Image via Sony Pictures
Published May 17, 2026, 8:42 PM EDT
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
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The thriller genre is a landscape of extremes, producing some of cinema's most embarrassing failures alongside its most devastating achievements. At its worst, a suspense movie is just a jump scare and a twist you saw coming; at its best, it’s two hours of a director methodically dismantling your reality. This list of must-watch thriller movies leans toward the latter.
We’ve curated a mix of stone-cold classics and underrated psychological thrillers that deserve more credit. Whether you’re looking for movies with the best plot twists or a slow-burning crime drama that lingers long after the credits, these are the top-rated thrillers worth your time.
1 'Prisoners' (2013)
Image via Warner Bros.Long before he’d give us a Dune trilogy worthy of Frank Herbert’s novels, Denis Villeneuve delivered this breakout, his first American feature that just happens to be two and a half hours of sustained, suffocating dread. This dark mystery movie follows the search for two young girls who go missing from a suburban Pennsylvania neighborhood on Thanksgiving. Their fathers, desperate to get them home safely, go down starkly different paths. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman, absolutely feral in a way he rarely gets to be) takes matters into his own hands, while Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) recedes into helplessness beside him. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal, filled with nervous tics and suppressed fury) works the case, fighting against procedure and parental obstruction to find the girls before the clock runs out.
Roger Deakins shot this film in a grey, waterlogged palette that makes Pennsylvania look like the end of the world and turns Prisoners into one of the best suspense thrillers of the 2010s. The two performances from Jackman and Gyllenhaal that serve as its center are some of their respective best work, with Jackman in particular refusing to let you look away as his character does monstrous things for understandable reasons. The mystery's resolution is more subtle than you’d expect. Still awful, just in a way you won’t see coming.
2 'Gone Girl' (2014)
Image via 20th Century StudiosGillian Flynn wrote one of the nastiest novels about matrimony in recent memory, and David Fincher gave it the ice-cold on-screen treatment it deserved with this mid-aughts psychological thriller. When Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary, suspicion immediately turns to her husband Nick (Ben Affleck, doing his best “man who is spiritually one large Dunkin' iced coffee away from a complete breakdown” work). The media circus that follows is a merciless dissection of the true crime phenomenon, staged with a keen eye by a director who’s clearly having a blast reflecting some of humanity’s worst impulses back at us.
Pike’s performance — calculating and darkly resentful — redefined the on-screen femme fatale, and her "Cool Girl" monologue remains one of the most iconic readings in modern cinema history. With a haunting score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the final act is a must-watch descent into a couple's total implosion.
3 'Primal Fear' (1996)
Image via Paramount PicturesThis probably isn’t the Edward Norton thriller you’d expect to be on a list like this, but hear us out, because his work as Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear nearly broke film audiences' collective brain years before Fincher took a swing at him. The setup is conventional enough: a hotshot Chicago defense attorney named Martin Vail (Richard Gere) takes on the case of a shy, stuttering altar boy accused of brutally murdering an archbishop. Then Norton opens his mouth, and the movie stops pretending to be anything straightforward.
Norton earned an Academy Award nomination for his film debut (his literal debut, like first performance ever on screen). Gregory Hoblit directs with enough confidence to keep the courtroom thriller mechanics engaging without letting the procedural elements overshadow things. If you’re looking for movies with the best plot twists, this '90s gem is mandatory viewing.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz
Which Action Hero Would Be
Your Perfect Partner?
Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn't work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
FIND YOUR PARTNER →
01
You're dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
ASomeone who already has three contingency plans running and is calmly working through all of them. BSomeone who reads the terrain instinctively and knows exactly how to use it against the enemy. CSomeone who keeps their nerve and their sense of humour when everything is falling apart. DSomeone who knows the history of wherever we are and what we're walking into. ESomeone with the right contact, the right cover identity, and the right exit already arranged.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
AOn foot through terrain no one else would attempt — I move where vehicles can't follow. BOn a motorcycle, a cargo plane, or anything else that gets me there before I think too hard about it. CIn something that belongs to someone else — borrowed, stolen, or improvised under fire. DFirst class, with a cover identity and a gadget that does something I won't explain until it's needed. EBy whatever means are available — I've driven, flown, and once arrived by camel. The destination matters, not the method.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
You're pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
ADisappears into the environment, flanks them silently, and ends it before I've reloaded. BCracks a one-liner, grabs a fire extinguisher or a chair, and improvises something that somehow works. CProduces a gadget specifically designed for this exact scenario and uses it with infuriating precision. DPulls out a whip, a pistol, and an archaeological insight that somehow gets us out alive. ENeutralises the threat with maximum efficiency and minimum words — they were already three moves ahead.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
AA bar with terrible lighting, cold beer, and absolutely no questions about feelings. BThe finest restaurant in the city, a bottle of something expensive, and a conversation that is equal parts brilliant and exhausting. CA local dig site, a museum after hours, or a long story about why that particular artefact matters to human civilisation. DPizza. Bad TV. Falling asleep halfway through a movie neither of you were watching anyway. EA debrief that turns into three hours of contingency planning that somehow becomes the most fun you've had all week.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
APrecise and minimal — tell me what I need to know and nothing else. Every word has a cost. BDeadpan and dry — keeping it light keeps me sharp, even when everything is on fire. CEnthusiastic and slightly chaotic — but always with useful information buried somewhere in the noise. DCalm and controlled through an earpiece, with a plan that covers every variable I haven't thought of yet. EBarely at all — silence is a language and they speak it fluently.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
AInfiltrate their inner circle, learn everything, and dismantle them from inside out before they know we're there. BStudy the historical pattern — every villain of this type has a weakness written somewhere in the past. CGet them talking. The more they monologue, the more time I have to figure out how to beat them. DGo through them. Directly. With as much force as the terrain allows. EFind the one thing they haven't accounted for — there's always one thing — and make sure we're holding it.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Things go badly wrong and you're captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
ACome in alone, quietly, and get me out before anyone knows they were there. BHave already been working on the extraction since the moment I disappeared — the plan is already running. CCome in loud, come in fast, and worry about the collateral damage later — I'd do the same for them. DUse every resource, every contact, and bend every rule until I'm out — they don't leave people behind. ECharm their way in somehow, bluff through the hard part, and still manage to look good doing it.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn't replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn't know you had.
ATechnology that shouldn't exist yet and the training to use it under any conditions. BSurvival instinct so refined it borders on supernatural — and the scars to prove it's been tested. CKnowledge of history, language, and culture that makes them invaluable in places where force is useless. DThe ability to walk into any room in the world and immediately become the most trusted person in it. EStubbornness that refuses to accept a situation is hopeless — and the improvisational skill to back it up.
NEXT QUESTION →
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
AA partner who never fully switches off — always watching exits, always calculating threats, even at dinner. BA partner who gets the job done brilliantly but has the emotional availability of a locked filing cabinet. CA partner who makes everything ten times more complicated than it needs to be — but who always comes through. DA partner who gets personally attached to every relic, ruin, and artefact we encounter, which slows everything down. EA partner who was not built for this and knows it — but shows up anyway, every time, without being asked.
NEXT QUESTION →
10
It's the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
AOne line. Absolutely dry. Delivered like the world isn't ending. Then we move. BNothing said at all — just a look that means we both already know what has to happen. CA plan I don't fully understand that somehow accounts for everything, delivered in thirty seconds flat. DA piece of historical context that reframes the entire situation and tells us exactly what to do next. ESomeone who steps forward instead of back — because that's who they've always been.
REVEAL MY PARTNER →
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn't talk much, doesn't need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you've finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You'll never need to ask if he has your back. You'll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it'll take you a moment to remember what's actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You'll never be bored. You'll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar's eye and a brawler's instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn't matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you'll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren't so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you've finished reading the briefing, and the plan he's settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn't exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
4 'Martha Marcy May Marlene' (2011)
Image via Fox Searchlight PicturesSean Durkin's debut feature is one of the most unsettling portraits of cult psychology ever put to screen, and most of that is thanks to Elizabeth Olsen, who is magnetic and terrifying in equal measure here. Her Martha has just escaped a rural cult led by the charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes, at maximum menace) and is attempting to rebuild a recognizable life with her sister and brother-in-law. The film refuses a linear timeline, cutting between Martha's present and her past with the cult in a way that blurs both.
The horror here is all in the psyche, and it accumulates slowly. The way Patrick operates, stripping names and replacing them with invented ones, erasing selfhood incrementally, is so specific that it sometimes feels like you’re watching fact, not a work of fiction. The film’s ending will probably prove controversial, but then again, the best thrillers often do.
5 'Parasite' (2019)
Image via NEONBong Joon-ho's Palme d'Or and Best Picture winner has been written about so extensively at this point that it's easy to forget how flat-out shocking it was to sit in a theater in 2019 with zero context and watch it detonate. This social thriller follows the Kim family, subsisting in a flooding semi-basement, insinuating themselves one by one into the employ of the wealthy Parks through an escalating series of cons that are equal parts hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. Then the second act happens, and everything you thought the movie was doing turns out to be wrong.
The cast is phenomenal across the board, with Song Kang-ho's patriarch Ki-taek and Choi Woo-shik's son Ki-woo functioning as the story's moral anchors in a film that systematically destroys any clean notion of moral clarity. Bong uses class as his weapon and wields it like a scalpel. Don’t let the subtitles scare you off. You’ll only be cheating yourself of one of the best thrillers of the century.
