5 Best Thrillers To Watch on Paramount + This Weekend

Published Oct 22, 2026, 7:49 PM EDT

Ben Brewster is a filmmaker, critic, screenwriter, and actor whose work sits at the intersection of film culture, craft analysis, and storytelling.

He is a movie list contributing writer at Collider and a contributing writer for High on Films, where he covers contemporary cinema, independent film, and festival releases with an eye toward narrative structure, performance, and visual language. 

Ben is an active film festival participant, having worked with Newport Film, the Nantucket Film Festival and as a screener for the Austin, Boston & Woodstock film festivals. 

He brings to that work a programming instinct shaped by years of close engagement with independent and documentary cinema. This comes with a deep investment in the kinds of films that rarely find their way into the mainstream conversation without someone willing to advocate for them.

His background spans documentary and narrative filmmaking, film marketing, and production, including work with award-winning directors. This as well as developing his own indie production company, Lilac Creative Studio, through which he develops and produces original work across fiction and nonfiction forms. 

His debut documentary, Diamond in the Rust, is an examination of economic redevelopment and displacement in the Queens area of New York City. The film was recently accepted to the Unisphere Film Festival, the Defense of Democracy Film Festival, and the Urbanite Arts & Film Festival. This would mark his first festival recognition as a director. 

In addition to his writing and programming work, Ben hosts Beneath the Bloom, a film podcast exploring the work behind the scenes in cinema, and the struggles one can face to make a movie become a reality. The show reflects the same sensibility that runs through all of his work. A conviction that film is not merely entertainment but one of the most powerful tools human beings have for understanding each other.

Across mediums, his work is driven by a deep belief in film as a communal, transformative art form.

Friday night thrillers come with a risk. Pick wrong and half the room is checking their phones thirty minutes in. A bad thriller will mistake speed for suspense, something the film Speed doesn't do itself, but its sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control, does with impressive precision. Nevertheless, Paramount+ has five strong candidates that can tell the difference, released between 2005 and 2019 from directors with a large variety of tonal languages and creative visions.

Halloween is nine days away, but not everything scary depends on a jump scare or a gory monster. These particular projects create an unease for the audience through a cinematic foundation cultivated from brutally violent action sequences and a patient sense of narrative purpose. Two of these movies won Best Picture, and the other three never came close to getting that kind of attention. Awards voters missed a lot, since Shutter Island and Killer Joe both play better today than upon their initial release. The ranking below favors movies that sustain tension from the first scene to the last.

Rewatch value counted too, because a weekend pick should hold up especially when someone on the couch has already seen it. One more warning — Killer Joe was released with an NC-17 rating and earned it, so think about who you're watching with before you press play. The other four are rated R and a smoother fit for a varied group. Some weekends call for something loud and political, and others call for a long cold stare into the Texas desert, but regardless, this list is varied enough to find some premise that will pique your interest.

5 'V For Vendetta' (2005)

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

James McTeigue directed V for Vendetta from a screenplay by the Wachowskis, adapting Alan Moore and David Lloyd's graphic novel into a story about a man whose face the audience never sees. Few thrillers have left a stranger fingerprint on the real world than V for Vendetta. The mask itself showed up at protests around the globe, and the image still appears in the cultural zeitgeist from time to time. Hugo Weaving plays V behind a Guy Fawkes mask he never takes off, requiring him to lean on his voice and posture to portray the character. He turns those aspects into a theatrical kind of courtly-like menace and his alliterative introduction speech is one of the most quoted moments of the film. Natalie Portman plays Evey, a young woman pulled into his campaign against a fascist government.

V for Vendetta sits at the bottom of this list because its thriller title runs a bit loose. Watch this one with someone who has strong opinions about politics, because V for Vendetta invites an argument every ten minutes. The investigation plot keeps moving. However, McTeigue cares more about speeches, symbols, and a masked man conducting explosions as if it were an orchestra. The domino sequence in V's hideout and the final train ride toward Parliament are the visual set pieces people tend to remember. It's a good Friday pick for anyone who wants sociopolitical rhetoric combined with explosions.

