8 Perfect Netflix Thriller Movies That Hooked Us in the First 5 Minutes

4 days ago 32

Published Oct 25, 2026, 2:49 PM EDT

Chris is a UK-based film and TV writer, editor and occasional filmmaker. For more than a decade, he has written news, reviews and features covering movies, television and pop culture. He has also made short films and worked in video production, giving him experience on both sides of the screen. Chris runs the We Love Movies More Than You TikTok channel and has a particular interest in overlooked and short-lived TV shows.

Thrillers can take many forms and are a fantastically pliable genre. You can be dropped into immediate danger or slowly pulled into a story of complex characters and tension. While Netflix’s original movies can range wildly from near-perfect to missed opportunity, its thrillers remain one of the streamer’s most consistent genres.

A good thriller should hook you quickly into the world it is presenting. A great thriller sustains that by escalating the danger or deepening the mystery, taking us to unexpected places. These eight near-perfect Netflix thrillers deliver on both with a captivating true-crime story, a love letter to B-movie action, and one based on Stephen King’s work that might be his most underrated adaptation.

1 'Don't Move' (2022)

Kelsey Asbille as Iris, wearing a pink sweater, standing on the edge of a cliff, and looking behind her in Netflix's Don't Move

A grieving mother, Iris (Kelsey Asbille), and a serial killer cross paths in this shockingly effective thriller from producer Sam Raimi. Returning to the place her son died, Iris wants her pain to end, yet a chance encounter with the seemingly kind-hearted Richard (Finn Wittrock) forces her to fight for her life after she’s injected with a slow-acting drug that will render her completely unable to move in 20 minutes. Being pursued through the woods by a murderer is bad enough, but attempting to outrun or hide as paralysis sets in gives Don’t Move a fiendishly cruel ticking clock.

As Iris steadily succumbs, everyday things like an ant’s nest or a recklessly wielded lawnmower become nerve-shredding ordeals, but each new obstacle she faces only fuels her restored need to survive. Directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto turn what could have been a cheap gimmick into an inventive and relentlessly tense thriller.

2 'Woman of the Hour' (2023)

Anna Kendrick sitting on the set of the Dating Game as Daniel Zovatto looms over her on the poster for Woman of the Hour.

An active serial killer appearing on a popular dating show in the 1970s might sound like fiction, but Woman of the Hour is based on a true story. Anna Kendrick stars and makes an impressive directorial debut that immediately sets the tone, introducing serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) as he photographs his soon-to-be victim. The tense and uncomfortable scene shows how Alcala’s apparent charm was the ultimate disguise for his true manipulative nature.

Kendrick stars as actress Sheryl Bradshaw, who begrudgingly accepts a spot on The Dating Game at her agent’s insistence. As the game progresses, she builds a rapport with bachelor number 3, Rodney Alcala. Dating shows usually come with an unavoidable forced-fun vibe. Sheryl sees him as charming, but we’ve seen brutal windows into his violent crimes, which creates a sinking dread as we watch her steadily grow to like someone we know is dangerous.

3 'The Guilty' (2021)

Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe looking in the mirror in The Guilty 2021

Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the brilliant Danish film of the same name is a pressure cooker of tension contained in a single location. Stressed-out LAPD call center dispatcher Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is struggling with the aftermath of a recent on-the-job incident when he takes a call from a distraught woman (voiced by Riley Keough) who claims to have been abducted. As Joe grows increasingly desperate to find her, his need to control the situation leads him down a spiral where he emotionally unravels.

The Guilty is an incredibly efficient thriller that skillfully uses its minimal location to trap both Joe and the audience in a high-stress atmosphere. Gyllenhaal is in excellent form as the flawed, volatile Joe, who keeps making the same impulsive decisions that led to his reassignment. The original might still be the definitive version, but the tightly wound remake quickly grabs hold and rarely lets go.

4 'Wheelman' (2017)

Frank Grillo pointing a gun at someone off screen from his car in Wheelman

Frank Grillo stars as the unnamed titular Wheelman in this underrated action-thriller that is a near-perfect B-movie throwback. Grillo’s getaway driver has a riotous night when a standard robbery is interrupted by an ominous phone call telling him that he’s about to be double-crossed by the crime organization he works for. Wheelman doesn’t win any prizes for its plot, but its execution is what earns its place on this list.

