The 6 Most Suspenseful Thrillers Released Since 2000, Ranked
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
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The 21st century has produced no shortage of nerve-rattling thrillers, so picking just 6 is a tough task. Nevertheless, the titles below represent the cream of the crop, the films that turn suspense into high art, and each of them does it in a different way.
Some generate suspense through killers hiding in plain sight, others through desperate investigations, psychological manipulation, or characters whose terrible decisions keep accumulating until disaster seems inevitable. All are modern classics.
6 'The Invisible Man' (2020)
"Surprise." Leigh Whannell's reinvention of the classic Universal monster story follows Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) after she escapes an abusive relationship with wealthy optics engineer Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Shortly afterward, Adrian apparently dies by suicide. Cecilia should finally be free... except she gradually becomes convinced that Adrian isn't dead at all. Instead, she believes he has discovered a way to become invisible and is continuing to torment her.
On its face, the premise sounds pretty absurd, but Whannell and the cast pull it off amazingly well. For instance, the director knows how to weaponize negative space. The camera frequently frames Cecilia off-center, leaving suspiciously large portions of rooms apparently empty. Viewers begin searching backgrounds for movement. That said, most of the heavy lifting is done by Moss. She turns in an intensely physical performance, making the terror feel totally believable.
5 'No Country for Old Men' (2007)
"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" This modern classic succeeds as both a dark, intelligent drama and a tense thriller. After a drug deal goes wrong, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) makes the extremely understandable but extremely unwise decision to take the money. From that moment onward, No Country for Old Men becomes an extended pursuit in which Moss tries to remain one step ahead of the murderous Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).
The whole way through, the Coen brothers gave us the suspense we expect from a thriller, but none of the heroics. Music is used sparingly, violence can arrive suddenly, and no one has plot armor. While the climax famously subverts the tropes associated with this kind of story, Chigurh himself is as scary as any of the genre's great antagonists, frequently deciding lives on a literal coin toss.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Coen Brothers Movie Would You Thrive In? Lebowski · O Brother · Fargo · No Country
Nobody writes people like the Coen brothers. The decent ones. The talkers. The ones who stopped trying years ago. And the ones who can already see how bad this is going to get. Four films, four completely different ways of handling trouble. Eight questions decide which one you would actually walk out of.
🎳Lebowski(1998)
🎸O Brother(2000)
❄️Fargo(1996)
🪙No Country(2007)
01
A bag of money lands in your lap. What happens next? Every Coen film starts roughly here. It never goes smoothly.
02
Somebody is being completely unreasonable with you. How does it go? Coen dialogue is mostly people failing to understand each other.
03
What is your actual relationship with work? Everyone in these films is either working far too hard or not at all.
04
Long drive, bad weather, nobody else on the road. How are you? There is always a drive in these films. It is never a good drive.
05
You are offered a shortcut that is not quite legal. This is the moment where the Coens find out who you really are.
06
The plan has fallen apart completely. What is your move? In a Coen film the plan always falls apart. That is the genre.
07
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Nobody writes a line quite like the Coens. Which one is yours?
08
How does your film end? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your movie.
The Verdict Is In Your Coen Film Is…
Four films, four completely different ways of handling money, trouble and other people. This is the one you would survive, why it suits you, and what it would cost you to be there.
The Big Lebowski
You have quietly arranged your life so that very little can get to you, and a surprising number of people find that infuriating. You would be completely at home here.
- The Dude is the only person in the film with no ambition, and the only one who comes out the other side undamaged. That is not an accident.
- You do not chase things. You let situations arrive and you deal with them at your own pace, which is a genuine skill however lazy it looks.
- This is a full crime plot happening around a man who mostly wants his rug back, and that is exactly the energy you would bring to it.
- Everything goes wrong. You abide. The film ends.
O Brother
You talk your way through life and it works far more often than it should. Give you a bad situation and an audience and you will find a way out of both at once.
- Everett never has a plan that survives contact with reality. He has something better, which is the ability to keep talking until a new one turns up.
- You are the optimist in the group, the one who makes a ridiculous idea sound reasonable at two in the morning.
- This is the warmest film the Coens have made. It is a chase, a comedy and a musical at once, and nobody in it is quite beyond saving.
- You would end up famous entirely by accident, and act like you planned it all along.