4 'Killer Joe' (2011)

Image via LD Entertainment

Come into Killer Joe knowing as little as possible and let it ambush you. William Friedkin directed the film from a screenplay by Tracy Letts who adapted his own stage play. It starts as a dark crime comedy about a family planning an insurance scheme. Emile Hirsch plays Chris, a debt-ridden Texas kid who hires a Dallas detective who moonlights as a hitman to kill his mother for money. Matthew McConaughey is that detective, playing the villain role with polite manners and a creepy stillness that slowly tightens his grip over the entire conflict. Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church, and Gina Gershon play the rest of the family.

The laughs in this one come from how badly everyone in the family reads the situation. Letts, who also wrote August: Osage County has a knack for family dinners that go off the rails. The family mostly plays the whole story straight and Killer Joe gets increasingly funnier and scarier because of it. The fried chicken sequence near the end is the one people remember in infamy, because of the sheer discomfort it caused audiences. The photography renders the Texas trailer park interiors in sweaty, harsh light that makes Killer Joe feel hot to the touch. Skip this one with parents or on a first date.

3 'Shutter Island' (2010)

Image via Paramount

Weather tends to matter when you pick a thriller, and Shutter Island is a storm movie. Martin Scorsese adapts this novel into a 1954 mystery when a hurricane pins everyone on a Boston Harbor island hospital for the criminally insane. Leonardo DiCaprio leads as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal who gets more rattled and unnerved with every conversation. He has been tasked with finding a patient who vanished from a locker room, with Mark Ruffalo as his partner, Chuck Aule. Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow play doctors with gentle manners and a steady habit of dodging simple questions.

Scorsese opens on a ferry pushing through fog and keeps the audience unsteady with an assembled score of dissonant classical pieces. The project divided audiences upon release because of how it asks to be taken seriously as genre material. Scorsese doesn't get enough credit for his horror instincts here. A second viewing of Shutter Island changes how nearly every scene reads. Put it on after dark with the lights low.

2 'No Country For Old Men' (2007)

Image via Miramax Films

The quietest movie on this list is also the tensest. The Coen Brothers' adapted Cormac McCarthy's novel into a 1980 West Texas chase built on a simple set-up. Llewyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, finds the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong while hunting antelope and walks away with two million dollars. Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, who carries a captive bolt pistol and treats a coin flip as a moral system, comes after him. He turns ordinary places like a gas station or a motel room into deathly traps. His bowl cut and flat voice won him an Oscar and the character stands out as one of the more recognizable movie villains. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who trails both men and narrates in a weary voice that frames everything as a story about a world he no longer understands.

No Country was shot by Roger Deakins, on a sprawling West Texas landscape that is both beautiful and hostile at the same time. Woody Harrelson shows up late as a hired gun and shares one of the most memorable conversations in No Country For Old Men with Bardem. The movie has almost no musical score, and expect an ending that refuses to give you the showdown that first-time viewers want. It is filled with scenes of high stakes and potentially brutal violence playing out in smaller gestures.

1 'Parasite' (2019)

Image via CJ Entertainment

Bong Joon-ho opens on the Kim family folding pizza boxes in a semi-basement apartment, then lets a tutoring job at the Park family's modernist hillside domicile become an infiltration on the whole household. Show Parasite to someone who says they do not watch subtitled movies. It won four Academy Awards, Best Picture, and became the first non-English language film to take the top prize. Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, and Jang Hye-jin play the Kims, while Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong play the parks whose generosity depends on never seeing how the Kims actually live.

The set for Parasite was built from scratch, giving the story a geography of stairs that does half the storytelling. Its reputation can occasionally scare people off, so it helps to know Parasite is funny and fast long before it becomes frightening. Every class detail feels planted with care, from the smell that Mr. Park keeps noticing to the rain that means very different things to each family. The flood sequence is one of the most devastating stretches of any recent thriller and the peach allergy scheme itself shows how many moving parts Bong is capable of keeping in the air at once. A masterclass of balancing comedy with terror.