The Best Thriller Films Streaming On Hulu That You Can Watch Right Now!
1. Searching
John Cho stars as a father investigating the abduction of his teenage daughter in Quest. It’s a double-edged title — the film takes place exclusively on a computer screen (i.e. looking for his daughter and searching the web). The gimmick is an upgrade to the found footage style (also commonly used in the overlooked horror of 2014, Unfriended) and could easily get tired. But Searching never loses steam, due in large part to Cho’s super-expressive face, which manages to communicate sorrow, rage, annoyance, and hope through a cam.
2. The Cabin The Woods
When a young group of college students heads out to party in a remote lodge, they end up with more than they did. Pivoting further towards the horror genre, this film has young people being unknowingly drugged and used as lab rats by workers in an abandoned lab who appear as aliens and zombies attack them one by one. Co-written by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), the film has been lauded for making it funny, weird, and frightening, all at the same time.
3. A Quiet Place
With A Quiet Place as a director and an actor, John Krasinski really developed his playing. The plot, though, does not play too well with aliens or even fear, but Krasinski reveals the fact of a family dealing with sorrow and survival. The storyline centers on a family living in a dystopian post-apocalyptic setting, where the roar of the beast consumes the setting. The family learns to live in unity, but interpersonal conflicts threaten their cohesion. A silent world is certainly scary and gloomy and lacks dialogue wonderfully, but thanks to its strong relations and the fact that the cast can be transmitted without speech.
4. Margin Call
This film looks at workers at a Wall Street investment bank and how they manage what’s to come as the markets are about to collapse and they know the facts, plunging into the financial crisis of 2007-08. It’s an exciting journey that takes place over a course of just 24 hours, beginning with mass layoffs, and one terminated employee handing over a USB drive with details that leads to the inevitable crash being uncovered. The ensuing financial scramble is serious, to say the least. The movie was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and is widely considered to be one of the best Wall Street-based movies ever made.
5. Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky’s trippy thriller about the production of Swan Lake by the New York Ballet Company is mentally and creatively complex. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a timid, talented ballerina who persuades the artistic director of the company to cast her, the Swan Queen, in the lead role. With a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), Nina sparks up a friendship-slash-rivalry, but then begins to hallucinate an evil doppelganger, and discovers mysterious bruises on her body. In his movies, Aronofsky is known for painting unsettling, vague allegories, and one of his tightest examples to date is Portman’s depiction of an artist sacrificing herself for beauty.
6. Eye in the Sky
The film represents the last live-action movie of the late Alan Rickman and was dedicated to his memory. Exploring the ethics of drone warfare, it is set in Nairobi, Kenya, where a jihadist organization has killed an undercover British / Kenyan agent and the search starts to take them down. Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) of the British Army must determine if she should send the go-ahead for a rocket strike to knock out suicide bombers. But the scheme has a wrench; there’s an innocent teenage girl on the property, and there’s a strong chance that she’s going to be murdered, too.
7. The Game
The game is full of too many twists and turns that make your head spin, and twists of those turns and turns of those twists. Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy, but lonely businessman who is gifted by his estranged brother with a customized “real-life game,” who promises to change his life. The title game starts very harmlessly but soon continues to become more and more intimate, delving into his inner demons and tormented memories.
8. Coherence
If you’re in the mood for a psychological thriller, your appetite could be fulfilled by this one. There’s a mysterious power outage after a meteor flies by as friends are having a dinner party; suddenly, strange things start to happen. During a dinner party scheduled for eight in an abandoned house across the street, friends find a package of pictures of themselves. It turns out that the other house is an alternative, a kind of upside-down, a bizarre mirrored copy of the universe, almost as puzzled as they are, with exact replicas of each person there. It’s like life comes to life in a twisty, mind-bending funhouse, and audiences will love going for the ride.
9. Parasite
Another clash of whiz-bang genre pyrotechnics and nudge-nudge class criticisms, Parasite sees South Korean producer Bong Joon Ho operating in a similar fashion to his previous two films, the dystopian train thriller Snowpiercer and environmental love tale Okja. There’s allegorical threading of ideas going on in this Oscar-winning nail-biter, which follows a poor family that infiltrates the blemish-free modernist home of a rich family, but Bong always ratchets up the tension with each sequence. Somehow, in their execution, his movies keep getting ever more accurate.
10. Shirley
The preeminent director of women who use their canny crazy in ways that are completely fascinating is Josephine Decker. Her last appearance was Madeline’s Madeline, in which the acting class of a girl veers into surreality as a drama teacher tries to leech from the knowledge of her pupil. Today, with Shirley, she gives another story about art and women on the edge, a fictionalized story of the horror novelist Shirley Jackson, played by Elisabeth Moss with impish vigor. Aping the general framework of Virginia Woolf’s Who’s Afraid? Shirley meets a young couple, Fred and Rosie (Logan Lerman and Odessa Young), landing on campus in Bennington at the home of Shirley and her partner, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). Fred works for Stanley, and while Rosie is expected to be in auditing school, Stanley immediately enlists her to act as the coarse and agoraphobic housekeeper and caretaker.
