(Credit: Netflix)

The weekend looks different in every household. For some, it means family time, for others, it means the ideal me time. For those craving the latter, how about a marathon with the five ultimate best thriller movies, currently streaming on Netflix?

With plenty of throwback chillers and contemporary mysteries to choose from, Best of Netflix promises you a weekend with no streaming risks.

The movies we’ve picked this time for your weekend fill in all the blanks you’d expect from a good thriller. They will twist your minds in a way that unknotting would become a task. Although you’re on the other end of the screen, they will make you feel like you’re living that reality.

Even without the theatrical setting, these thrillers will immerse you with their gripping premise and top-notch storytelling. While the list is not short on edge-of-your-seat stuff, fair warning: some of them can move you in ways you cannot imagine.

The five best thriller movies to binge on Netflix this weekend

The Call (Lee Chung-hyun, 2020)

There are many thrillers on Netflix that haunt you with the lights off. But The Call? It couldn’t care less about whether they are on or off. The South Korean film follows two women, Seo-yeon and Young-sook, who strangely connect via a phone call from different times, distant by two decades, 1999 and 2019. With a rather unique, unoriginal, and inventive premise at its forefront, The Call on Netflix messes with your head to the point of no return.

What begins as a seemingly harmless exchange soon spirals into real-time consequences. The Call is, in fact, a very rare brand of suspense where the horrors aren’t physical but innately psychological. When you do watch the film, keep predictability outside the door because just when you think you might have figured it out, it catches you off guard. Rated a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Call is the ideal way to kick-start your weekend thriller marathon.

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

Sometimes the name is enough to pull you in for a binge. And when it comes to action thrillers, David Fincher is the name. The Killer on Netflix stars Michael Fassbender as an assassin whose internal monologue takes the cake for a significant portion. If you expect a rush in pace, you might be disappointed. But since it’s a weekend, we urge you to watch it with patience, as the film’s icy precision lies not just in the cutthroat action, but in its killer introduction.

The Killer takes a clinical and procedural approach to tap into the psyche of a crime professional, with an unflinching focus on the silence and sound of his process. At times, you might feel like skipping the scenes because the suspense becomes so hauntingly unbearable. Although you’ll be waiting for the bloodshed with bated breath, when it happens, you’ll see how Fincher leaves no room for stylisation, yet leaves you palpitating with the ruthless, unsentimental address that creeps and crawls on your skin.

Wind River (Taylor Sheridan, 2017)

Taylor Sheridan is not the king of the Western genre without reason. So, when you find his work on Netflix, you make a marathon out of it. Inspired by several true stories, Wind River marks Sheridan’s third film on the modern American West. It revolves around a game tracker and an FBI agent who join forces to unravel the mystery behind an Indigenous woman’s rape and murder, following the discovery of her body in a remote Indian reservation.

The Yellowstone creator made the film based on his real experiences, having heard the stories of many such cold, unprobed, and unnoticed cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Wind River brings a cutthroat portrayal of the real world to inform and raise awareness of the consistent and constant hate crime against Native Americans, where justice is a sham. It’s not just intense; it’s traumatising, but not more than those who’ve experienced and keep experiencing them first-hand.

Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001)

There are many such psychological thrillers that play with your mind. That’s what they’re supposed to do. However, watching Vanilla Sky isn’t one and the same. It serves as the English-language reboot of the 1997 Spanish film, Open Your Eyes. The sci-fi psychological thriller follows Tom Cruise in the role of a magazine publisher, who is the ultimate unreliable narrator living in an unreliable reality.

Vanilla Sky is designed to daze and disorient the audience. The line between reality and dream is as thin as a muslin fibre. From the iconic shot of deserted Times Square to the soundtrack moving with the pace and backdrop of the scenes, the film is a masterclass showcase in terrific and terrifying worldbuilding. Anyone who has watched the movie is in for a mind-bending twist worthy of retrospection. The ones who haven’t, we promise you, it’s going to be hard to blink even once.

Forgotten (Jang Hang-jun, 2017)

With thrillers, the source of tension is significantly important. Forgotten doesn’t waste time getting to the point. It opens with an unoriginal premise when a man’s brother returns 19 days after being kidnapped as a completely different person with no memories of whatever happened to him those days. Determined to uncover the truth behind his mystifying abduction, the South Korean mystery thriller misdirects to enhance the state of paranoia.

The younger brother is our point of view for Forgotten. So, the daze is collective. And by the time you reach the conclusion, the thriller changes the tone, making you introspect on how it goes from gut-punching to gut-wrenching. But don’t worry, it’s not just you. We’ve been there too.