) against the psychopath stalking the perimeter of her secluded country home. The heroine’s impairment ratchets up the threat level (how can she fend off what she can’t hear?), and Hush toys with genre convention by unmasking the killer fairly quickly. Mostly, though, this is just an effectively straightforward exercise in suspense, one that further positions Flanagan—who also made the well-received Ouija prequel—as a filmmaker with a strong grasp on horror’s fundamentals. [A.A. Dowd]

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I Care A Lot writer-director J. Blakeson sees the plight of senior citizens ground beneath the wheels of bureaucracy as the jumping-off point for a black comedy of escalating aggression. The result is something one could facetiously, but accurately describe as I Love You Phillip Morris crossed with I Saw The Devil, with a little The Psychopath Test for added flavor. Rosamund Pike stars as Marla Grayson, a con artist and stone-cold sociopath who reins over what she thinks is the perfect scam: A professional guardianship service that specializes in watching over elderly people left in the care of the state. If you’re thinking, “but that sounds nice, actually,” that’s the point: Under the angelic cover of social work, Marla and her business/life partner Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) are bleeding their clients dry like vampires in tailored pantsuits. A legal guardian also has control of their ward’s assets, you see, and Marla and Fran’s game is to pay a corrupt doctor (Alicia Witt) to declare someone mentally incompetent and scuttle them off to a prison-like nursing facility before any distant relatives notice what’s happening. And if the person objects to Marla and Fran selling their house and draining their bank account? They’re not fit to make their own decisions. It’s right there on their chart. [Katie Rife]

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It sounds like the stuff of slumber parties, a cautionary tale to be whispered by flashlight or embellished over a flickering flame: Sleep with the wrong person, as the teenage heroine of It Follows does, and the nameless thing will come for you. On the outskirts of Detroit, Jay (Maika Monroe) finds herself the target of this relentless, shape-shifting entity—a curse passed on through sex with Hugh (Jake Weary), her handsome but mysterious new squeeze. As he explains, only the afflicted can see the specter, which will sometimes take the form of someone she knows. It will follow her, persistently but always at a walk, until she either falls into its clutches or passes the burden to a new sexual partner. “Never go anywhere with only one exit,” Hugh warns. There’s a primal, ingenious simplicity to that setup, one that writer-director David Robert Mitchell mines for one enormous scare after another. [A.A. Dowd]

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The Killer re-teams Fincher with Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, and it marks a seeming return to the type of dark thrillers on which he first cut his teeth to great success. Much like Fincher’s previous films, The Killer is meticulous in its assemblage. Kirk Baxter’s editing is assured, and the movie hums and throbs with a knotty energy that in its best moments abets its protagonist’s steely determination. Fincher augments Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s atonal score and some disconcerting urban sound design work from Ren Klyce with a roster of songs from The Smiths, which are featured as his assassin’s soundtrack of choice.

This technical mastery establishes and assures a baseline absorption in terms of a viewing experience. Whatever one thinks of his films, collectively and individually, it’s difficult to argue against the assertion that Fincher marries form and content in a highly thoughtful and usually compelling way. And his precision, his exacting sense of captured movement, here fits hand-in-glove with a character whose entire being is dictated by thoroughness. The film’s tagline, “Execution is everything,” delivers the obvious pun, but then works on another level for rib-nudging cineastes. [Brent Simon]

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In Andrew Dominik’s superb revisionist Western The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, he staged the last days of an iconoclastic gangster with a strong feeling for how his story could take root in the American imagination. Dominik’s follow-up, Killing Them Softly, makes that subtext text, wondering aloud what makes America America, and exploring the greed and avarice that cannot be extricated from the freedom and opportunity that’s supposed to make the country great. While it isn’t unusual for nasty little genre movies like Dominik’s stylish heist thriller to smuggle such themes under the surface, Killing Them Softly makes them startlingly explicit. All the criminal mayhem that composes it—an audacious robbery and the bloody retribution that follows—is mere prelude to a thesis statement, support for a grim assessment of the country on the eve of the 2008 Presidential election. [Scott Tobias]

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Though he won a permanent spot in the hearts of 10-year-old girls everywhere by penning the early ’90s tween romance favorite The Cutting Edge, screenwriter Tony Gilroy is best known as the scribe behind Matt Damon’s Bourne franchise. With his directorial debut, Michael Clayton, Gilroy shifts his focus from international espionage to corporate duplicity and sinister legal machinations, but retains an emotional palette rich in grays and black. Like Damon in the Bourne movies, the film’s protagonist, a high-powered legal clean-up man suffering from professional exhaustion and ennui, cuts himself off from his emotions and transforms himself into a hyper-efficient machine to keep from being destroyed by the darkness that surrounds him. In the title role, George Clooney tones down his movie star charisma and ebullience to play a man whose inner light was extinguished long ago, a victim of compromise, bad breaks, and lowered expectations. [Nathan Rabin]

