The best psychological thrillers now streaming — and where to watch them

So you’ve found yourself longing for some sinister cinematic intentions. You’ve caught yourself daydreaming about erotic rides of the rollercoaster sort. That’s right, you’re in the mood for a psychological thriller, and who could blame you? Looks like dangerous women in red dresses and the men who love them and/or turned them dangerous in the first place are on the movie menu tonight. 

Narrowing down all the psychological thrillers now simmering across all the streaming platforms was a challenge. But we’ve sorted out just the stuff for when you want to turn the lights down low and live vicariously though bad people with even worse intentions. After all, it’s best to scratch this kind of itch before it gets out of hand — you could be kidnapping people like Anne Hathaway or robbing banks like Tony Leung any minute if you don’t submit. And take my advice: It’s good to submit to Harris Dickinson whenever possible.

Here are 10 of the best psychological thrillers now streaming, and how to watch them. 

Babygirl

Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) has it all. She’s the high-powered, silk-bloused CEO of a robotics company in New York City. She’s married to a hunky and loving theater director (Antonio Banderas). And she has as many wonderful daughters as she does multi-level homes (two!). And yet something’s not quite getting her there — and by “there,” we mean “to an orgasm,” of course. Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a new intern at her company who saves her from a street dog attack and immediately begins whispering sultry, inappropriate somethings into her ear at the office. What’s a woman in charge to do but jump right on that?

Dutch actress turned director Halina Reijn (who worked with Paul Verhoeven in Black Book and therefore knows all about how hot under the collar moral quandaries can get) coaxed one of Kidman’s greatest performances out of the always-great actor in this 2024 thriller that blurs the line between business and pleasure. Deeply vulnerable while also thrumming with barely repressed desires that she has no idea what to do with, Kidman’s Romy is, in the words of David Byrne, a real live wire. And Dickinson is just the right man — excuse me, just the right babygirl — to tap that. 

How to watch:Babygirl is now streaming on HBO Max.

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The Cell

Making the “psychological” in “psychological thriller” literal, this sumptuous cinematic feast from writer/director and visual fabulist Tarsem Singh (Immortals, The Fall) takes us inside the outrageously avant-garde dreamworld of a serial killer in order to save his next would-be victim  in this 2000 chiller. Jennifer Lopez stars as an empathetic psychologist named Catherine who’s mastered the ability to use a new technology that allows two people to share brain space – basically, she can beam straight into their subconscious and, like a mechanic, treat their mental issues from the inside. 

Then the cops come a-knockin’ (led by Vince Vaughn) after another girl gets kidnapped by a killer named Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio). See, Carl’s unfortunately fallen into a coma before they could get her whereabouts, so it’s up to Catherine to step inside his haunted palace of a mind and somehow find the clues to save the girl. That’s a lot of plot to describe a movie that’s 100% about the visuals, and my God, what visuals. Borrowing from modern surrealists like Damien Hirst and Odd Nerdrum, Singh delivers a (excuse the pun) mind-blowing phantasmagoria of scary unreality for Lopez to wander through, all while wearing one extraordinary costume designed by the legendary Eiko Ishioka after another. 

How to watch:The Cell is now available to rent or purchase on Prime Video.

Watcher

Credit: Courtesy of IFC Midnight. An IFC Midnight release.

Actor and low-key scream queen Maika Monroe continued her roll of picking exquisite thrillers to star in (see also: It Follows, The Guest, Longlegs) with 2022’s Watcher, the most underrated and dare I say best of the entire Maika bunch. In writer/director Chloe Okuno’s feature-length film debut, Monroe plays Julia, an American who’s just moved to Bucharest with her distracted husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), for his job. 

Unable to speak the language and feeling lost and purposeless, Julia begins wandering about the city aimlessly — when she’s not sitting at home staring at the enormous wall of windows across the street, anyway. And like Rear Window before her, a load of trouble comes raining down when Julia spots somebody over there watching her back. Awash in icy atmospherics and a strain of tension that slowly closes around your throat, Watcher truly does the term “Hitchockian” justice. 

How to watch:Watcher is now streaming on Netflix and Shudder.

Eileen

An adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s delicious 2015 novel, Eileen stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eileen, a mousy secretary at the local prison in 1965 who spends her downtime taking care of her alcoholic asshole of a retired cop dad (Shea Whigham). Dreary doesn’t come close to covering it. And so when a pop of color in the form of prison psychologist Rebecca St John (Anne Hathaway, chewing the scenery with camp aplomb) sweeps into the same slushy Massachusetts burg, Eileen becomes obsessed — as do we all.

As Rebecca discovers there may be more to one inmate’s story than initially thought, a fire is lit in her belly to find justice for the wrongly imprisoned man. Dragging Eileen into a scheme that Eileen can’t embrace fast enough, everything goes spectacularly sideways real fast, well beyond Rebecca’s wildest imaginings. Like the seedier cousin to Todd Haynes’ Carol, Eileen is the full-on lesbian noir that Haynes only flirted with; Eileen director William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) fully embraces the pulpiness, and all of his actors are committed to the high melodramatic wavelength. A nastily under-appreciated little gem. 

How to watch:Eileen is now streaming on Hulu.

Compliance

Before his work became synonymous with Kate Winslet saying “wooder” in Mare of Easttown, director Craig Zobel gifted us with 2012’s Compliance, the movie that turned Ann Dowd from notable character actress to full-on name recognition. Based on a real-world incident that happened in 2004, Dowd plays Sandra, the manager of a fast-food restaurant who receives a phone call one day from a man claiming to be a police officer. He tells her that one of her employees has stolen from a customer, and it’s Sandra’s job to detain said employee until the cops can arrive to arrest them. 

