While most film genres are pretty easily definable, the thriller is harder to pin down. It must have suspense and tension, but it’s often just a tone that is spliced into other genres. You can have political thrillers, erotic thrillers, psychological thrillers, legal thrillers, and on and on. For me, a pure thriller must be relentless. Once things kick into gear, it should be an unending and exhausting ride.
There are lots of great movies that have thrilling scenes, but aren’t thrillers. Michael working up the nerve to kill Sollozzo in The Godfather, the bank robbery in Heat, the T-1000 showing up to Sarah Connor’s psych ward, and Alfred Molina’s drug den in Boogie Nights are all great examples of what I want THE WHOLE MOVIE to be like. What I love about thrillers is that we’ve gotten so much better at building tension in a scene with each decade that passes (sorry Hitchcock).
Take the scene in 1972’s The Godfather I just mentioned. It’s memorable, but it also goes surprisingly according to plan. Nowadays, writers would have the police chief also get up to use the bathroom, and have the hidden gun not be there at all. Thrillers should constantly be putting characters we care about into unwinnable scenarios…the tension overwhelming us until they somehow make it to the next scene’s problem. TV shows have excelled at this. Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire and Fargo are all at their best when they are pure thrillers. So lets take a look at thirty three of the most intense thrillers of the past half century (in chronological order) to see how the genre has evolved over time.
1. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
This is a chronological list, but we’re skipping all the groundbreaking stuff Alfred Hitchcock did in the 50s. It’s all very well covered on every other janky internet list of thrillers, and it honestly feels like pandering for me to say they’re still intense to me today. Hitchcock was decades ahead of the competition, but everybody studied him religiously and eventually caught up. Roman Polanski was one of the first to do so…this film also feels way ahead of its time. This is much more of a slow burn thriller than I usually like, but the premise is too classic to ignore: a paranoid pregnant woman begins to think everyone in her apartment building is part of a satanic cult that wants her baby. The most frustrating part of this movie is that we’re given too much information…we’re not left in the dark with Mia Farrow. Right away we see that she’s right, and they don’t even hide from us that her husband is in on the scheme. The twist ending of why these people are actually interested in her baby is amazing, but it’s also something you already know before ever watching because of its place in pop culture. I do have trouble praising this movie, though, because Polanski is a real fucking creep. and also Farrow seems to have been seriously taken advantage of throughout the filming. Polanski’s camera uncomfortably leers over her for long stretches, and at one point he made her walk into actual oncoming traffic just to get a shot. The fragility and mental anguish that feels so raw and makes this so memorable can’t just be acting…her then husband Frank Sinatra (a dirtbag) served her divorce papers ON SET after she went against his wishes and accepted the role. She tried to leave the film, but Polanski promised her she would be nominated for an Oscar to get her to stay. She wasn’t, but her astonishing performance in this is what makes it all work.
2. Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Robert Redford plays a nerdy CIA researcher in New York, where he looks for secret messages hidden in translated texts. He uncovers something he shouldn’t, everyone in his office is killed while he’s out picking up lunch, and then he has to go on the run, not knowing which of his CIA contacts he can actually trust. It’s a great set up…the one CIA agent who is usually stuck behind a desk reading is forced into the field, going up against deadly assassins led by the amazing Max von Sydow. Redford is pretty wildly miscast in this (he’s far too handsome and charming, it’s hard to believe him as a Q when he’s clearly James Bond), but it still works because of how slick and modern it feels. Director Sydney Pollack had a great understanding of how to build tension with silence. There’s an amazing scene where von Sydow confronts Redford, not to kill him, but to give him advice on how to stay alive. Von Sydow is amused by all the cat and mouse games…to him it’s just business. I’m not big on political thrillers, but I don’t really consider this in the same category as All the President’s Men or The Manchurian Candidate. Those are slow burns leading to a big reveal of a political cover-up. This is much closer to the first Mission:Impossible or The Bourne Identity, but with a main character who isn’t lucky enough to be Ethan Hunt or to remember he himself is also an assassin. It doesn’t really matter to me who is trying to kill Redford, or what they’re hoping to cover up by doing so. The thrills are in just watching him try to survive and figure out who he can confide in.
3. Alien (1979)
This one definitely falls more into the horror category, but I figure it’s a good excuse to discuss the differences between the two genres. A thriller is stressing you out with a tense situation, while a horror movie is trying to frighten you with chilling moments and jump scares. Alien bounces back and forth between the two, while John Carpenter’s The Thing is actually much more of a straight thriller. Kurt Russell knows that he can’t trust anyone, leading to the blood test scene, the most tension-filled part of the movie. But in Alien, Ripley has no idea there is a mole in her crew that’s only loyal to the company. It’s scary when Ash reveals himself as an android, but it could have been thrilling too with more build up of Ripley figuring it out. Once Ash has been dealt with, and the rest of the crew has been killed, it’s just Ripley and the alien, and this movie does finally become a full on thriller. A race against the clock as she arms the detonator, tries to escape but runs into the alien, then realizes she can’t disarm the bomb. Jaws is only thrilling when the characters enter the ocean, but Ripley is stuck in freaking SPACE with this killing machine…it’s naturally way more intense. There will be a couple more set in space on this list, because it provides such a great setting for thrillers.
4. Blue Velvet (1986)
David Lynch has all the makings of a classic thriller in this movie, but it is so off-putting and bizarre (Lynchian) that it doesn’t immediately come to mind. Frequent Lynch muse Kyle MacLachlan finds a severed ear on a walk home, and decides to figure out who it belongs to. This offbeat noir plot leads him to follow a mysterious and attractive lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) who might know something. He sneaks into her place, equally hoping to get a clue and also watch her change. Surprisingly, she finds him, but instead of being scared by his intrusion, she’s aroused. It’s a teenage boy’s misguided fantasy dialed up to 11, but then things take a very dark turn when there’s a knock at the door. MacLachlan hides in the closet and watches in horror as Dennis Hopper steamrolls into his life. Hopper’s character Frank Booth is one of the most frightening I’ve ever seen…he’s a sadomasochist who disturbingly chants “baby wants to fuck,” he wants you to shame him but becomes violent when you look at him, and is addicted to inhaling drugs through a creepy gas mask. When someone like this is introduced in a movie, it puts you on edge in every remaining scene, hoping that he won’t show up again. Most movies would have Frank follow MacLachlan’s character, but Lynch flips this, having MacLachlan choose to follow Frank instead. It’s thrilling to watch someone in so over their head descend deeper and deeper into a bizarre criminal underworld hidden right under the surface of his white picket fence community. Lynch has always been interested in challenging his audience with extreme discomfort and repulsion, he also knows how to make an engrossing thriller.
