The best thriller movies on Hulu

12 Hour Shift is not political, unless you want to count its grisly, madcap plot about a crew of night nurses and the organ-trafficking scam they’ve been running out of the back of an Arkansas hospital as a commentary on the American healthcare system. Mostly, it’s an ensemble comedy as black as a longtime smoker’s lungs, full of the kind of working-class gallows humor that gets you through a long night on your feet. 12 Hour Shift is Brea Grant’s second feature outing as a writer-director, but she’s best known as an actor. And that shows here: Although it boasts a large cast that includes David Arquette and wrestler Mick Foley, 12 Hour Shift hinges on the performance of ’s Angela Bettis as Mandy, the opioid-addicted nurse at the center of her small town’s black-market organ trade. The material is edgy and at times outrageously gory and chaotic, but Bettis gives Mandy an exhausted, fed-up quality that keeps the movie on track, even (or maybe especially) when she’s pissed off about having to do everything herself. []

To say Bound is a double-meaning title understates the way the Wachowskis thread the concept into the fabric of the movie, where Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon are bound literally, bound to each other, bound to the powerful men who control their destinies, and bound by their own ideas about what intimacy could mean for them. Since this is a crime film, getting unbound involves a plan to steal $2 million in mob money and run off together, but the Wachowskis remain conscious of how their theme is developing, even as they choreograph suspenseful setpieces with a “Look, ma!” flair that’s only occasionally distracting. The stakes are high, but to the Wachowskis’ credit, the question isn’t “Will they get away with the money?” but “Will they make it out together (with their lives and their tenuous trust intact)?” That’s a different level of engagement than the crime genre usually encourages. []

Like William Friedkin’s underrated previous film, The Hunted, the relentlessly claustrophobic Bug strips its story down to the basics. A dramatically grunged-up Ashley Judd is all jangled nerves and edgy intensity as a hard-luck waitress with a drinking problem, a coke habit she can’t afford, a missing son, and an abusive ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr.) fresh out of jail and eager to pick up where he left off. Judd spies a brief respite from loneliness in the person of mysterious drifter Michael Shannon, an AWOL veteran with demons of his own. As in The Exorcist, Friedkin establishes a tone of hard-edged, almost documentary-style realism before ratcheting up the horror to nearly unbearable levels. Bug skirts camp ridiculousness throughout, especially during a fever-dream last act in which Judd embraces Shannon’s insanity with disconcerting conviction. Like a thinking man’s The Number 23, Bug seems to take place largely inside the demented psyche of someone with a loosening grasp on reality. At other times, Bug suggests Safe as remade by David Cronenberg, both in its biological, venereal horror, and in its paranoia about a contemporary world hopelessly corrupted by viruses, germs, and infections, literal and metaphorical. Judd and Shannon’s unnerving performances ensure that even when Bug leaps deliriously off the deep end, it remains rooted in the loneliness of two very sad people desperate for any kind of meaningful connection, no matter how mad or destructive. Even at its most preposterous—Friedkin’s latest rivals his Druid horror flick The Guardian for sheer lunacy—Bug remains disconcerting, real, and raw. It poignantly suggests that some lost souls would rather be crazy and doomed than alone. [] (leaving May 31)

Where put a postmodern twist on slasher films, The Cabin In The Woods takes on the whole genre and twists even harder. Director Drew Goddard, screenwriter of and a veteran of and Alias, co-wrote the film’s script with , who worked with him on Whedon’s . The script brings to the fore Whedon’s love of subverting clichés while embracing them and teasing out their deeper meaning. []

Not enough attention has been paid to The Clovehitch Killer, directed by first-timer Duncan Skiles, from a script by co-screenwriter Christopher Ford, starring Dylan McDermott as a beloved small-town scoutmaster who may be a serial rapist and murderer. ’s Charlie Plummer plays the man’s son, in a story that unfolds in three distinct parts, each asking two unsettling questions: What if this seemingly upstanding, conservative Christian community leader is actually a dangerous criminal? And what is it about who he is and where he lives that might let him get away with something truly heinous? The Clovehitch Killer takes an unusually slow-paced and experimental approach to mystery and suspense, but it’s also a cogent critique of how “the culture wars” can provide a cover for someone whose sins are far beyond what his neighbors can imagine. [Noel Murray]

