The best thrillers on Netflix right now

Have you ever imagined the perfect crime? In the opening moments of Spike Lee’s thriller Inside Man, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) promises the audience that he’s already pulled it off. And you have to give him credit because Russell and his men have really planned a heist so effectively that they manage to take hostages in a bank and successfully hide themselves among the civilians.

It falls to Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) to try to make sense of what Russell’s crew is doing. But the bank’s chairman, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), knows all too well what’s really happening. That’s why Case immediately hires a fixer, Madeline White (Jodie Foster), to prevent the bank’s darkest secret from emerging.

Although Red Dragon marks Anthony Hopkins’ third and final outing as Hannibal Lecter, it’s actually a prequel to the two films that came before it. Over a decade before the events of The Silence of the Lambs, FBI profiler Will Graham (Edward Norton) narrowly survives his first encounter with Lecter and arrests him.

However, Lecter reenters Will’s life when another serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes), proves to be far too difficult to profile on his own. Will reluctantly asks for Hannibal’s help, but the imprisoned Lecter is all too eager to send Dolarhyde information about Will that will place his family in danger.

I See You is the kind of thriller that presents multiple twists and turns, keeping viewers griveted and guessing throughout its entire runtime. Directed by Adam Randall, this slow-burning tale stars Jon Tenney as Detective Greg Harper. Tasked with investigating a missing person’s case, evidence of the crime starts piling up that points toward a series of abductions that took place nearly 15 years before.

But as Harper’s case continues to unfold, his grip on reality weakens, as strange events begin taking place in his home. You’ll start this film thinking one thing, only to be totally redirected multiple times throughout. And thanks to Randall’s assured direction, this is a film you won’t soon forget about.

Based on a Stephen King short story, Secret Window stars Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey, a down-on-his-luck mystery writer authoring another book in a rural homestead. One day, a mysterious man named John Shooter (John Turturro) arrives at Mort’s doorstep, claiming Rainey plagiarized one of Shooter’s own stories.

Denying the claim, Mort’s own life then takes a harrowing dive down a rabbit hole of horrors as Shooter begins terrorizing the hapless writer, whom he believes is reaping rewards from his intellectual property. A top-notch thriller with a compelling cast and story, Secret Window is one of the better King adaptations out there, and perhaps one of the most underrated, too.

In director Matt Reilly’s Interceptor, Elsa Pataky stars as Captain JJ Collins, the spearhead of an isolated nuclear missile facility smack-dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When the weapons hub falls under attack from enemy forces led by a former U.S. intelligence operative (Luke Bracey), Collins must use her military background and quick ingenuity to thwart the evildoers before they overrun the base. Interceptor is a decent example of a Netflix-backed action-thriller, driven by a kinetic pace that hits all the beats but misses here and there. A refreshing change of pace is seeing a woman in a role that would normally be helmed by Bruce Willis, and Pataky tackles her heroine character with muscle and grace.