Four dark thrillers on Netflix that will mess with your head
Dark thrillers should make you ill at ease… otherwise what’s the whole point? A dark thriller should start interfering with your judgement before you notice it happening. Something you didn’t register earlier can alter the meaning of what you have already seen; that’s where the real thrill is.
Like Forgotten starts with a missing brother and keeps changing what you think happened, while Fractured turns a hospital visit into a nightmare where you are never sure who to believe.
Then you have films like The Call, where one phone connection across time becomes a weapon, and that is where the genre gets dirty, because the danger is not always some man lurking in an alley. It can just be a bad decision sometimes. And you know the feeling when a thriller gives you an answer, only for that answer to make everything worse? That is the real gold.
These four Netflix thrillers live in that same area and will make you question everything before you reach the interval.
Four dark thrillers on Netflix that will mess with your head
Calibre (Matt Palmer, 2018)
You must’ve heard that old warning about digging a hole for yourself, and it’s now time to watch it happen in real time. Calibre spends ninety minutes showing you what happens when two men grab the shovel and just don’t stop. Vaughn and Marcus go to a remote Highland village for a hunting weekend, but an accident in the woods leaves people dead, and instead of telling the truth, they try to cover it up, making everything worse.
Be careful because this is where Matt Palmer gets his hooks into you, as the menace does not come from some masked killer waiting in the woods, and then comes the main villain – guilt. The worst knowledge to have is that one lie has always demanded another. The villagers know the land, and they notice inconsistencies, while you can feel the room shrinking each time Vaughn or Marcus opens his mouth. So what would you do at that point: confess or keep digging?
Wind River (Taylor Sheridan, 2017)
If you go into Wind River expecting a straightforward murder investigation, then you are terribly mistaken. Cory Lambert, a US Fish and Wildlife tracker, finds the frozen body of a young Native American woman on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, which brings FBI agent Jane Banner into a place where she knows neither the land nor the people. Cory helps her understand the place, but he is dealing with his own loss too, so the case hits close to home for him.
The case keeps widening, and this is where the film becomes so much bigger than the victim. By then, you are not just waiting to find out who killed her but also seeing how little protection Indigenous women can have in a system that has failed them for years. You might feel something changing or have that sudden epiphany, but let it process; give it time. It is one of those thrillers where even if the murder gets an answer, you know the problem around it has not gone anywhere.
I Came By (Babak Anvari, 2022)
At first, I Came By is all youthful rebellion and class resentment, with Toby, played by George MacKay, breaking into the homes of wealthy Londoners and leaving graffiti behind as his own little act of defiance. Then he chooses the house of Sir Hector Blake, a retired judge with a spotless reputation. His credibility score is so high that people trust him before he has even said a word. Ah, but this so-called “gentleman” doesn’t seem so when Toby finds something hidden in the basement that was never meant to be found.
Now Blake barely needs to defend himself at first, as his status has already done half the work. On the other hand, Toby is the young man who broke into his house, so put those two versions of events in front of the authorities and ask yourself whose story arrives with more credibility. Anvari developed I Came By from a screenplay that won the Sundance Institute’s NHK Award, and that’s one more reason to binge it.
The Body (El Cuerpo) (Oriol Paulo, 2012)
Before getting into the corpse, here is something you should know: The Body travelled well for a film. Oriol Paulo’s 2012 Spanish thriller inspired remakes in South Korea and India, and you can understand why once you know the plot. A body disappears from a mortuary, and everyone connected to the dead woman starts looking suspicious
The dead woman is Mayka Villaverde, a wealthy businesswoman whose younger husband, Álex, has more than a few reasons to look nervous when Inspector Jaime Peña starts asking questions. He has a lover, and he was hardly mourning the marriage, so an autopsy is the last thing he wants. Then Mayka’s body disappears from the mortuary, and Álex starts finding signs that seem meant for him. Also, details only Mayka should know begin surfacing, and before long he cannot tell whether someone is having him on or his dead wife is still making his life harder.