The minimalist sci-fi mindbender Coherence boasts a scenario as tried and true as the walking dead: Bickering individuals hole up in a house during a crisis, discovering that the threat looming beyond their walls may pale in comparison to the conflict happening within them. There’s a wrinkle in the design this time, however, and it’s that the characters are their own worst enemies not just in a figurative sense, but in a literal one, too. Confused? Writer-director James Ward Byrkit has the answers, and he’s not stingy about providing them. What separates his film from other exercises in Twilight Zone trickery is its refusal to play coy with a high concept. Unlike, say, the feature-length rug-pull , Coherence doesn’t get off on withholding. It would rather milk its premise for all it’s worth than stockpile secrets. The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects—of which there are basically none—but on heavy doses of paranoia. []

The rare Stephen King adaptation to capture the author’s signature sense of inexplicable, internal/external terror, The Dead Zone stands as one of David Cronenberg’s most straightforward and eerily effective early works. Trimming King’s source material down to its lean essence—and benefiting from the lack of his imaginative monsters, which never properly translate to the screen—the film concerns Maine schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), who turns down an offer to stay the night with his girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams), subsequently gets into a traffic accident, and awakens from a coma five years later with the gift of second sight. Far from a blessing, however, the power proves to be a damnable curse, turning Johnny into a freak show whose time and attention is coveted by many, but only for their own selfish ends. As the man’s vision expands, his life shrinks down to nothing—an isolated existence which Cronenberg depicts through direction that routinely lingers on the empty silences between words and the distant whooshing of wintry New England wind. Cronenberg’s icy directorial detachment lends The Dead Zone a haunting creepiness, greatly amplified by Walken, whose halting verbal rhythms and glassy stare imbue Johnny with an alienated (if not outright alien) quality. []

Destroyer, from director Karyn Kusama, is very much in the mold of antiestablishment ’70s cop movies like Serpico and Dirty Harry, but with a gender-swapped twist: Nicole Kidman stars as Erin Bell, an LAPD detective who’s still scarred by an undercover assignment that went tragically wrong nearly 20 years earlier. Unable to forgive herself for her role in the debacle, Erin let her guilt consume her from the inside like a cancer. Now, she’s a hard-drinking, rage-filled, brittle husk of a woman who regularly sleeps in her car. But Kusama and Kidman give Erin’s hard-bitten amorality an intriguing twist by making her, for all her violent tantrums, ineffective and eternally frustrated. In the opening minutes of the film, Erin stomps onto a murder scene on the dried-up banks of the L.A. River, demanding information from the cops standing around the body. They tell her to go home and get some rest. It’s a dynamic that repeats throughout the film, as Erin descends back into her own personal hell after receiving a coded message from Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of the high-desert gang she and her former partner/boyfriend Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated all those years ago. []

During the ’80s golden era of American action movies, there was a certain way these movies looked: burnished steel, gleaming sweat, bulging muscles that couldn’t possibly exist without chemical enhancement. The movies that people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were making looked nothing like real life. One fascinating thing about 1988’s , quite possibly the best action movie ever made, is that it didn’t look anything like that. As played by Bruce Willis, McClane was something other than a steroidal superman. He was an ordinary human being, and kind of an asshole. As the movie opens, we see McClane grumpily huffing at his airplane seatmate, his affable cartoon-character limo driver Argyle, and finally at his estranged wife. He’s a New York cop who wants to remain a New York cop, and he can’t accept that his wife’s business career has taken off in Los Angeles or that she’s using her maiden name. Seeing her for the first time in months, he freaks out at her and then immediately realizes that he’s being an asshole when it’s too late to do anything about it. But fortunately for McClane, before he has a chance to make more of an ass out of himself, some terrorists show up. And all of a sudden, he’s his best self. []