The best murder mysteries start small and build outward, becoming less about the crime and more about the community where the crime took place, and the evolving psyches of the investigators. Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother starts with the fairly pathetic case of a mildly developmentally disabled adult accused of killing a promiscuous teenage girl from an uncaring family. Then the movie expands to take the measure of the small South Korean town where the murder took place, and of the woman who sifts through clues in order to learn the truth. The woman (played by the remarkable Kim Hye-Ja) is the mother of the accused, and seeking more than vindication for her boy. She brought this kid into the world and taught him how to conduct himself, and if he actually killed somebody, then maybe he’s merely the murder weapon, and she’s the culprit. [Noel Murray]

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Nightcrawler is well worth seeing just for Jake Gyllenhaal’s spectacularly creepy performance. Blinking as little as possible and speaking every line with robotic conviction, he makes Louis the sort of person who discovered early in life that it’s possible to get away with nearly anything so long as one couches one’s words in the right tone, except that he has a truly warped notion of what the right tone is. Even the most obnoxiously persistent door-to-door salesmen have nothing on this guy, who treats everybody he encounters as an obstacle to be politely mowed down with bland verbiage derived from corporate jargon. It’s a mesmerizing turn from an actor who, while frequently quite good, has never really had a breakout role until this one. Nightcrawler gave him a chance to make a lasting impression, and he takes full, fanatical advantage. [Mike D’Angelo]

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“I’m too cynical to be an artist,” muses a character at around the midpoint of Nocturnal Animals, the second feature by the fashion designer Tom Ford, perhaps winking to the audience of this arch and self-conscious film. For Nocturnal Animals takes dilettantism as a principle; Ford, who previously directed A Single Man, is a mimic and an unapologetic aesthete, and his liberal adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel Tony And Susan operates on the cusp of satire, playing with insincerity and indulgence as it conveys the workings of a reader’s imagination. Its three interrelated stories reflect and obscure one another in equal measure: a Los Angeles drama about the ennui and mores of the modish rich, focused on a gallery owner married to a nearly bankrupt businessman; a violent thriller about a family man seeking revenge against Texas hicks, which is actually a novel manuscript by the gallery owner’s estranged first husband; and a failed romance, set in the early years of the relationship between the former couple, childhood friends from Texas who reconnect in New York. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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In his feature-length debut, See You Yesterday, co-writer and director Stefon Bristol asks one of sci-fi’s most indulgent questions: If you had the power to travel through time, what would you go back and change? When 16-year-old science prodigy Claudette Walker (Eden Duncan-Smith)—affectionately referred to as CJ by her friends and family—and her best friend, Sebastian Thomas (Dante Crichlow), successfully build a pair of time-traveling backpacks, they don’t exactly have the luxury of securing riches or rubbing elbows with famous historical figures. Instead, they harness their newfound power in an attempt to save CJ’s older brother, who is murdered by the police on his way home from a party about a third of a way into the story. It’s a sobering twist on a classic premise, and such a dichotomy should result in tonal whiplash. Instead, See You Yesterday, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival before finding a home at Netflix, finds a striking-yet-natural balance between genre concept and a harsh reality that is achingly familiar to the people who have to navigate it every day. [Shannon Miller]

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Expanding the frenetic, panic-attack-inducing cinema of Good Time with novelistic ambition, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie created a thrilling study of one man’s compulsive self-destruction with this tragicomedy about a hustling Manhattan jewelry dealer (Adam Sandler, in the best performance of his career) who owes a fortune in gambling debts. Already on the brink of implosion, Sandler’s Howard Ratner can’t stop making bets, convinced that his financial (and personal) salvation will come by way of a grapefruit-size lump of Ethiopian black opal. He’s reckless, neurotic, self-deluding, an addict, equal parts sucker and scammer—and perhaps more like us than we’d care to admit. Packed with memorable supporting characters (and impressive turns from newcomers like Julia Fox, Keith Williams Richards, and NBA star Kevin Garnett, who plays himself), Uncut Gems establishes the Safdies as masters of anxious existential grit; their style of overlapping dialogue and tension feels like the unlikely fusion of Robert Altman and Abel Ferrara. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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There’s been a burst of satanic panic-themed horror films over the past few years. From The Devil’s Candy to A Dark Song to, well, Satanic Panic, these movies play on the tropes and concepts that first came to national consciousness during the panic of the ’80s, when a wave of sensationalist media and conservative conspiracy theorists started pushing the idea that secret Satan-worshipping cults throughout the country were preying on America’s youth. It was horseshit, of course, but the upside is that it’s inspired some damn fine horror. And We Summon The Darkness doesn’t just embrace that source material: It gives it a soft, warm kiss, right before swiftly flicking its wrist and using the knife hidden in its sleeve to open up a vein and release an arterial spray of blood. We Summon The Darkness is a solidly entertaining little horror-thriller with a sharp sense of humor and an effective balance of those two elements. Honestly, it’s just smarter than most of its brethren, and never feels like it’s having to flail or do something suspiciously over-the-top to hold your attention. If anything, it maintains an even keel where lesser horror-comedy attempts would descend into slapstick. In that sense, it borrows a page from Johnny Knoxville’s even-keeled reverend, keeping his malevolent rage in check despite walking into his kitchen and seeing a murdered police officer lying in a pile of blood. [Alex McLevy]

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