5. Frantic (1988)
Harrison Ford stars as a doctor traveling to Paris with his wife for a conference. She disappears without a trace while he’s in the hotel room showering, and then he has to run around town to find her. He’s jet lagged, he doesn’t speak any French, and the local police are useless. He eventually finds an attractive French woman who switched bags with his wife at the airport, and she might know more than she lets on. It’s a great premise that kind of goes off the rails, but I really wanted to get a Ford movie on this list. When he wasn’t starring in the two most exciting franchises of the 80s, Harrison Ford specialized in what I like to call Sunday Dad Thrillers. They’re on tv, your dad flips to it, smiles, and leaves it on. Harmless predictable fun. Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Witness, The Fugitive…most people probably haven’t even seen these movies without commercial breaks. There won’t be any Tom Clancy or John Grisham adaptations on this list because they barely move the needle for me in terms of suspense. This is a much better thriller to me than The Fugitive because we only see Ford’s POV. Half of The Fugitive is following Tommy Lee Jones and his misfit crew of U.S. Marshalls, who are straight out of Law and Order or CSI. They’re fun and likable, and they let us catch our breath, and get way too comfortable. A good thriller shouldn’t really be fun till after it’s over and you can breathe again…like waiting in line for a roller coaster and dreading the first drop. Frantic wisely only follows Ford as he descends into seedy parts of Paris looking for clues, and we have just as much information as he does. Both movies end up having absurd third act reasons for his wife’s death or kidnapping, but the first thirty minutes of this are much more chilling than The Fugitive’s dated one-armed-man flashbacks. Ford knows who killed his wife in The Fugitive, he just has to find him. In this, he’s overwhelmed…he doesn’t have any idea where to even begin.
6. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
I’ve always considered this more of a thriller than a horror movie, primarily because of the dangerously close relationship that forms between Jodie Foster’s Clarice and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. She is just as terrified as we are when she first walks down the stairs and through the hallway towards Lecter’s cell, but she quickly becomes more and more comfortable talking to him. He might be a vicious serial killer, but it’s appealing to her that he treats her as an equal. Clarice is underestimated by every other male character in this movie…she’s only picked by her boss because he thinks Hannibal will find her attractive, Hannibal’s sadistic warden only sees her as a potential date, and Buffalo Bill doesn’t seem to think she can kill him (the only reason Clarice even gets to face Bill alone is sexism…every other glory boy in her department flies in to join the bust on the wrong house, but she’s ordered to follow up on what are assumed to be dead leads). Hannibal is still a psychiatrist at heart, and wants to help her unpack the emotional trauma of losing her father when she was young. The more she lets her guard down, the closer we get to the edge of our seat, assuming he’ll attack her at any moment. There is unsettling dread in every scene in this movie, and that all builds towards the two most intense scenes…Hannibal’s brutal escape sequence and Clarice finally tracking down Bill. It’s a chilling idea to have a cordial relationship with a serial killer, the show Mindhunter is built around the concept of how this might change you. And it’s an interesting choice that we’re never shown Clarice’s life outside of this case…we never even see where she lives because everything moves at such a thrilling pace. Instead it’s her past that gets dragged into the proceedings…Lecter successfully gets in her head as much as he gets in ours.
7. Jurassic Park (1993)
One of the big reasons my favorite movie hasn’t spawned my favorite franchise is that its sequels have often forgotten the key to this film’s success: it isn’t an action movie…it’s a thriller. The first hour carefully sets the stage, and the second half is a perfectly choreographed thrill ride. Every big set piece in this is built up perfectly with lots and lots of tension. The two cars sit stalled in the rain for minutes before the T-Rex actually attacks. Ian Malcolm slowly notices the rippling cup of water before the Jeep chase. Spielberg toys with us as he cuts back and forth between Tim struggling to climb the electric fence and Sattler methodically turning all the power back on. and the kids do everything they can to just hide from the raptors in the kitchen before they are forced to run from them. Future installments don’t have anything even approaching all these iconic scenes…Lost World has Julianne Moore laying on cracking glass, and Jurassic World has the vibrating phone in the rolling glass ball. But these movies are all action adventures…stronger and better equipped people running from more and more dinosaurs. The same thing has happened with the Alien franchise…all of the carefully crafted suspense has been drained and replaced with in your face CGI. We barely see the shark in Jaws or the xenomorph in Alien or the raptors in Jurassic Park until the third act…their menacing presence is teased so well that we’re terrified when we finally see them. The original is a masterclass in suspense, taking a straightforward monster movie and turning it into one of the best thrillers of all time.
8. Speed (1994)
The action thriller is almost always more action than thriller, and it’s rarely done well enough to deserve respect, but I still wanted to touch on the string of bad 90s high-concept action thrillers I love so much. The plots are always too outrageous for us to actually take them seriously and give in to the suspense, and the tone is never gritty or realistic enough for us to be more than just amused. Take Nic Cage’s holy trinity of The Rock, Face/Off and Con Air. They could all be considered great thrillers on paper…a detective forced to go undercover as the bad guy he hates, a good man stuck on a plane with the worst criminals, and a desk jockey chemist trying to take out terrorists on Alcatraz…but the absurd directorial flares of Michael Bay, John Woo and Simon West only make us laugh. In the right hands those could all be much more skillful thrillers… picture Face/Off if it was somehow made by Martin Scorsese, or Con Air directed by Alfonso Cuarón, or The Rock done by Spielberg. Speed is the closest thing to an actual thriller from this genre, only because there’s barely any action at all. This isn’t Keanu Reeves killing a bunch of bad guys…he just has to figure out how to help hostages on a bus that can’t go below 50 miles an hour. This is the difference between Die Hard 1 and 3. The first is an action movie about one guy taking down a dozen terrorists to save his wife, but the third is a thriller where a cop is forced to play a deadly game of Simon Says. There’s definitely parts that get ridiculous (the bus jumping the gap lol) but director Jan de Bont does his best to ignore his worst instincts and just let the stakes of the situation do the work. It’s impossible not to be compelled every time a new problem appears in the road. You’re still having way too much fun for this to be a real thriller, but leaving it off just because it’s too low brow feels wrong.
