Notable Thriller Films, 2025–2026
I would use “thriller” rather broadly here—crime/noir, espionage, psychological, survival, techno-thriller, and horror-thriller. That seems more useful than imposing a rigid genre boundary. In fact, one reason 2025 was unusually interesting is precisely the amount of cross-breeding between thriller and horror. (TheWrap)
2025 — my essential shortlist
- Black Bag — Steven Soderbergh
- Espionage / psychological thriller
- Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett
- An intelligence officer must discover a mole; his wife may be one of the suspects.
- Probably my first recommendation.
- Extremely economical—about trust, marriage, surveillance, betrayal and epistemological uncertainty rather than explosions.
- TheWrap called it one of the strongest espionage thrillers in years. (TheWrap)
- ★★★★★
- Companion — Drew Hancock
- Sci-fi / psychological / relationship thriller
- Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid
- Starts almost like a slightly peculiar romantic weekend and gradually reveals that the relationship itself rests upon a technological asymmetry.
- Especially interesting if one is thinking about AI, agency, ownership and the distinction between a person and an object.
- ★★★★★
- Sinners — Ryan Coogler
- Historical horror / supernatural thriller
- Michael B. Jordan
- Much more than a vampire movie: race, music, memory, community, seduction and cultural appropriation.
- One of those rare genre films whose metaphysics are more interesting than its monsters.
- ★★★★★
- 28 Years Later — Danny Boyle
- Post-apocalyptic / horror thriller
- Written by Alex Garland
- Less interested in zombies per se than in what decades of catastrophe do to culture, childhood, ritual and memory.
- A considerably stranger film than an ordinary franchise sequel.
- ★★★★½
- Weapons — Zach Cregger
- Mystery / horror thriller
- A group of children from one classroom mysteriously vanish during the night.
- Fragmented viewpoints gradually reconstruct what happened.
- Particularly worth seeing for its nonlinear assembly of fragments.
- ★★★★½
- Dangerous Animals — Sean Byrne
- Serial-killer / survival / shark thriller
- Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison
- A shark-diving operator is considerably more dangerous than his sharks.
- Lean, nasty, wonderfully uncomplicated suspense filmmaking. (TheWrap)
- ★★★★
- Drop — Christopher Landon
- High-concept psychological thriller
- Meghann Fahy
- A woman on a first date receives anonymous messages ordering her to murder the man sitting across from her—or her child will die.
- Essentially a Hitchcockian closed-system exercise updated for the smartphone era. (TheWrap)
- ★★★★
- The Gorge — Scott Derrickson
- Sci-fi / action / romantic thriller
- Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy
- Two operatives occupy watchtowers on opposite sides of a mysterious chasm.
- The first half—the isolation, distance and communication across an abyss—is much better than the more conventional monster-action second half. Critics were divided, but the central premise is excellent. (Rotten Tomatoes)
- ★★★½
- Dead of Winter — Brian Kirk
- Crime / survival thriller
- Emma Thompson
- A widow in the frozen north accidentally discovers a kidnapping.
- Interesting because survival knowledge—not superhero competence—becomes her weapon. (TheWrap)
- ★★★★
- Relay — David Mackenzie
- Paranoia / corporate thriller
- Riz Ahmed, Lily James
- Built around an anonymous intermediary who negotiates between whistleblowers and corporations.
- Old-fashioned conspiracy filmmaking with distinctly twenty-first-century communication systems.
- ★★★★
Also worth seeing from 2025
Caught Stealing — Darren Aronofsky; crime thriller with an ordinary man accidentally entering a violent underworld.
Highest 2 Lowest — Spike Lee; Denzel Washington in a contemporary reworking of Kurosawa’s High and Low.
The Amateur — espionage/revenge thriller, with Rami Malek as a CIA cryptographer forced into field action.
Bring Her Back — psychologically brutal horror-thriller from Danny and Michael Philippou.
Eddington — Ari Aster’s paranoid contemporary Western/thriller; politically and socially grotesque rather than conventionally suspenseful.
2026 — the strongest films so far
As of 21 August 2026.
- Crime 101 — Bart Layton
- Crime / noir / heist thriller
- Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry, Barry Keoghan
- A meticulous jewel thief operating along Los Angeles’s 101 Freeway is pursued by an equally obsessive detective.
- Clearly indebted to Michael Mann’s Heat, but unusually well executed.
- Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at 88%, and several critics have praised its return to intelligent adult crime filmmaking. (Rotten Tomatoes)
- ★★★★★
- For your taste, this may be the first 2026 film I would choose.
- The Rip — Joe Carnahan
- Police / crime thriller
- Matt Damon, Ben Affleck
- Miami cops discover millions of dollars in cash; the discovery progressively destroys the certainty of who can trust whom.
- A very classical thriller premise: money enters a closed group and converts relationships into suspicion. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★½
- Send Help — Sam Raimi
- Survival / psychological thriller
- Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien
- An employee and her obnoxious boss survive a plane crash and become stranded together.