It is both easy and impossible to separate Roman Polanski the person from Roman Polanski the filmmaker when considering his briskly entertaining new thriller The Ghost Writer, and that’s entirely to the film’s benefit. It’s easy because Polanski remains a consummate craftsman, just as capable of making swift, witty, precisely stylized diversions now as when he made Knife In The Water nearly 50 years ago. And yet there’s no mistaking the oppressive sense of isolation and exile that hangs over the proceedings, and how it relates to a man who has known public disgrace and life on the run. Based on Robert Harris’ novel The Ghost, the film opens with cars pulling off an island ferry onto the mainland; every car, that is, but one. The driver washes ashore a couple of days later, presumed dead from an accident or a suicide, but of course there’s more to the story. As it turns out, the deceased is a close confidant to a disgraced former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), and he’d been on the island to help put the finishing touches on Brosnan’s highly anticipated memoir. Brosnan’s publisher, eager to get the book out fast, hires Ewan McGregor, who normally specializes in quick-and-dirty celebrity autobios, to punch up the tome and turn it around in a month. When McGregor arrives, he finds the book a terrible bore, but he runs into much bigger problems once he learns of the deeper, darker intrigue surrounding Brosnan and his inner circle. [] (leaving May 31)

Squirming just below the surface of Goodnight Mommy, a nerve-shredding thriller from far-flung Austria, is an almost comically predictable plot twist. Moviegoers hip to the true identities of Tyler Durden and Keyser Söze should figure it out by the end of the first reel, when the filmmakers have already begun to show their hand. But you don’t go to a midnight movie to have your mind blown. You go to have your stomach churned, your hairs put on end, your fingers forced over your eyes. And by that base criteria, this elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it. Nearly all of the film takes place in a secluded country house, surrounded by an idyllic forest and vast cornfields, perfect for frolicking and fleeing. This is the new home of 9-year-old twins Elias (Elias Schwarz) and Lukas (Lukas Schwarz), as well as their mother (Susanne Wuest), an anchorwoman who’s just undergone cosmetic surgery. To these troublemaking boys, there’s something not quite right about Mommy: Beyond her strange, frightening appearance—a pair of bloodshot eyes peeping out from behind a mask of bandages—she just seems different. For one thing, she’ll barely acknowledge Lukas’ existence, addressing only Elias and providing the boys with a single dinner, one set of clothes in the morning, etc. Soon, the brothers begin to wonder if it’s someone else entirely under all that gauze—if, in fact, their mother has been replaced by a malevolent imposter. []

Stories confined to a single location had a special place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock, who saw them as opportunities to experiment: with long takes in , 3D in , and studios sets in and , one of his celebrated and most imitated films. But one wonders what the master of suspense would have made of the Danish emergency call center that provides the backdrop for Gustav Möller’s intriguing thriller The Guilty. A utilitarian bullpen with six desks and a water cooler, the setting of Möller’s debut feature is distinctly awkward and uncinematic—a ploy to get us into the point of view of Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), a disillusioned Copenhagen narcotics officer who has been reassigned to dispatch until a high-profile internal investigation blows over. It might not be the kind of movie that anyone needs to see twice, but The Guilty’s variations on the classic building blocks of suspense implicate our own guesswork in interesting ways—suggesting, in a roundabout manner, that the qualities that make Asger a driven protagonist might make him a less than ideal officer of the law. []

Matthew McConaughey topped a resurgent 2012 as the eponymous character in Killer Joe, a redneck noir that bristles with sleazy wit. McConaughey plays a police detective who moonlights as a contract killer, a double life that gives McConaughey an advantage in investigative cover-ups (see also: Morgan, Dexter), but one that requires careful management so McConaughey doesn’t cross the streams. He’s utterly psychotic, but he keeps his anger and creepy peccadilloes in check while spending much of his time leveraging power and control from the desperate, greedy pond scum that requires his services. Whatever threat he poses is hidden behind the eyes. []

The stranded family of The Lodge are locked in a cold war even before the harsh weather strands them indoors. Teenage Aidan (’s Jaeden Martell) and his younger sister, Mia (Lia McHugh), give a chilly reception to their father’s new fiancé, Grace (Riley Keough). Their resentment runs deeper than the usual reluctance to warm to a surrogate parent; it stems from a trauma The Lodge inflicts early, the tragedy and unspeakable loss—a jolt of shattering violence—that sends the plot into glacial motion. Grace, as it turns out, has deep wounds of her own. Her father was the leader of a radical Christian cult whose entire congregation committed suicide when she was 12, leaving her the only survivor. The first real glimpse we get of her is in the front seat of a car, back to the camera, eyes in the rearview mirror. They want to appear friendly. They mainly look haunted. []

