The 6 Most Suspenseful Thrillers Released Since 2020, Ranked
Suspense gets interesting when the movie makes you feel stupid for relaxing. You think the danger has passed because the room is quiet. You think the person on the phone sounds helpful. You think there is probably a rational explanation for the figure across the street. Then one detail shifts and your body notices before your brain does.
These six are very different movies, but all of them understand one ugly truth. And that is — fear gets worse when certainty disappears. A voice can be lying. A camera can miss something. A building can become a trap. A person can be standing three feet away and still feel impossible to prove. That is the kind of suspense that lingers after the credits because the movie has taught you to distrust ordinary things.
6 'The Guilty' (2021)
The Guilty follows Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), a suspended LAPD officer working emergency dispatch, who answers a call from a woman he believes has been abducted and spends the night trying to save her without ever leaving the call center. Gyllenhaal carries almost the entire film through voice, reaction, and the increasingly desperate certainty that he understands what is happening.
The hook is brutal because Joe is acting on fragments. He hears traffic, breathing, partial answers, background noise. He starts building the situation in his head and then treating that mental picture like fact. The more invested he gets, the more you feel how dangerous that becomes. I love thrillers that make information itself dangerous, and this one basically turns a headset into a loaded weapon.
5 'Watcher' (2022)
Watcher follows Julia (Maika Monroe), an American woman who moves to Bucharest with her husband and becomes convinced that a man in the apartment building across from theirs is watching her, just as reports spread about a serial killer targeting women in the city. Monroe makes Julia’s fear painfully believable because the entire problem is that everyone around her thinks belief is the issue.
What gets under my skin is how ordinary the threat looks. A silhouette in a window. A man in a supermarket aisle. Somebody sitting too close in a theater. Nothing is dramatic enough to justify panic on its own, which means Julia keeps getting pushed into the humiliating position of defending her instincts. The suspense comes from waiting for proof and slowly realizing proof may arrive much later than safety requires.
4 'The Call' (2020)
The Call follows Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye), a woman who returns to her childhood home and discovers that the landline can somehow connect her to Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo), another woman living in the same house twenty years earlier. Their conversations begin as an impossible friendship until changing events in the past starts rewriting Seo-yeon’s present in increasingly terrifying ways.
This is where the movie gets nasty in a really fun way. A phone call can save someone, erase someone, change a family, change a room, change who is alive. And because Young-sook understands the power of the connection faster than Seo-yeon understands the danger, every conversation starts feeling like negotiation with somebody holding reality hostage. Time travel here is not wondrous. It is leverage.
3 'Missing' (2023)
Missing follows teenager June (Storm Reid) after her mother disappears while vacationing in Colombia, forcing June to investigate from home using search engines, account logins, video calls, location data, and every digital trace she can access. The entire film unfolds through screens, but somehow it never feels visually trapped.
The reason it works is that June is constantly interpreting partial evidence. She finds a clue, builds a theory, gets emotionally attached to that theory, then discovers she misunderstood the clue. That cycle becomes addictive because the audience is solving alongside her. Will Merrick and Nick Johnson directed the film, and they are incredibly good at making normal digital behavior feel urgent. Password resets, cached photos, old messages, security footage, suddenly all of it feels like detective work. The thriller is basically asking how well you know someone if most of what you know came through a screen.
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.
2 'Fall' (2022)
Fall follows Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), two friends who climb a 2,000-foot abandoned radio tower as a way of confronting Becky’s grief and fear after the death of her husband, only for the ladder beneath them to collapse and leave both women stranded at the top with almost no way down.
This movie is evil if you are even slightly afraid of heights. There is barely anywhere to hide from the premise. No villain is needed. Gravity is enough. The girls have limited water, unreliable phones, and increasingly desperate ideas for reaching the ground. What makes it more than a stunt is how quickly every tiny object becomes valuable. A rope. A drone. A shoe. At that height, everything becomes survival equipment.
1 'The Invisible Man' (2020)
Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man follows Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) after she escapes an abusive relationship with wealthy optics engineer Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and is told he later died by suicide, only for her to become convinced that Adrian has found a way to turn himself invisible and is still controlling her life from inside rooms where nobody else can see him.
The movie understands something deeply frightening about abuse. Being believed can become part of the battle. Cecilia notices doors move, footprints appear, objects shift, and people around her keep seeing only a traumatized woman unraveling. That makes every empty frame feel occupied. The film weaponizes negative space better than almost any thriller in recent memory. You start staring at corners of rooms because the camera has trained you to suspect emptiness. And once Cecilia realizes she may actually be right, the suspense becomes vicious because proof does not automatically mean escape.
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