9. Seven (1995)
Music can make or break a thriller. The 2002 film Road to Perdition has some intense moments, but its grandiose and sappy score keeps reminding us that this is an epic period piece about fatherhood and loyalty, not the film version of Boardwalk Empire (it also rarely works for a thriller to have narration. we need to be in the moment…we need to forget we’re watching a movie). So much of what makes Seven such an unnerving thriller is the haunting, repetitive score every time we approach a crime scene with the detectives. Every other police procedural blows through these moments, but Fincher brilliantly decides to terrify us by slowly revealing just what exactly John Doe has done, lingering in the grimy details of each victim’s surroundings. We dread what the flashlights will expose. Howard Shore composed the music for both this and Silence of the Lambs, which is no coincidence. This is much more of a spiritual successor than any of the actual Hannibal sequels or prequels. Both movies manage to stress us out without showing their serial killers actually kill anyone. It feels a little too fortuitous for Clarice that Hannibal actually knew Buffalo Bill (and that Bill raised extremely rare moths), whereas Mills and Somerset have literally nothing to go on until they break the law and use the FBI to look up library records. But all of these main characters are in over their heads. We are so on edge through both movies because we know Hannibal and John Doe are in complete control the whole time. Clarice is lucky enough to earn Hannibal’s respect, while Mills unfortunately earns Doe’s infatuation. Both have twist endings, but you have to give the edge to Seven. Shore’s familiar theme starts to kick in again as the van crests over the hill. We’re conditioned to associate the song with a crime scene…something’s not right. It’s a delivery man with a box for Mills. The music swells as Somerset debates opening it, then does, looks inside, and is horrified at something we can’t see. The final sequence of this by itself would probably be enough to make this one of the best thrillers ever, but the whole movie is meticulously orchestrated tension.
10. Breakdown (1997)
I was debating between this or the Michael Douglas thriller The Game that came out the same year. While I loved The Game when I was younger, it hasn’t aged very well. It’s far too obvious that everything happening to Douglas is part of his brother’s gift, and the levels of planning involved are impossibly absurd. Breakdown goes for similar mind games to start, but on a much smaller and more believable scale. Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan are a married couple on a road trip when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A trucker (the incredible J.T. Walsh, a character actor who died way too young but was still in several 90s classics) offers to give Quinlan a ride to the gas station, but they never return. When Russell finally tracks down Walsh, the seemingly nice truck driver acts like they’ve never met. Kurt Russell plays his reaction to this perfectly, dropping his charming smile and asking with a disturbed look, “wait, what are you doing?” He flags down a cop, they search the big rig, but there’s no sign his wife was ever there. It’s a really creepy idea, that someone could pull off acting like they’ve never met you and convince everyone else you’re crazy. What makes this movie work so well is that it drops this unsustainable act about halfway through, and then turns into a more classic rescue-my-wife thriller. J.T. Walsh and his band of evil mechanics and truckers are scary enough to be out of No Country for Old Men, and the tension really plays up the liberal fears of getting stuck in a red state town. I expected this one to not hold up, but it has some really intense moments, a great cold-blooded villain in Walsh, and feels just as timely as ever, unfortunately.
11. Training Day (2001)
Great thrillers usually have pretty compressed timelines…if the story takes place over too many days or weeks it’s really hard to keep the tension high and the stakes palpable. Here we follow a bright-eyed Ethan Hawke for 24 hours as he slowly realizes the narcotics detective training him is as dirty as it gets, and is willing to kill him if he doesn’t play ball. This movie is constantly moving through the streets of LA…they never even set foot in a police station. I’m not sure Denzel Washington ever gets quite as scary as you’d hope in this, but both actors play so well off each other that it still works really well (it didn’t take long for Washington’s over the top Oscar-winning performance to start getting spoofed, peaking with the Wayne Brady episode of Chappelle’s Show). Washington has a secret agenda that slowly gets revealed, as we learn he’s trying to steal a million dollars off the streets in order to pay back the Russian mob before they kill him. This movie would still work if we just followed him trying to steal drug money, but it’s much better seeing everything from Hawke’s POV. With each stop they make, Hawke is forced to break more and more laws, to decide just how far he’s willing to go to get his dream job. It isn’t at all what he pictured, and it’s crushing to see him start to realize he probably won’t make it home to his family. Everything quickly goes from entertaining to nerve-racking, building to the whole sequence with the card game that ends with Hawke finding himself in a bathtub with a shotgun pointed at his face. The twist that keeps him alive might feel too convenient, but it doesn’t make the scene any less intense. The final showdown fizzles a little, but I will always love this movie.
12. The Bourne Identity (2002)
If only they had stopped after the first one. Although I imagine if you give any movie enough sequels, it will inevitably become a parody of itself. Before this franchise devolved into Matt Damon whispering to a string of aging but respectable computer room yellers that he’s actually hiding under their desk, this was a very good thriller! Praising the Bourne Identity feels like trying to remind people that Coldplay used to be cool, but the premise is legit: a guy on the run from the CIA and elite assassins who doesn’t remember why they’re after him in the first place (I mean one of the assassins is freaking Clive Owen…remember they have a really intense, silent face-off in a field? Look what they make you give!). It was thrilling to see Damon slowly realize what he was capable of in this, every time he seems to be trapped with no way out. And I’ll never forget the great monologue he gives to Franka Potente in the diner. “I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting at the counter weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself…Why would I know that?” Bourne never gets much time to figure this out, the quick pace of this and its gritty, handheld realism is key to its success. He’s pretty much constantly on the run with Potente from the moment he opens his old safety deposit box of fake passports. They’re great together…Potente making it believable that she’d actually stick with this guy. Future installments made the mistake of focusing more and more on the exhausting history of Treadstone, and every little bit of minutia about the man Jason Bourne used to be. But we don’t care about that. It’s enough to see a man realize he used to be a brainwashed assassin, and know that he doesn’t want to do that anymore. We’re rooting for him to put all this behind him, but ironically we liked the movie so much they kept having to rip happiness away from him to give us more Bourne movies.
