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35 Thrillers on Netflix That Will Get Your Heart Racing

best netflix thrillers
35 Great Thrillers to Stream on NetflixNetflix

Are you looking for a scary movie that won’t keep you up at night? Perhaps something with a mind-bending twist or a frightening plot without all the gore? Enter... the elusive thriller. This genre is perfect for when you want a bit of everything— drama, horror, action, and sometimes, a bit of comedy—wrapped into one bone-chilling film. Over the years, the genre has grown to be quite expansive, but a great thriller only needs three key elements: a twisted plot, an unnerving character, and enough mystery to keep you guessing.

If you’re looking to watch a thriller at your next movie night, we’ve got you covered. Below, we rounded up 35 of the best thrillers on Netflix for your streaming convenience. This list will check all your thrill-seeking boxes, with films such as Aubrey Plaza’s Emily the Criminal, Mila Kunis' Luckiest Girl Alive, Stephen King's Mr. Harrigan's Phone, and the chilling apocalyptic disaster Leave the World Behind. Enjoy, folks—just make sure not to watch any of these before bedtime.

Rebecca

Rebecca stars Lily James as a newlywed woman who visits her inlaws estate in England. Upon her arrival, she learns about her husband's first wife, Rebecca, who died years ago. Her husband may have moved on, but his family certainly has not.

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Leave the World Behind

In Leave the World Behind, a family's vacation on Long Island is cut short when another family knocks on their door. They claim there’s been a blackout, and the vacation house is theirs. As the world around them begins to fall apart, both camps have to rely on each other for safety.

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Society of the Snow

Society of the Snow is any frequent-flyer worst nightmare. Set in 1972, this film follows a Uruguayan rugby team whose flight to Chile crashes into the Andes. When the survivors realize they’re stranded, they take extreme measures to make it home.

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The Good Nurse

Jessica Chastain stars as Amy Loughren in The Good Nurse. When one of her colleagues is accused of murdering several of his patients, she’s hesitant to believe it. But when a formal investigation begins, Amy realizes her coworker might not be as innocent as he seems.

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The Gift

In The Gift, Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall star as Simon and Robyn—an ordinary married couple. One day, their marriage is turned upside down when they run into a man named Gordo, who claims to be an old friend of Simons. As Robyn begins to learn more about their relationship, she questions if her husband is who he says he is.

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Luckiest Girl Alive

Luckiest Girl Alive is based on Jessica Knoll’s best-selling novel of the same name. The story follows Ani, a successful journalist with a seemingly perfect life in New York City. Her world implodes when she’s asked to participate in a true-crime documentary based on a high school tragedy.

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The Stranger

In The Stranger, Mark—who works as an undercover cop—forms a close relationship with a murder suspect. He hopes to get a confession, but instead, Mark puts both their lives at risk while searching for the truth.

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Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak follows newlyweds Edith and Sir Thomas Sharpe. After their wedding, they move into Thomas’s family home in the English hillside. To Edith’s surprise, her new sister-in-law, Lady Lucille, lives there as well. Lucille suffers from haunting visions and says she can speak to the dead, which leads Edith to dig into their family’s twisted history.

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Emily The Criminal

In Emily The Criminal, Aubrey Plaza stars as a college graduate who embarks on a credit card scam to get out of debt—but the scheme proves to be more dangerous than she bargained for.

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Before I Wake

When a young boy admits that he's afraid to go to sleep, his guardians think it's just childhood nerves. But when a dead person appears in their home, they discover the boy's dreams and nightmares have the power to transform reality. Creepy!

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Mr Harrigan's Phone

We don't want to spoil too much here, but Mr Harrigan's Phone sees—yes, a mysterious phone—give a young boy named Craig the ability to communicate with the dead.

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Hypnotic

In Hypnotic, Kate Siegel, the queen of scary movies, plays a young woman who hires a hypnotist to quell her anxiety. Things take a dangerous turn when her hypnotist turns out to be a master manipulator.

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Intrusion

Intrusion is your classic home invasion nightmare. In the film, a couple's home is broken into, leaving the wife fearful of everyone around them. Who can you trust when everyone's a suspect?

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a Charlie Kaufman flick, which should give you an idea of what you're queuing up. Meaning: it's better to press play without knowing too much beforehand.

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The Devil All The Time

British actors Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland brush up on their Ohioan accents for this American gothic tale of a town haunted by its mistakes. Harry Potter star Harry Melling also excels in his role as an Evangelical preacher who pours spiders all over his head to prove his faith in God.

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The Guilty

Jake Gyllenhaal sitting in a chair and responding to a single 911 caller gave Netflix one of the most thrilling films of 2021. On top of the stressful conversation, an asthmatic Gyllenhaal is also blasting his inhaler at full force just to get through the night.