There’s a scene early in Luce, a riveting psychodrama about race and preconceptions, that’s as tense as any thriller, and all it really comes down to is two people talking in a classroom, their deceptively polite conversation shading into passive-aggressive antagonism. One of the two is the title character, a beaming A-student played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. The other is his government and history teacher, Ms. Wilson (Octavia Spencer), the only instructor at their Virginia high school who ever seems to challenge the star athlete, debate-club champion, and soon-to-be valedictorian—though she, too, views him as an “important example to the school,” a Black kid who’s climbed his way to the top of the class. Harrison perfectly captures the poise and charisma of an academic golden child, the kind who knows just how to talk to adults, projecting sincerity and gratitude with just a touch of good humor, so as not to come off an unlikable, Tracy Flick-like overachiever. But the actor also lets us see, early and often, how that congeniality is a kind of front: a whole manufactured persona Luce can toggle on or off. And as Ms. Wilson carefully questions the promising pupil about an assignment he’s turned in that’s raised some red flags for her, his mask of ingratiation slips, just long enough for him to issue what sounds an awful lot like a veiled threat. It’s a remarkable, chilling performance: from Harrison, certainly, but also from his character, playing code-switching mind games with his teacher. []

The Man From Nowhere, the highest-grossing movie, foreign or domestic, in South Korea in 2010. (For comparison’s sake, America’s highest-grossing movie that same year was .) The Man From Nowhere is a raw fucking film. It tells its story with an all-out intensity that no American action movie could ever hope to match. It gets complicated, but here are the broad strokes: A quiet, mysterious loner lives by himself in an apartment building and runs a pawnshop. The only person he ever talks to is one neighbor, a little girl whose mother is a reckless heroin addict. He acts annoyed whenever the little girl comes around, but he looks after her. The mother steals some heroin from some gangsters, and so they kidnap both the mother and the girl. And they’re not just drug traffickers; they’re also organ harvesters, and they plan to do some bad things to these poor people. So the pawnshop owner, who happens to be a former special forces assassin, has to take on this entire merciless criminal syndicate to get his friend back. []

Only about 30 rocket-paced minutes have whizzed by before Mission: Impossible­—Fallout first flirts with truly impossible odds. Ethan Hunt, the human missile of American intelligence that Tom Cruise has been popping back in to play for more than 20 years now, is masquerading as a mysterious terrorist, the perfectly named John Lark, to buy back some plutonium he’s lost to a cabal of doomsday extremists. The bad guys, alas, will accept only one form of payment: the sneering anarchist supervillain Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who Hunt put away in the last Mission: Impossible and is now forced to bust out of police custody to avert nuclear catastrophe. Forget, for a moment, the risk that our hero will unleash the world’s most dangerous man back on the world. How, exactly, can Hunt free his nemesis without either killing a lot of innocent cops or blowing his cover as an agent of chaos who wouldn’t think twice about leaving a trail of bodies in his wake? []

There’s always been a degree of cheek to the Mission: Impossible film series, which for two decades has offered a knowing, but generally exciting, take on a 1960s TV series that pitted mask-happy, gadget-wielding spies against megalomaniacal madmen. In both the film and TV versions, any resemblance to actual espionage was purely coincidental. Though ’ introduced some emotional stakes, the M:I movies have mostly served as a testing ground for how well a director could craft an exciting action sequence around Tom Cruise. Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, the series’ fourth film, charges director Brad Bird with the task, betting that the animator behind and would have similar luck with flesh and blood in his live-action debut. The bet pays off. And then some. []

Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its romance and derring-do. Even by those standards, The Nightingale is tough to take. Set in the Oz of 1825, it confronts audiences with the full horror of colonialism, including enough scenes of sexual assault to warrant the trigger warning offered up before several screenings of the film. But while what we see and can never unsee over the course of a grueling two-plus hours is certainly extreme, it’s not gratuitous. That’s partially because Kent, who made the spectacular spookfest , isn’t some B-movie shockmeister, rubbing our noses in ugliness for the sake of it. She’s pulled back the veil of awful history to find a cracked reflection of the modern world—and a corresponding, hard-won beauty in solidarity among survivors. []