13. Minority Report (2002)
What I love about this movie is how it keeps changing the stakes of what type of thriller it is. First there’s the great opening scene, where Tom Cruise has to figure out which house the jealous husband is about to murder his wife in. Then he has to go on the run from Colin Farrell after the Precogs say he will kill a man he’s never met in 36 hours. So now Cruise has to swap out his eyes to not get tracked, which leads to that amazingly tense scene of the scanning spiders making their way through the apartment building towards him while his new eyes still heal. And THEN you get to the best version of this movie, where he kidnaps Agatha and they navigate hiding in a wide open mall by using her ability to see the future. It all builds to Cruise finally getting in the same room as the mystery man he’s sworn he won’t kill, only to realize this could be the guy who kidnapped his son. Talk about great plant and payoff…we aren’t expecting his past to collide with the present plot at all. And then there’s the ending. It’s not yet at the level of debate as to whether Harrison Ford is a replicant or not in Blade Runner, but it is heavily implied that the happy ending that many people despise is actually only happening in Cruise’s mind in his virtual prison. It’s hard to stomach such a bleak ending from Spielberg, but he clearly believes that freewill makes the future uncertain, and therefore Precrime is inherently flawed. There’s lots of big ideas in this movie, just like Blade Runner, but those are all layers added onto a really great thriller.
14. 28 Days Later (2003*)
Not only is this the birth of the incredibly stressful infected/fast zombie genre, but I also think it kicks off the departure into what I consider modern thrillers: stripped down and realistic, gritty with an unrelenting pace…every remaining movie on this list took a lot of notes from Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s masterpiece. Zombie movies obviously fall into the horror category, but they also work really, really well as thrillers because they are an entire plot as much as they are a monster. What I mean is zombies inherently create a post-apocalyptic environment our characters must navigate. This makes for nonstop thrills…this whole movie is just following Cillian Murphy and the others as they constantly have to barely escape and relocate. And then they have to deal with a deranged group of surviving soldiers. Subsequent fast zombie films never quite lived up to this, but they did have individual scenes that were great additions to the genre: there was the incredible opening twenty minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004, then another great opening sequence in 28 Weeks Later in 2007. The Spanish found footage film REC, the instantly iconic video game The Last of Us, the riveting The Girl With All The Gifts, and I’ve heard good things about Martin Freeman’s Cargo which just came out on Netflix. I noticeably left off the show The Walking Dead, because I gave up on it after four seasons. A good thriller needs to have the possibility of hope…the light at the end of the tunnel that our character has almost no chance of reaching. That’s the stakes…whether or not they’ll get out of this horrible scenario and either die a hero or earn back their regular life. In 28 Days Later, it is revealed that the infection is only in the UK… it is possible to escape it. The Walking Dead is the opposite. It is completely without hope…after the CDC at the end of the first season was destroyed, there was nothing left to drive towards. It is just a monotonous slog that hopes its fans will take pleasure in the shocking yet pointless death of every last hero it has. There is nothing thrilling about that.
*a note on the date: even though this was released first in the UK in late 2002, I’m going by when it came out in the US. I’ll be doing the same for indie films that had festival premieres one year but theatrical releases in another.
15. Children of Men (2006)
I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that as the years and decades pass, we will grow to realize this might be the greatest film ever made. I remember staggering out of the theater after first seeing it, and feeling completely emotionally exhausted. This movie had wrecked me, but in the best way possible. You don’t watch it…you live inside it like a bad dream. Alfonso Cuarón and cinematography wizard Emmanuel Lubezki use absurdly complicated one take shots and hand held cameras to bring you right into the unrelenting action. You can always distance yourself from 28 Days Later because zombies aren’t real, but there is a growing discomfort as you watch Children of Men that this is prescient…that this is our only possible future. The racism against refugees, the isolationism of the UK as it watches the world fall around it…it’s sadly not hard to imagine at all. It is so stressful because it all feels so real. 2027 looks like tomorrow. And it is deeply unsettling to consider how much our society hinges on the assumed guarantee of future generations. How quickly everything would collapse if we weren’t able to see the point of it all anymore. I was shocked to realize it’s run time is only 109 minutes, the journey that Clive Owen goes on feels like the most riveting four hour movie you’ve ever seen. There is perfect suspense in every set piece, from the gut-punching one-shot highway ambush, to the silent escape at dawn in the car that won’t start till you freaking push it down the hill, to the secretive birth and escape from Peter Mullan’s Syd, and finally the show-stopping climax of Owen and Clare-Hope Ashitey and her baby navigating through an active war zone. All the stress of these scenes makes the ending so much more cathartic. You can’t help but cry as Kee tells Theo that she’s naming her baby after his son. And then, as the Human Project ship peeks through the fog, Caurón frees us from all the pain his movie has just brought. The screen goes black, and we are relieved to hear the laughter of children. There is still hope, he says. This isn’t our world yet.
16. Sunshine (2007)
In the last possible attempt to save mankind, a group of astronauts are sent on a mission to launch a massive nuclear bomb into our dying sun. Things quickly start to go very wrong, and the gigantic stakes of it all force the dwindling crew to make impossible decisions. It is nerve-wracking. Should they change course and intercept the first failed mission’s spacecraft to double their payload? What caused that mission to fail? Is it naive to think this mission isn’t a one-way ticket? If there’s only enough oxygen to get a crew of four to barely reach the sun, and you have five people still alive…how do you decide who needs to die? I’m still confused by how under the radar this movie was…besides the dynamite team of Boyle and Garland returning after 28 Days Later, it has an incredible cast. Chris Evans gives maybe his best performance as the only crew member still thinking clearly enough, while Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne are amazing at conveying the mental and emotional strain of being forced into making harder and harder calls. The last act unfortunately ventures into Event Horizon territory (not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels as out of place as Matt Damon’s plot in Interstellar), and the idea of some crew members getting addicted to looking at the sun is pretty weird, but this is a really fantastic thriller. As I said before when talking about Alien, space is a ripe setting for suspense. It is incredibly stressful. Besides the brutally intense loneliness and mental deterioration, there are so many things that can go wrong with the ship. And every slight variation the crew votes to make from their original mission cascades into full blown disaster. A must watch if you’ve never seen it.