6 'Shutter Island' (2010)
Image via Paramount PicturesA mind-bending psychological thriller set in a crumbling asylum off the coast of Massachusetts is not the kind of dramatic fare Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio usually teamed up for before Shutter Island came along to surprise both critics and diehard fans. DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, sent to Ashecliffe Hospital to investigate a patient's disappearance, who quickly discovers that nothing on the island, not even his own memories, is what it appears to be.
It's one of those thriller movies that rewards rewatches, with Scorsese planting so many clues in plain sight that your second viewing feels like a different movie entirely. Ben Kingsley does his best unsettling-authority-figure work, and Mark Ruffalo as Teddy's partner is almost too likable to ever fully trust. Some critics initially dismissed the film as a pulpy genre exercise, but even if it was that at the time, it’s since aged…spectacularly. The ending, in particular, is an emotional gut punch that puts a period on the question of whether Scorsese can master any genre. Yes. Yes, he can.
7 'Se7en' (1995)
Image via New Line CinemaBefore Fincher was destroying the institution of marriage, he was doing the same to the human capacity for cruelty in this relentlessly grimy '90s cult classic. The logline: Two detectives investigate a series of murders staged around the seven deadly sins in an unnamed city that exists in a perpetual state of rain and moral rot. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is world-weary, counting down his days to retirement; David Mills (Brad Pitt) is young and hotheaded, exactly the kind of person this case will break. The villain, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), doesn't appear until deep in the third act, but his presence saturates every frame before that.
The ending of Se7en has been picked apart more than almost any other in the genre, and for good reason: it's a stomach drop that strips any promise of justice or relief. If you don’t already know the meaning behind those Gwyneth Paltrow box memes, for the love of God, don’t Google it. Just experience one of the greatest serial killer movies ever made in its pure, intended form.
8 'Black Swan' (2010)
Image via Searchlight PicturesDarren Aronofsky's psychological horror-thriller about the cost of perfectionism is wrapped in ballet tulle, but at its heart, it's a horror movie that uses the female body as its primary site of terror. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman, who won a fully deserved Oscar) is a technically immaculate but emotionally rigid dancer cast as the lead in Swan Lake, slowly fracturing under the pressure of embodying both the White Swan and the Black Swan's opposing natures. Mila Kunis's Lily, loose-limbed and effortlessly sensual, functions as both competition and dark mirror.
Aronofsky is deeply interested in what happens to a person when the thing they've sacrificed everything for starts eating them alive. He keeps the camera so close to Nina for so long that when things start going wrong, you're too deep inside her perspective to trust your own eyes either. Portman's performance in the film's final sequence is the kind of thing you immediately try to dissect once the credits roll. Good luck with that.
9 'Bugonia' (2025)
Image via Focus FeaturesThe odd one out on this list, and arguably the most fun. Yorgos Lanthimos — yes, the Poor Things guy — directs this remake of a beloved 2003 Korean cult film, with a screenplay by Will Tracy, who spent years in the Succession writers' room and clearly never recovered. Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a beekeeper who works at a pharmaceutical company whose pesticides are, with exquisite irony, killing all the bees. After falling down an internet rabbit hole of the most spectacular kind, he becomes convinced the company's CEO is an alien planning to destroy Earth. His solution is to kidnap her. His cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) comes along.
The CEO is Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, who is now four films deep into her working relationship with Lanthimos and has clearly decided this is where she gets to do whatever she wants. Watching her maintain Michelle's icy corporate composure while two increasingly unhinged men hold her hostage in a basement is the film's primary pleasure. Plemons, for his part, makes Teddy's wounded conspiratorial logic almost make sense, which is its own kind of unsettling. It's more dark comedy than thriller, but the paranoia is genuine, and Tracy's satirical take on corporate power has real teeth. Strange, funny, and sneakily sad in ways no other film on this list is, it’s a palate refresher as far as thrillers go.
10 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' (2011)
Image via Sony Pictures ReleasingBy Dragon Tattoo, it's almost perversely impressive how many thrillers Fincher managed to claim as his own. His Scandi-noir adaptation of Stieg Larsson's best-selling Swedish crime novel is long and brutally cold, and it is also, undeniably, ideal for curling up under a blanket during a miserable winter. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is hired to investigate a decades-old disappearance within a deeply dysfunctional Swedish industrialist family, eventually joined by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a state-ward hacker who catalogues everything with a blank, unforgiving stare.
Mara's Lisbeth ranks among the best genre protagonists, a character who operates entirely outside the social norm and makes you root for her absolute refusal to apologize for it. The film's most harrowing scene is hard to sit through and serves a specific narrative purpose; it is not gratuitous, even when it feels like it might be. Reznor and Ross deliver their best Fincher collaboration here, which makes it all the more baffling how thoroughly the film underperformed at the box office.
English (US) ·