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The Platform

In a nightmarish scenario, residents of a strange facility known as “the Pit” are fed via a platform that is filled with food on top floors and slowly descends until the scraps reach those in bad favor toward the bottom. A commentary on wealth inequality, this Spanish film is as revolting as it is captivating.

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Army of Thieves

A prequel to Zombie-thriller Army of the Dead, Army of Thieves follows Matthias Schweighöfer’s expert safe-cracker on a grand heist with Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel, all while Earth is being overridden by the undead.

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The Beguiled

This Sophia Coppola flick combines the best of the thriller genre: the thread of danger, sexual tension, and an incomprehensible Nicole Kidman accent. Long live the genre. Set during the Civil War, an ailing soldier finds comfort in a school for women, but obviously, things get complex really quickly.

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Stowaway

You know how sometimes you go to space with two other people and everything is fine, and then all of a sudden, someone falls out of the roof of the ship because they were doing last minute maintenance and now y'all don't have enough oxygen for everyone to live? BUMMER.

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The Woman in the Window

Notoriously awful? Messy in scope? Sure. Those things are true. But also, The Woman in the Window is a psychological thriller that is so over the top and campy that it's impossible to stop watching. Watching Amy Adams navigate the fallout after witnessing a murder is intoxicating, especially as you decide whether or not she's a reliable witness.

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I Care a Lot

Somewhere between terrifying and hilarious lies I Care a Lot: the thriller starring Rosamund Pike as a legal caregiver who manipulates the judicial system to scam elderly people out of everything they own. Things are going great until she nabs someone with ties that bind a little more tightly than she's used to. The movie will literally have you asking if you're more comfortable with human trafficking or elder abuse, which is really a no-win situation. And yet, the film is so damn good.

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Bad Genius

Lori Loughlin? Child's play. In Bad Genius, a group of highly gifted students set up a college entrance exam scam that leads to higher and higher stakes the more successful they become. The 2017 Thai heist film (more! heist! films!) has a 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and is critically acclaimed, so flex on your film buff friends with that.

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See You Yesterday

You might have slept on this Spike Lee-produced film, but it's on Netflix and waiting on your binge. The 2019 thriller sees two science prodigies who are experimenting with time travel, but when one of their brothers ends up murdered by an officer, their experiment becomes more important than ever before.

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Gerald's Game

Directed by new horror master Mike Flanagan (the mind behind Doctor Sleep and The Haunting of Hill House), Esquire ranked Gerald's Game as one of the top 10 best Stephen King adaptations. It's the story of a woman whose husband dies suddenly of a heart attack but she's left handcuffed to the bed and must find a way to survive

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Fractured

This Netflix psychological thriller shows a family on a road trip for Thanksgiving. When his young daughter suffers an injury, Ray takes her and his wife to the nearest emergency room and waits as the two are taken to get a CT scan. However, the two disappear, and Ray becomes convinced that the hospital is hiding something.

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1922

1922 follows a farmer to Nebraska, where he sets on the path to write a confession for a murder from his past. The Netflix film is adapted from a Stephen King novella.

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Bird Box

Sandra Bullock, Sarah Paulson, Trevante Rhodes, and John Malkovich star in this dystopian thriller (and Netflix original film) about a woman who must travel blindfolded along with her children to safety as an unseen force stalks them on their journey.

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Cam

Madeline Brewer plays an enterprising camgirl who discovers that she's somehow been replicated in various videos that have been uploaded to her own website in this Internet-inspired horror thriller and Netflix original.

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The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino delivers an Agatha Christie-style mystery set in the American West just after the Civil War with a stellar cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

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The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino delivers an Agatha Christie-style mystery set in the American West just after the Civil War with a stellar cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

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I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

Lily (Ruth Wilson) is a live-in nurse who moves into the remote New England mansion owned by her patient, an elderly horror novelist who suffers from dementia. Soon Lily starts to question if the unsettling things that are taking place in this house came straight from one of her patient's books.

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The Perfection

The Perfection is absolutely bonkers, so when it comes to thrillers, it fits the bill perfectly. If you’re looking for unnerving twist and turns, you’re going to be hard pressed to find one with more than this film about two cellists vying for the top spot in a conservatory.

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Secret Obsession

Brenda Strong deserves one insane Netflix thriller a year, and Secret Obsession is her entry for 2019.

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Velvet Buzzsaw

This horror satire from Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy is a mix of The Square and Eyes of Laura Mars, with Jake Gyllenhaal starring as an art critic who discovers that the mysterious paintings by an unknown artist have supernatural abilities—and take their revenge on anyone attempting to profit off of them.

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