17. No Country for Old Men (2007)
In a Coen brothers movie, there are two worlds: the normal one where regular (often clueless) people live unremarkable lives, and the dangerous and methodical professional criminals that lurk in the shadows. They love to explore the idea of these worlds crashing together…they realize it is uniquely stressful and hilarious at the same time to see one of the deadliest men in the world being slightly inconvenienced by a stubborn motel clerk. Just like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, Javier Bardem terrifies us in this from the moment he first shows up. Instead of being batshit crazy, though, he’s disturbingly calm and deliberate. He’s a ghost when he comes to kill you. The Coen’s use every sound in this movie to build tension. Every time Bardem shows up and quietly releases the valve on his air tank, we hear every noise in the room. As I mentioned before, some movies have a great score that adds to our dread, some have music that lets us relax. In this, there isn’t any musical score at all. The result is exhausting, you are on the edge of your seat with every door that swings open or phone that rings, with nothing to remind you this is just a movie. Josh Brolin might be more well-equipped to go on the run from Bardem than Kyle MacLachlan was against Hopper, but he’s just as naive about the second world he’s stepping into when he decides to keep the drug money he finds. While there’s still plenty of suspense in the last quarter of the movie, it does bring everything to a grinding halt when we stop following Brolin. We were emotionally invested because of him, and while Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff is the main narrator of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, it is jarring to switch to his POV in this. Still, this is easily one of the best thrillers ever made, a remarkable feat from the same people that also gave us the best comedy ever.
18. Sin Nombre (2009)
Before he was the director of all eight episodes in the brilliant first season of True Detective, Cary Fukunaga wrote and directed this brutally realistic immigration thriller. We follow Casper, a young member of a Mexican chapter of the famously violent street gang MS-13. He lives in the southernmost city in Mexico, right on the border of Guatemala. He has grown tired of the violence, and finally snaps when he saves a young Honduran woman named Sayra from being raped by his gang leader. Forced to flee, Casper reluctantly joins Sayra and her father and uncle on their journey to America. It’s some fifteen hundred miles to the US border in Texas, and they’re getting there by riding on the tops of trains. Immigration police are definitely to be feared, but the real suspense comes from the gang’s pursuit. Casper has been given a green light, which means every chapter of MS-13 along their route through Mexico is after him. Sayra knows it’s dangerous to be near this boy, but the two quickly become inseparable. This movie devastates you a little at a time, as you come to realize the inevitably of Casper’s fate. He was never given a chance to even do anything else with his life…MS-13 recruited him as a kid. He knows he won’t be able to escape, but he tries his best to make sure Sayra can make it across the border. It’s frustrating to think that the people in this country with the most hatred for immigrants will probably never see this movie. Being born in the US means you have won the birth lottery, and for many that blinds them to consider what their life would be like if they were born into much less fortunate circumstances. It is so easy to root for Sayra and Casper and every other character they meet trying to make a better life for themselves along the way, because we hope we would be brave enough to do the same thing. American thrillers often have to resort to high concept fantasy to artificially bring tension into the main character’s charmed life, but for much of the world, real life is more stressful and dangerous than we care to acknowledge. Fukunaga has made this film feel incredibly real, because for many, many people, it is.
19. The Hurt Locker (2009)
All of the thrillers on this list so far are about a main character rapidly reacting to things that happen to them, whether it’s their environment suddenly becoming dangerous, or a very scary person or thing stalking them, or someone going missing that they care about. But it can also make for a great thriller to watch somebody repeatedly CHOOSE to enter high-tension scenarios. This movie opens with the phrase “war is a drug” and for Jeremy Renner’s character, that is definitely true. Every time he comes across a bomb to disarm, his rush is our stress. When we finally see him go home, we feel guilty that we actually agree that regular life can’t compare. We don’t want to see him shopping for groceries…get him back out there with another bomb! This isn’t so much a war movie as an extremely specific look at one man’s experience of war. Kathryn Bigelow makes us feel like we are on the ground with Renner, inside his bomb suit as he sweats and cusses and mumbles to himself before snipping the right wire. The movie American Sniper also wrestled with this idea of Bradley Cooper being most comfortable in war…in that case specifically combat. Both characters tell themselves they are only doing this to save their fellow soldiers lives, but it’s clear to us that their addiction to the adrenaline rush is guiding them. I had a harder time with Clint Eastwood’s film, because much of it came off as black and white patriotic propaganda. But there was one scene that really stuck out to me. Cooper had returned home, and he’s out running errands with his son, when he gets approached by a soldier whose life he saved. Cooper becomes extremely rigid, cold and uncomfortable, unable to deal with the man telling his son that his dad is a hero. We’re confused at first…wouldn’t he be moved by this? Wasn’t this the whole reason he kept returning to the war, to save more lives? But war isn’t that simple. He hadn’t unpacked how much it had actually changed him, he hadn’t talked about it at all. I imagine Renner’s character would react similarly. The best war movies don’t celebrate war, they aim to show us what it is really like for those that return home.
20. Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Tarantino had shown us before that he could masterfully create tension, with the end standoff in Reservoir Dogs and both Mia’s overdose and Butch’s bizarre journey in Pulp Fiction. But this is his masterpiece in that department. Usually his signature nonlinear storytelling and fondness for extended small-talk makes it hard to maintain suspense for more than a scene. But here Tarantino keeps everything chronological, and turns the long conversations INTO the suspense. It’s exhilarating from one scene to the next. The French dairy farmer wiping his brow, slowly getting interrogated by Hans Landa while a Jewish family hides under his floor. The only survivor, Shosanna, forced to sit and smile and talk with the man who had her family killed, unsure if he recognizes her. And then, what is probably the best scene Tarantino has ever given us, the Nazi basement tavern where Michael Fassbender makes it 99% of the way, only to blow his cover with the wrong gesture. That entire sequence is a masterclass in tension. It goes on for probably twenty minutes, and we are on the edge of our seat the whole time. And there’s still the climax to go, where everyone converges in the theater to try to kill Hitler. It is a very unpopular opinion to rank anything above Pulp Fiction, but I think this is Tarantino’s best movie. He still breaks everything up into chapters here, but he finally trusts his ability to tell a compelling story without needing to jump around in time to keep us engaged. It is polished and precise. Needless to say, I am very, very excited about this new Manson movie.