The majority of the film is set inside the car; we rarely stray from its interior, creating a nearly overwhelming immediacy by putting us in the thick of the action, often to claustrophobic effect. As he tries to keep his family safe and survive a night filled with attacks from angry mobsters and motorcycle assassins, Grillo tears through the streets of Boston looking for answers. Running for a brisk 82 minutes, Wheelman is all thriller and no filler, and it barely pauses for breath.

5 '1922' (2017)

Thomas Jane as Wilfred James looking down in 1922

Director Zak Hilditch’s absorbing adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, 1922, might lean toward horror, but beneath the dread-fueled nightmare, it's a disturbing psychological thriller. Thomas Jane gives a career-best performance as farmer Wilfred James, who hatches a plan to murder his wife (Molly Parker) after she inherits the means to leave for a better life. He convinces his son to aid in his dark deed, and the resulting crime slowly eats away at their lives and the place they once called home.

Mike Flanagan has partly cornered the market on Stephen King adaptations, but Hilditch (We Bury The Dead) proves equally creative, finding suspense in the mundane and the torturous horror of a guilty conscience. The home Wilfred so desperately wanted to remain in becomes a dilapidated husk, and the increasingly gruesome visions conspire to drive him to a place beyond madness. Perfectly combining the psychological with the supernatural, 1922 is perhaps one of King’s most underrated adaptations.

6 'Calibre' (2018)

Jack Lowden as Vaughn and Martin McCann as Marcus having an argument in the woods in Calibre

Before joining Slow Horses, Jack Lowden starred alongside Martin McCann in Calibre, a haunting rural thriller and striking debut from director Matt Palmer. Childhood friends Vaughn (Lowden), a soon-to-be father, and reckless Marcus (Martin McCann) go on a weekend hunting trip that results in the deaths of two locals. Having already met some of the villagers, they can’t simply vanish, so the fractured friends are forced to spend time among the community that will soon be looking for two missing members.

Calibre is all about creating unhealthy amounts of atmosphere and quiet unease. Vaughn becomes riddled with guilt, making him a liability, while Marcus desperately tries to conceal what they’ve done, and his misguided attempts to control things only make a bad situation infinitely worse. Every interaction with the villagers becomes tense, with simple exchanges carrying the fear of discovery. Palmer steadily builds the pressure to devastating effect in an early Netflix original that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

7 'Rebel Ridge' (2023)

A collage of the cast posing in character with weapons on the poster for Rebel Ridge.

After the brutal thrillers Blue Ruin and Green Room, director Jeremy Saulnier tries out a different approach with Rebel Ridge. Former Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) has his trip to bail his cousin out of jail in a small Louisiana town violently interrupted when he’s run off the road by the corrupt local police. With his money seized and his attempts at justice going nowhere with the chief of police (gleefully played by Don Johnson), Terry quickly realizes that the rot runs deep in this town.

Rebel Ridge is a sharply crafted thriller full of social commentary on police corruption and abuse of power. Saulnier uses the impressively staged action sparingly, as the film has no desire to be the next John Wick with an impossibly high body count. Pierre delivers a commanding performance as Terry, restrained yet fully capable of unleashing hell at any time. That restraint makes for a grounded character and a welcome change of pace. An intelligent thriller full of twists and turns, Rebel Ridge is one of the most enjoyable Netflix original movies of all time.

8 'The Stranger' (2022)

as Mark Frame and Henry Teague talking to each other in The Stranger (2022)

Thomas M. Wright's masterful thriller follows undercover cop Mark (Joel Edgerton) as he befriends drifter Henry Teague (Sean Harris) to earn his trust, hoping to find answers to a long-unsolved murder. When we meet Henry on a late-night bus, he’s a guarded man of little conversation, clearly troubled and desperate. Yet the more Mark gets to know him, the harder it becomes to maintain their manufactured friendship as the weight of the pretense slowly breaks Mark in ways he couldn't have foreseen.

The Stranger is an unflinching character study that blurs the ethical line between friendship and deception — and thrives on that moral ambiguity. Henry is an unpredictable force, and Mark is relentlessly driven; this makes even the quieter scenes feel anxiety-inducing, with Harris and Edgerton delivering richly layered performances. Despite its critical acclaim, The Stranger is another near-perfect Netflix thriller that was largely overlooked by audiences and is ripe for rediscovery.