Four best mystery thrillers on Netflix to watch right now
It’s been a while since mystery thrillers on Netflix stopped playing by the old rules… You know the ones: the same old dead body, the same old suspicious neighbour and the same old liars presenting “their version” in front of the detective, which clearly are white lies. Fine, nothing wrong with that, but you see, this genre has so much potential, and Netflix seems to have caught the nerve.
Take Woman in Cabin 10. There is a possible murder, sure, but then nobody believes the woman who says she saw it, and before you go snooping around who the killer is, you are trying to work out whether the whole thing even happened the way she remembers it.
Reptile is almost playing the same notes, because we get another straightforward murder case, and it keeps opening doors that probably should have stayed shut.
So yeah, forget finding Waldo in a room, because we’re hiding him in a circus. These four mystery thrillers will scratch the itch of a tough mystery solve.
Four best mystery thrillers on Netflix to watch right now
Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004)
Starting with a writer as our hero, Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is not in a good place when you meet him, and you can tell before the film bothers spelling it out for you. His marriage is finished, and the man has vanished off to a cabin, where he spends most of his time looking like he has given up. And fair enough, the man has gone through a lot.
The twists come knocking when there is an actual knock at the door… and standing outside is John Shooter, holding a manuscript and accusing Mort of nicking his story. Now what do you do with that? Slam the door? Well, Mort takes the high road and tries to prove him wrong, which sounds easy.
Except the proof he needs will not fall into his hands! Shooter keeps coming back, and then people start getting hurt, so we are well past a row between writers now. Come on, the man’s named “Shooter”. And once you know Secret Window comes from Stephen King’s Secret Window, Secret Garden, maybe stop trusting the obvious answer… because with King, that’s never the right answer.
The Weekend Away (Kim Farrant, 2022)
A girls’ trip to Croatia should sound like a lot of fun! A few drinks, a nice flat, a break from normal life… but don’t forget, you’re in the mystery thriller zone now because soon, Beth (Leighton Meester) wakes up after a night out with barely any memory of what happened, and her best friend Kate is gone. Not answering her phone, not back at the apartment, just gone. So yes, the holiday mood dies rather fast.
Beth starts retracing the night because what else is she meant to do, and every person she speaks to seems to make things worse. Just then, bam, Kate is found dead, and the police start looking at Beth. Yeah, and now, along with her, you have to solve this mystery. The cool part is it’s also a book adaptation based on Sarah Alderson’s novel of the same name.
Offering to the Storm (Fernando González Molina, 2020)
Okay, we are wandering into dark mystery thriller territory with Offering to the Storm and Beware, as this one is not messing about. Inspector Amaia Salazar is called into a case involving the death of a baby, and very soon, she hears whispers about some ritual and something called the Inguma. As if missing a baby wasn’t enough, that old belief is involved.
Amaia starts investigating; of course, it does not stay one case for very long, because other deaths begin to form a queue. The whole thing is pointing back towards the Baztan valley and secrets that have been festering there for years. The film is the final chapter in Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy, so there is history hanging over Amaia from the start, and that matters because the case keeps getting involved with her own past. Folklore and police work – it doesn’t get better than this!
The Call (Lee Chung-hyun, 2020)
As the name suggests, a phone rings in your old family home, and, at first, it seems like nothing more than a wrong number. Then Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) realises the woman on the other end is calling from the very same house… twenty years earlier. The caller is Young-sook, played by Jeon Jong-seo, and once the two women work out that they can affect each other’s lives across time, it’s the most fascinating thing to watch.
Well, almost. Because Young-sook is not someone you want holding the keys to your past, and once Seo-yeon understands what she is capable of, every call carries the chance of changing the present before she can stop it. That is where The Call gets really dirty, because hanging up does not fix a thing when the person on the other end can rewrite your life from 1999. So, good luck with that!