21. Celda 211 (2009)
Set in a Spanish prison, a newly hired guard gets trapped in a cell block after the prisoners take control during a riot. But since it’s his first day, none of the prisoners have seen him yet. So, thinking quickly, he takes off his clothes and acts like he’s one of them, hoping to blend in and survive until he can escape. The only problem is that the most dangerous prisoner in there, the leader of the riot, takes an interest in him. And so the guard has to start acting more and more like a criminal to keep up his cover. This is the only foreign film on my list that didn’t get an American theatrical release, and it’s not hard to see why. There is a particularly dark turn this movie makes that an American thriller just wouldn’t do (and I’m not sure it pulls it off). The execution here is sometimes lacking, and you keep expecting everything to get much more brutal and violent (especially after an extremely graphic opening that shows a prisoner slitting his wrists), but the concept is so perfect that it still delivers plenty of tense moments. What will he do when he’s offered drugs? Or challenged to a fight? Or asked to help torture a fellow guard that’s been taken hostage? Alberto Ammann is great as the slowly unraveling undercover guard, and Luis Tosar is definitely scary enough as the head prisoner known as Malamadre (Badmother). American remakes can be pretty hit or miss, but I really think somebody should redo this one. Wikipedia tells me Paul Haggis has expressed interest, but that doesn’t feel like a good match with the material. I’d love to see someone like Jeremy Saulnier get a shot at it. Still, the original is worth a watch for sure.
22. A Prophet (2010)
When I started this list, I talked about how much more suspenseful the scene of Michael‘s first hit in The Godfather would be if it was made today. A Prophet is exactly what I meant, a modern day Godfather (it’s that good). We follow the rise of Malik, a French teenager who goes to prison for six years for attacking an officer. He starts out with literally nothing. No money, no girlfriend, no family, no friends. His sneakers get stolen off of his feet during a beating. He tries to keep his head down, but is immediately noticed by the Corsican mafia, who run the prison (from my limited understanding, the island of Corsica is to France what Sicily is to Italy, including the mafia parallels). The Corsicans have been ordered by their outside leaders to kill a recent prison transfer, a Muslim man who will be an important witness in an upcoming trial. Malik is of Muslim descent, so the Corsicans force him to get close to the man, and then kill him (they’ll kill Malik if he doesn’t comply). Malik, having no choice, hides a razor blade in his mouth and heads to the man’s cell. The resulting scene is about as intense as it gets, blowing Michael’s bathroom gun retrieval out of the water. The rest of the movie follows Malik as he slowly rises to power in the prison, navigating between the dangerous Corsican mob and the Muslims who consider him a traitor. After three years of “good behavior” he is granted leave days, where he can go to a fake job for 12 hours and start running drugs and organizing hits. The more people he meets, the more crime he coordinates. It’s like Grand Theft Auto the movie, if it was French. One of my biggest problems with The Godfather Part II is how uninteresting and straightforward Vito’s rise to power is during the flashbacks. This movie is the antithesis of that…it is riveting to see Malik slowly build alliances and cut out middlemen, all while planning the perfect moment to make a dangerous power grab from the Corsicans. Tahar Rahim is absolutely incredible in this role, as is Niels Arestrup, who plays the head of the Corsican prison gang like you wish Jack Nicholson had been in The Departed. Watch it immediately.
23. Looper (2012)
Boy do I love this movie. Every character in Rian Johnson’s sci-fi masterpiece is essentially in their own thriller. Bruce Willis travels back in time to find and kill the boy who will grow up to become the reason his wife dies. Emily Blunt must protect that boy, her son who has some secret and dangerous telekinetic powers. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is caught in the middle, frantically trying to kill Willis, his Old Self, and “close his loop” before he is tracked down by his crime boss. There are tons of intense sequences in this, but the one that shook me the most on first viewing actually doesn’t involve any of our main characters. Paul Dano doesn’t get much screen time, but he is expertly used in the first act to really drive home Gordon-Levitt’s stakes for the rest of the movie. His punishment is a preview of exactly how bad it really is to let your Old Self go free instead of killing him. And holy crap, is it memorable and disturbing. My stomach turned as Dano’s Old Self started to have body parts literally vanish off of him. He desperately tries to turn around and turn himself in as he crumbles before us. And then we realize in horror what is happening: his younger body is being tortured and operated on, instantaneously changing how he looks as an old man. This constant threat of what will happen to both Willis and Gordon-Levitt if Gordon-Levitt gets caught hangs over the whole movie. There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense if you think about it for too long (why not just kill the people BEFORE sending them back in time?), but Johnson makes it so dang cool and suspenseful throughout that you don’t have the time to care.
24. Gravity (2013)
Seeing this in IMAX 3D opening night was probably the most incredible movie-going experience I’ve ever had. I had seen plenty of films set in space, but this was the first one that made me feel like I was actually there. and being next to an astronaut as they hopelessly drift into space is exhausting. This is a relentless 90 minutes as we watch Sandra Bullock navigate one disaster after the other (I remember actually forgetting to take a breath during some of the more extreme moments). One of the main reasons I thought Ridley Scott’s The Martian lacked any suspense and was extremely overrated is because Matt Damon’s character seemed to actually be the perfect person MOST capable of surviving being stranded on Mars (this would be like having Tom Hanks in Cast Away be an island explorer survivalist-type, instead of a businessman that has to learn how to survive). Gravity wouldn’t work if it was George Clooney’s character we followed…he knows exactly what to do at every turn. Bullock, on the other hand, is thrown into all of this her first time in space. and as things get more hopeless, her tragic past causes her to really explore how much she actually even wants to fight to survive (the moment where she is resigned to die, crying as she howls with the dogs she can barely hear on the radio is some of the best acting you’ll ever see). Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki instantly made every other space movie fairly meaningless with this (James Cameron called it “the best space film ever done”). Also, just like Hans Zimmer’s work on Dunkirk, Steven Price’s stress-inducing score works beautifully here, kicking in every time the debris field circles back around. They should re-release this in IMAX once a year.