- What makes it interesting is the reversal of workplace power once civilization disappears. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★½
- Project Hail Mary — Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
- Science-fiction / existential thriller-adventure
- Ryan Gosling
- A scientist wakes aboard a spacecraft without memory of his mission and gradually discovers that Earth’s survival depends upon him.
- Not a pure thriller, admittedly, but too good and too relevant to omit.
- Critics and audiences are both around 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. (Rotten Tomatoes)
- It is ultimately less about saving Earth than about encountering an utterly nonhuman Other and discovering the possibility of relation.
- ★★★★★
- Is God Is — Aleshea Harris
- Revenge / crime / black-comic thriller
- Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Sterling K. Brown
- Twin sisters seek revenge against the father responsible for devastating their family.
- Highly stylized and deliberately uncomfortable; currently one of the year’s most critically admired thrillers, with reported RT scores around 97%. (Tom’s Guide)
- ★★★★½
- Dead Man’s Wire — Gus Van Sant
- True-crime / hostage thriller
- Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Colman Domingo, Al Pacino
- Based on Tony Kiritsis’s extraordinary 1977 Indianapolis hostage case.
- A good example of the thriller as a pressure chamber for class resentment, humiliation and spectacle. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★
- How to Make a Killing
- Black-comedy / murder thriller
- Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Ed Harris
- A disinherited man discovers that seven relatives stand between him and a fortune.
- Think inheritance comedy gradually transformed into homicidal arithmetic. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★
- Mother Mary — David Lowery
- Psychological / psychosexual thriller
- Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel
- Pop star and estranged fashion-designer friend reunite.
- More dreamlike and pathological than plot-driven—a thriller of identity, performance and desire. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★
- Her Private Hell — Nicolas Winding Refn
- Near-future / psychological thriller
- Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton
- Refn’s first feature in roughly a decade.
- A young woman searches for her father in a metropolis engulfed by a mysterious mist.
- Inevitably more interested in atmosphere, bodies and alienation than ordinary narrative causality. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★
- I Want Your Sex — Gregg Araki
- Erotic / psychological thriller
- Cooper Hoffman, Olivia Wilde
- A young assistant enters a sexual relationship with a provocative artist/employer.
- Araki returns to questions of desire, power, transgression and generational difference. (Marie Claire)
- ★★★★
Interesting, but substantially weaker
Mercy — Timur Bekmambetov
- Chris Pratt is accused of murdering his wife and has 90 minutes to convince an AI judge played by Rebecca Ferguson that he is innocent.
- The premise is almost irresistible in 2026—algorithmic justice literally replacing human judgment.
- Unfortunately, critical reception has been poor: Rotten Tomatoes currently lists 24%. (Rotten Tomatoes)
- Film: ★★½ / Idea: ★★★★★
Still coming in late 2026
These are the ones I would particularly watch:
Hope — Na Hong-jin — September 9
- Korean sci-fi/horror thriller from the director of The Wailing.
- Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender.
- Police, aliens and an increasingly incomprehensible encounter.
- Potentially the most interesting remaining thriller of 2026. (Marie Claire)
Primetime — Lance Oppenheim — September 25
- Robert Pattinson.
- Fictional treatment of the origins of the To Catch a Predator phenomenon.
- The obvious comparison is Nightcrawler: media, voyeurism and moral contamination. (Marie Claire)
Victorian Psycho — Zachary Wigon — September 25
- Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie.
- Gothic governess story whose title tells us approximately where things are headed. (Marie Claire)
Verity — October 2
- Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett.
- Writer enters another writer’s house and discovers that the manuscripts may reveal considerably more than intended.
- Pure psychological-thriller machinery. (Marie Claire)
How to Rob a Bank — David Leitch — November 13
- Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai.
- Twenty-first-century bank robbers using social media as part of their operational system. (Marie Claire)
A Place in Hell — Chloe Domont — December 25
- Michelle Williams, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Andrew Scott.
- Rivalry inside a criminal-defense law firm.
- From the director of Fair Play, so I would expect psychological violence more than gunfire. (Marie Claire)
If I reduced the entire two-year period to only ten
- Black Bag — espionage, trust, marriage
- Companion — AI, ownership, subject/object
- Sinners — history, music, community, predation
- Weapons — fragments gradually finding one another
- 28 Years Later — catastrophe becoming culture
- Crime 101 — contemporary LA noir
- Project Hail Mary — encounter with the radically nonhuman Other
- The Rip — money producing paranoia
- Send Help — civilization collapses; power relations reverse
- Is God Is — trauma transformed into revenge
And if I reduced those ten to three films particularly likely to interest you, I would choose Companion, Black Bag, and Project Hail Mary. The curious common denominator is that all three are ultimately about whether the Other before me is truly an Other—or merely something I have classified, possessed, used, or misunderstood.