Using the vague information the officer tells her, Sandra quickly surmises the person at fault has to be young employee Becky (Dreama Walker). And thus begins a nightmare for Becky, as Sandra and the other employees decide it’s their duty to do whatever this stranger’s voice on the telephone tells them to do, even as each demand becomes more and more disturbing. (Look out for a profoundly upsetting turn from Philip Ettinger, later from First Reformed, as one of Becky’s co-workers tasked with “security.” Shudder.) A horrific fable about our blind faith in institutions and how easily weaponized our self-assuredness can be, Compliance couldn’t be more timely as we watch our own neighbors’ intentions curdle around us.

How to watch:Compliance is now streaming on Netflix.

Infernal Affairs

Before Martin Scorsese remade it into his Oscar–winning film The Departed, there was Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s 2002 crime saga masterpiece Infernal Affairs.  And if we’re being honest, we might even think it’s better than what Marty came up with. 

On one side you’ve got Andy Lau as Lau Kin-ming, a criminal who gets sent to become a mole in the police department. And on the other, you’ve got Tony Leung as Chan Wing-yan, a cop who’s gone undercover in the same crime syndicate Lau’s from. Neither is aware of the other at first, but over the course of the film it becomes their job to sniff the other out. And before long, our idea of who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy couldn’t get more twisted. What follows is a tightly wound aria of suspicion and Hong Kong action wizardry — it simply doesn’t get any better than this. (And the two sequels are pretty great too!)

How to watch:Infernal Affairs is now streaming on HBO Max.

Femme

Credit: Fantasia International Film Festival

Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s fleet, 99-minute thriller begins with Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) being brutally beaten by a gang of drunken homophobic thugs one night after performing in drag at a club. Soon thereafter, once he’s recovered physically if not mentally, Jules bumps into the leader of the aforementioned thugs when they’re both cruising a gay sauna. His attacker’s name is Preston (George MacKay), and he doesn’t recognize Jules out of drag, and so Jules seizes onto the opportunity. 

Unfortunately, what that opportunity is and what Jules wants from it becomes as confused as Preston’s own closeted ass. As the two tumble into a rough (and, it must be said, extremely hot) sexual relationship, Femme benefits from the fact that it’s never clear where the film is going. Not until it gets there, and even then it’s all twisted up. Jules and Preston’s murky desires, exquisitely rendered by both actors, make the both of them into two of the most complicated and deeply realized queer characters put on-screen this past decade. 

How to watch:Femme is now streaming on Hulu.

Red Rooms

Calling Red Rooms a “courtroom drama” doesn’t even come close to capturing how incredibly disturbed and disturbing this 2023 movie is, even though on its surface it is mainly just that. From Quebecois director Pascal Plante, it stars Juliette Gariépy as a fashion model named Kelly-Anne who’s obsessed with the ongoing criminal trial of an accused serial killer. In Gariépy’s truly unforgettable performance, Kelly-Anne begins camping out early every day so she can sit in the courtroom and listen to the gruesome details of the case, which seem to have very little effect on her. Instead, she seems more intent on staring the creep directly in the eyes. 

But for what reason? Gariépy gives away very little and the film follows suit, so Kelly-Anne’s icy fixation becomes the movie’s true horror show the longer that we’re forced to stare at it. Befriending another serial killer obsessive (Laurie Babin) and harassing one of the victim’s mothers is just the beginning of Kelly-Anne’s slide into psychological sadism. Red Rooms is a truly provocative take on the true crime genre.

How to watch:Red Rooms is now streaming on Shudder.

Fair Play

Credit: Sergej Radovic / Courtesy of Netflix

A throwback to the heyday of ’90s thrillers about sexual politics like, well, anything that starred Michael Douglas for about a decade, writer/director Chloe Domont’s 2023 film stars Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor as Luke and Emily, a pair of cutthroat hedge-fund analysts who’ve been having a secret affair when they go home at night. Although “secret affair” makes it sound more diabolical than it appears in practice — really, they’ve just been keeping their romance to themselves since it’s not 100% in compliance with HR  to be dating a co-worker.

They find out why that’s the case when Emily gets the big promotion that Luke had been gunning for, as his bruised ego leads to everything at home and in the office having a spectacular unraveling. Ehrenreich and Dynevor each turn in terrific work, weaving through the thorny complexities of male-female power imbalances in the wake of #MeToo, especially Dynevor, who keeps finding ways to muddy up our inclination to root for Emily in this situation she’s found herself in through no real fault of her own. Fair Playturns out to be an incisive excavation of the hetero here and now.

How to watch:Fair Play is now streaming on Netflix.

Saltburn

At Oxford on a scholarship, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan in a naked-dancing, bathtub-water-slurping, star-making turn) wants everything that popular rich and beautiful Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) has. It’s not hard to see why; Felix is a 6-foot-5-inch, aristocratic stud with an estate the size of a small country. Luckily for Oliver, worming his way into the entire Catton family — which includes  Rosamund Pike as mother Elspeth Catton, Richard E. Grant as dad Sir James, and Alison Oliver as sis Venetia — proves riotously easy. As Six Degrees of Separation taught us, all rich people want is a fancy pot of jam. And Oliver is fancy jam incarnate.

One of the funniest and meanest black comedies to be gifted to us in recent years, writer/director Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman ruffled as many feathers as did her debut. Nobody seemed to be able to suss out Saltburn‘s intentions: Was it a class satire made by a member of the upper class? To say Fennell delights in smashing all her hands on all our buttons at once is the understatement of the century. But when it makes for this much horny, hateful fun, I say smash, smash away. 

How to watch:Saltburn is now streaming on Prime Video.