Fargo
You would survive Fargo because you are the only kind of person who does: patient, decent, and completely unimpressed by anybody trying to be clever.
- Marge Gunderson solves the whole case by being polite, thorough and unhurried while everybody around her panics. That is the entire argument of the film.
- You do the boring parts of the job, which is precisely why you would notice the thing everyone else walked straight past.
- Fargo is about ordinary greed causing enormous damage, and about one person who simply refuses to be corrupted by any of it.
- You would go home at the end of it, have dinner, and sleep perfectly well.
No Country
You do not expect the world to be fair and you stopped being surprised about it a long time ago. That clear-eyed quality is exactly what this film asks for.
- No Country is the Coens at their coldest: a film where being smart, fast and careful might still not be anywhere near enough.
- You plan for the worst, you keep your own counsel, and some part of you is already working out the exit.
- Llewelyn Moss is competent, prepared and resourceful, and the film is honest about whether any of that is ever sufficient.
- You would see it coming. Whether that helps is the one question the film refuses to answer.
4 'Zodiac' (2007)
"I need to know who he is." Some mysteries become more frightening when they're solved. Zodiac is frightening because certainty remains perpetually out of reach. This meticulous thriller from genre maestro David Fincher chronicles the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized Northern California during the late 1960s and early 1970s while sending cryptic letters, ciphers, and threats to newspapers. But rather than turning the investigation into a conventional detective story, Fincher focuses on the psychological damage caused by a mystery that refuses to provide a clean ending.
We see this through the impact it has on three men: cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Years pass. Suspects emerge and disappear. Evidence almost fits but not quite. The investigation becomes an obsession capable of swallowing careers, relationships, and enormous portions of people's lives. A brilliantly grim portrait of obsession.
3 'Prisoners' (2013)
"Pray for the best, prepare for the worst." Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners begins with two young girls disappearing during Thanksgiving in suburban Pennsylvania. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) quickly focuses on a suspicious RV driven by Alex Jones, but the police are forced to release Alex after finding insufficient evidence to hold him. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), the father of one missing girl, becomes convinced they've released the man responsible. The whole cast is strong, but Jackman gives an absolutely ferocious performance as a desperate man pushed beyond every moral boundary.
Believing Alex knows where the children are, Keller abducts him and begins conducting his own brutal interrogation. The possibility that Alex might genuinely possess crucial information makes these scenes almost unbearable, while the possibility that he doesn't makes them even worse. Complementing this perfectly, Roger Deakins turns gray skies, dark houses, empty streets, and relentless rain into an atmosphere of suffocating unease.
2 'Uncut Gems' (2019)
"This is how I win." This movie feels like an extended panic attack. Uncut Gems features a 'top of his game' Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a New York jeweler and compulsive gambler who acquires a rare Ethiopian black opal that he expects to sell for an enormous sum. From there, Howard begins moving money, jewelry, and collateral around with frantic confidence, becoming increasingly ensnared in a chain of debts, wagers, lies, and risky schemes.
The storytelling here is propulsive, barely giving us space to breathe. Characters talk over each other, Daniel Lopatin's score throbs beneath conversations, phones keep ringing, doors refuse to open when they should, and Howard's problems proliferate, hydra-like. Sandler himself is the eye of the storm, delivering a performance so good and so well-suited to the material that it's hard to picture anyone else in the role.
1 'Gone Girl' (2014)
"What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?" Fincher strikes again, taking Gillian Flynn's fantastic novel and turning it into a new high-water mark for thriller storytelling. The setup is iconic by now: Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns home to discover that his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) is missing. There are signs of a struggle, suspicious financial details, and enough problems in the marriage to make Nick look increasingly terrible once the cameras arrive.
Then, around its midpoint, Gone Girl reveals that we haven't even been watching the movie we thought we were. The whole thing is a marvel of narrative misdirection, every twist and turn perfectly orchestrated. Thematically, the film also digs much deeper than most thrillers. The ending is harrowing: two characters trapped in a twisted, mutually assured destruction pact, pretending to be a happy couple for the cameras. An instant classic.
Gone Girl
- Release Date
- October 3, 2014
- Runtime
- 149 minutes
- Director
- David Fincher
- Writers
- Gillian Flynn
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