25. Blue Ruin (2014)
I guess you could call Taken a thriller, but it does lose a lot of suspense once it becomes obvious that Liam Neeson is just gonna whomp on everyone until he gets his daughter back. His character is perfectly suited for vengeance, and the bad guys are no match. This movie works so much better (on a fraction of the budget) because it imagines what it would be like for someone who isn’t an ex-CIA bodyguard to want revenge…someone who has no business taking things into his own hands but does it anyway. Macon Blair plays a homeless man whose life spiraled out of control after his parents were murdered years earlier. When he finds out the man responsible is getting out of prison, he decides he’s going to kill him. He unsuccessfully tries to steal a gun, then just follows him into a bar bathroom with a knife. Much like the scene I described in A Prophet, things don’t go as planned. It is one of the most intense scenes I’ve ever seen. Then everything turns into a brutal version of Home Alone (complete with a badass cameo by Devin Ratray), because it turns out this man has a dangerous family who would rather take things into THEIR own hands than report Blair to the police. The violence in this is brutal and shocking, and since Blair is so over-matched, it is extremely stressful every time he has to fight for his life. Blair is incredible in this, which is crazy because he is the childhood friend of director Jeremy Saulnier. This movie is amazingly the result of a Kickstarter campaign they launched, and it rightly put them both on the map immediately. It’s stripped down and raw and real, and one of the best thrillers I’ve ever seen.
26. It Follows (2015)
Usually the third act of a horror movie turns into a pure thriller. The fake scares and jump scares are out of the way, the body count has sufficiently wiped out almost all of our characters, and we finally get a good look at the killer as it becomes a game of cat and mouse with the Final Girl. David Robert Mitchell throws out this formula immediately, instead having this mysterious creature only interested in Maika Monroe from the start. It won’t warm up by killing anyone who gets in its way…it’s not even visible to anyone else until she sleeps with someone and passes it on. It’s the slowest chase possible, but the suspense comes from never knowing the form the creature will take. Anybody calmly walking towards her is a suspect, and since nobody else can see it, it’s hard to take her seriously. This also plays up the psychological thriller elements, too…both her growing paranoia, as well as her internal debate about sealing someone else’s fate by passing it on. It still has one of the biggest jump scares I’ve ever seen with that eyeless tall man barreling down the dark hallway through Monroe’s bedroom door, but for the most part this movie looks to keep you on edge with never-ending tension instead of simply frightening you.
27. Sicario (2015)
Both director Denis VilIeneuve and writer Taylor Sheridan have exploded onto the scene the past few years, churning out some amazing thrillers. So it’s no surprise that the two of them teaming up for Sicario created an instant classic. There are several memorable sequences, but the one that sticks with me the most is when the caravan attempting to extract a top cartel man gets attacked at the border. The whole thing is set up so, so well with building tension. We are just as nervous as Emily Blunt’s character when the cars first cross over into Juárez, and she sees the bodies hanging in the streets. Blunt scans every alleyway, expecting them to be noticed and attacked at any moment. But they quickly grab their extradition target, and start to make their way back towards the border. Everything seems to be going too smoothly, and that’s when they hit a traffic jam and start to realize they are about to get ambushed. Blunt holds her own, but immediately understands this is not what she signed up for. Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro are both fantastic as seasoned men who no longer care about the law. They lecture Blunt about her misplaced idealism, about how they know the only ways to actually win the drug war. I get wanting to make a follow up film that focuses on del Toro’s mysterious character, but I think this movie really works because we see things through Blunt’s POV. Her journey through this movie is exhausting, as she goes from one high pressure scenario to the next without knowing exactly what she’s involved in. At first she’s in way over her head, realizing too late that she’s only being used. But she decides to see things through, proving that she can survive in what del Toro calls “a land of wolves.” When he comes calling at the end to make sure she can be trusted, she’s no longer afraid.
28. Green Room (2016)
After proving himself with Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier got to flesh out an idea that had stuck with him for years: a thriller about a band that is trapped inside their green room. Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat and the rest of their punk band take a random gig at a secluded bar in the Oregon woods. It turns out that it’s a scary neo-Nazi bar, and after they witness a murder, the skinheads lock them in the green room while they await instructions from their gruff leader (played by a surprisingly chilling Patrick Stewart). Yelchin and the others, along with bar regular Imogen Poots, quickly realize that they’re going to be killed for what they’ve seen, so their only chance is to just try to fight their way out. The neo-Nazis have knives and guns…the band has nothing. The gore is so intense and the premise is so scary that this actually leans pretty far into the horror genre. Being held hostage has gone from an abstract 90s action movie trope to a very real fear in the age of active shooters. We are now all too aware of our closest emergency exits, and how we’re somehow supposed to charge at the gunman if there’s no hope of escape. Blue Ruin is more raw and grounded, but Green Room is far more haunting because of how easy it is to picture yourself in the brutally hopeless situation. It strangely reminded me of watching the 2006 movie United 93, about the plane on 9/11 that passengers were able to take down before it reached its target. That movie is obviously way more intense in a much different way because it is recounting something that actually happened (in real time), but both films aim to make you feel the sheer panic of the people onscreen. This one is definitely not for the faint of heart.