The last time Bong Joon Ho made a parable of class warfare, he set it aboard one hell of a moving metaphor: a train looping endlessly around a frozen Earth, its passengers divided into cars based on wealth and status, upward mobility achieved only through lateral revolution. Parasite, the South Korean director’s demented and ingenious movie, doesn’t boast quite as sensational a setting; it takes place mostly within a chicly modern suburban home, all high ceilings, stainless steel countertops, and windows instead of walls, advertising the elegant interior decoration within. But there’s a clear class hierarchy at play here, too; it runs top to bottom instead of front to back, vertically instead of horizontally. And though we’re watching a kind of warped upstairs-downstairs story, not a dystopian arcade brawler, Parasite races forward with the same locomotive speed as , with plenty of its own twists and turns waiting behind each new door. []

Based on a short story by paranoid futurist Philip K. Dick, whose work inspired the similar Minority Report, John Woo’s smart thriller Paycheck may not intend to be political, but it’s marked as much by its era as post-Watergate thrillers like The Parallax View or Three Days Of The Condor. In considering a machine that works like a giant crystal ball, the film questions the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare, saying that once the future can be predicted with any degree of certainty, the world is destined to be destroyed. Of course, like most science fiction that contends with such fortune telling, Paycheck gets snared by the usual questions of free will versus predestination, raising all the unavoidable paradoxes that are impossible to resolve. But the inherent slips of logic do nothing to undermine the Dickian anxieties at the story’s core, which looks to the future in order to comment meaningfully on the present. []

Suffering has long been characterized as a woman’s lot, canonized in the form of Catholic saints and celebrated in literature and art. (Pablo Picasso merely made it explicit when , “Women are suffering machines.”) To defy this edict will bring further misfortune, leaving only two choices: either smile and let your soul die piece by indignant piece, or embrace the darkness and learn to enjoy it. Josephine Decker’s Shirley is about a woman who opted for the latter: Shirley Jackson (played here by Elisabeth Moss), author of high-school staple “The Lottery” and the oft-adapted The Haunting Of Hill House.  Mocked by her peers, mistreated by her husband, and burdened by mental illness, Jackson lived with the psychic evils that lurk in her writing. But for Decker, what’s important about Shirley’s misery is how she used it to fuel her work. []

Gallons of ink have been spilled on Paul Feig’s female-focused approach to comedy, so why isn’t one of the year’s best vehicles for women getting more press? Starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in a twisted tale of suburban intrigue, A Simple Favor pioneers the subgenre of mommy-blog noir. But while it lives in the mundane realm of play dates and PTA meetings, the film also recognizes that, while they might spend a lot of time with kids, its characters (and target audience!) are still intelligent adults with sophisticated tastes, from dry gin martinis to designer menswear. []

Based on the best-selling novel by Scott Smith (who also wrote the screenplay), A Simple Plan both simplifies and brings into focus the already simple and effective thriller. Two farm-town brothers (Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton) and their friend (Brent Briscoe) discover a bag stuffed with $4.4 million and decide to hold onto the contents until springtime, when the coast is clear. Almost immediately, greed and insecurities get to work, and the plan begins to unravel. The premise is older than The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, and A Simple Plan may remind some of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, particularly for the way both films set bloody, sudden violence against the snow-covered Midwest. But where the Coens’ breakthrough film was often cold, and sometimes mean-spirited and cynical, Sam Raimi’s film beats with a human heart. []

Heartless evildoers receiving their ironic comeuppance have been a horror staple since the days of EC Comics. The indie horror anthology Southbound puts a contemporary spin on this tradition, presenting five tales of irreversible decisions and their gruesome consequences. Sometimes the lessons in these mini-morality plays are ploddingly obvious—especially when Larry Fessenden explicitly explains them in his cameo role as a radio DJ—but then again, the same can be said for Tales From The Crypt. Set against the bleak landscape of the Southwestern desert, the segments overlap on several levels. Besides the Monty Python-style transitions, in which characters from one episode appear in the next, the movie also maintains a certain stylistic consistency throughout, which has its pluses (the segments share a timeless feel, à la ) and minuses (shaky hand-held camerawork is an unfortunate constant). Regardless, that cohesion is a credit to the creative forces behind the film, and a welcome change from the wild inconsistencies of horror anthologies like the ABCs Of Death series. []