29. Get Out (2017)
The suspense in this movie comes from us knowing just as much as Daniel Kaluuya’s character Chris. We don’t know exactly what is wrong with this white family he’s visiting, but we know he’s somehow in danger. It’s more and more stressful the longer he’s there. At first we think it must be something to do with hypnotism…that Catherine Keener’s matriarch is somehow brainwashing black people into servitude with the instantly iconic concept of the sunken place. Remember that it’s not the way any of the white people are acting that actually makes Chris nervous…it’s the black characters’ demeanor that signifies things aren’t right. Chris fully expects the racist remarks and general awkwardness from the Armitage family (while white audiences laugh nervously during the party scene, black audiences nod knowingly). Jordan Peele gives a window into just what exactly this feels like, leading to the brilliant and gut-wrenching realization at the end that you are actually SCARED when the cop car pulls up. In every other movie, that means our main character is safe…but every other movie had a main character who was white. There is an alternate ending where Chris goes to jail and no one believes him, but Peele realized this movie was too depressingly realistic, and wisely gave us the catharsis of Chris escaping. Besides the incredible performance by Kaluuya, the casting of the Armitages was also brilliant. Bradley Whitford, Keener and Allison Williams always play socially-aware, liberal characters. We know it in our bones that they are good people. Peele shows us that even the most “woke” white person is still racist, and when we learn just how sinister they all are, it is all the more staggering. A second viewing reveals how carefully constructed this was, and how evil Williams’ character truly is, posing as an ally but secretly regarding Chris as nothing more than a trophy. You’d like to believe this was all just a metaphor, but by the end you hopefully understand why this is all so scary in the first place. As Peele tweeted after this was nominated as a comedy…“Get Out is a documentary.”
30. Wind River (2017)
In both this and Sicario, writer Taylor Sheridan sidelines the gruff male characters who would usually be the star in movies like this, and instead focuses on the more interesting journey of female characters who are entering these men’s harsh worlds for the first time. Jeremy Renner might be the expert of the snow-covered local terrain, but it’s more stressful to follow someone who didn’t even bring warm enough clothes. Like Emily Blunt in Sicario, Elizabeth Olsen has no idea what she is stepping into when she arrives on Wind River Indian Reservation to investigate a murder. She starts out annoyed that she has to be there at all, but then quickly makes it her personal mission to figure out the killer. This film builds to three main confrontations, each of them extremely brutal and shocking. There is usually a predictable pattern to how scenes stack up in a murder mystery…we assume Olsen will be safe for a while as she starts making the rounds to ask questions. But here she comes under fire immediately…we’re on edge the whole time because anything can suddenly happen. Violence can and will explode out of nowhere. While Sicario is heart-pounding throughout, Sheridan slows everything down with both this and Hell or High Water. He excels at lulling us into a false sense of security with beautiful wide shots of nature and the realistic small talk of locals in flyover states. And then when we’re swept up in the authenticity of it all, and least expecting it, gunfire erupts. His first TV show YELLOWSTONE just started on Paramount Network, definitely check it out if you like his movies.
31. Super Dark Times (2017)
People have praised both Stranger Things and the It remake for how authentically they portray boys being boys. But Kevin Phillips debut film immediately makes both of those look phony as hell. The first thirty minutes feel like a documentary…like these kids don’t even know the camera is on them. I was instantly transported back to the days of junior high, when all you want to do is cuss and talk about girls. And then one of the kids starts playing with his older brother’s katana, and things get very very very bad. This movie makes it impossible not to feel attached to these nerds, and then the floor drops out from under you when one of them suddenly dies in an accident. The other boys agree to cover it up and tell no one, but then they all start to crack under the pressure. Owen Campbell is amazing as Zach, the main character we’re seeing all this through. Zach starts to get more and more distrusting of his best friend Josh (Charlie Tahan, who is also incredible here), and starts to have extremely disturbing nightmares straight out of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. We think Zach’s losing it, but the movie has other, much more disturbing plans in mind. The last twenty minutes of this are so upsetting that it’s hard to believe they’re actually happening. It will mess you up. The violence in a thriller, compared to an action movie, is usually much more realistic and dramatic. Here this is dialed up to 11…you’ve never been more afraid of what a single sword can actually do in real life. This is on Netflix, highly recommend if you’ve got the stomach for it.
32. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t the most accessible filmmaker, but much of this movie is actually a fairly straightforward thriller. It’s just as absurd as his dark comedy The Lobster, but here you’re only laughing because you’re so uncomfortable. Something is causing Colin Ferrell and Nicole Kidman’s children to become paralyzed, and they slowly realize the creepiest teenager ever is somehow to blame. The boy that keeps showing up to their house has somehow cursed their family. This movie would have still worked with a grounded explanation, but the bizarre supernatural elements keep you in suspense. You don’t really know what the hell is going on either, and it’s stressful as hell to watch this family all lose their minds in the face of something that can’t be explained. The fact that Barry Keoghan didn’t get nominated for his performance in this is a travesty. The whole reason this movie works is because of how terrifying he is. How much dread he brings every time he shows up at Ferrell’s work, or invites him over for dinner, or starts to hang out with their daughter. This is one of those movies where all of the elements are assaulting you…the actors’ delivery, the painstakingly slow zooms, the bizarre score…they all work to make you more and more unsettled. A must watch for sure.
33. You Were Never Really Here (2018)
Summarizing a Lynne Ramsay movie definitely feels like cheapening the experience of actually watching it. The plot is definitely there, but it’s really just used as a backbone for whatever memorable visuals she wants to explore. Still, the subject matter here is intense enough to make it a thriller. Joaquin Phoenix plays a troubled veteran who gets paid to rescue young girls from sex trafficking. Armed with only a hammer, he channels his demons into violence against the men responsible, then carries the girls to safety. He is tasked with rescuing the young daughter of a state senator, and then the floor drops out from under him when that senator kills himself the next day. This isn’t just an artsy Taken, though. It’s a very heavy emotional endeavor to see what Phoenix sees, and it only seems to be adding to his PTSD. Ramsay has very little interest in showing him kill bad people…while most movies linger on the brutal justice being dispatched, we are often only shown the aftermath (in one sequence we only see bits of the security camera footage as Phoenix methodically makes his way through the building). Ramsey wants to show us how traumatized Phoenix’s Joe really is. He never talks about how he is feeling, but we are often shown the disturbing things that enter his brain. An unfinished version of this got a standing ovation at Cannes in 2017, which isn’t surprising at all. Like I said the plot is really an afterthought, it’s Phoenix’s acting and the visual choices that make it so memorable.
And that’s it! I think the genre is in very good hands these days, and am excited to see how much more intense things can get. Hope you guys enjoyed following along, and that you end up watching some of these awesome thrillers. Thanks for reading!
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