Want to add some heart-pounding excitement to your next streaming session? One of the best streaming services around, Amazon’s Prime Video, is home to a large catalogue of top-notch film titles, especially when it comes to the thriller genre.
Though they may take the form of an action movie or a horror favorite or a foreign flick, thrillers all have the same thing in common: They pack in plenty of pulse-pumping suspense and tension, keeping audiences on the edge of their seats as they watch characters navigating dangerous terrain, seemingly impossible mysteries and high-stakes situations.
If it’s plot twists, unreliable narrators and an ever-growing sense of impending danger you’re after for your next movie marathon, satisfy your desire for thrills and chills with the 5 best Prime Video thrillers to stream right now.
‘Memento’
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Long before the likes of “Inception”, “Interstellar” and “Oppenheimer”, writer-director Christopher Nolan was bending our brains with his 2000 neo-noir thriller “Memento.”
Guy Pearse stars as Leonard Shelby, a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia — resulting in short-term memory loss — who culls together Polaroid photographs, handwritten notes and his own tattoos to uncover the perpetrator who murdered his wife, Catherine (Jorja Fox).
And if it sounds like a straightforward thriller, it’s anything but. Nolan plays with both style and structure throughout, alternating between black-and-white and color sequences as well as chronological and reverse-chronological order. Altogether, it makes for a dizzyingly excellent watch, with a solid ensemble that includes Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano and Stephen Tobolowsky.
Watch “Memento” on Prime Video now
‘The Handmaiden’
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Directed, co-written and co-produced by celebrated South Korean director Park Chan-Wook, this 2016 erotic thriller and crime drama tells the sensual tale of two women: Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a Japanese heiress living a secluded life on a countryside estate, and Nam Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a Korean woman hired to serve as her new handmaiden.
But the maid has a few professional secrets than her CV seemingly let on: She is actually a pickpocket who has been recruited by a conman (Ha Jung-woo) to help him seduce the lady and steal her large fortune.
Inspired by the Victorian novel “Fingersmith” by British author Sarah Waters, Chan-wook uses the book as “the loose inspiration for another visually sumptuous and absorbingly idiosyncratic outing,” per critics on Rotten Tomatoes, where the BAFTA-winning thriller has a 96-percent approval rating.
Watch “The Handmaiden” on Prime Video now
‘Winter’s Bone’
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The first of Jennifer Lawrence’s four Academy Awards nominations — she would go on to win the Best Actress trophy for her memorable turn in “Silver Linings Playbook” — was for the harrowing 2010 drama “Winter’s Bone”, which sees the A-lister star as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, an unflinching Ozark Mountain girl tasked with caring for her mentally ill mother while raising her 12-year-old brother Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and 6-year-old sister Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson).
When the already destitute family is at risk of losing their home due to the crimes of her drug-dealing father, Ree is forced to navigate dangerous social terrain to hunt him down and keep a roof over the family’s head. Led by a steely, star-making performance by Lawrence, “‘Winter’s Bone’ is a welcome reminder that thrillers don’t have to be loud and boisterous to grab the attention and keep it captive,” writes film critic James Berardinelli.
Watch “Winter’s Bone” on Prime Video now
‘You Were Never Really Here’
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One of Joaquin Phoenix’s most intense performances—and that’s saying something—comes courtesy of this 2017 hitman thriller, written and directed to taut perfection by Lynne Ramsay. The actor hauntingly plays Joe, a traumatized hired gun who specializes in rescuing trafficked girls and uses brutal methods against their captors, all while dealing with his own PTSD that stems from his past in the military and his abusive father.
When Joe is tasked with rescuing Nina Votto (Ekaterina Samsonov), the kidnapped daughter of a New York State senator, he is forced to reckon with not only high-level corruption and abuses of power but also his own childhood trauma.
“Bracingly elevated by a typically committed lead performance from Joaquin Phoenix, ;You Were Never Really Here’ confirms writer-director Lynne Ramsay as one of modern cinema’s most unique—and uncompromising—voices,” reads the critical consensus over at Rotten Tomatoes.
Watch “You Were Never Really Here” on Prime Video now
‘Contagion’
“Contagion” obviously takes on even greater poignancy in a post-COVID society, but it still prompted chills aplenty when it debuted back in 2011: directed by Steven Soderbergh, the medical disaster thriller chronicles the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that quickly and terrifyingly turns into a worldwide pandemic. (Sound familiar?)
With a starry ensemble that includes Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow, the film frantically follows the medical community racing to find a cure and control the rising panic, while the rest of society tries not to spin out of control.
Playing into real human fears—one that we, sadly, know all too well — “Contagion” was praised by The New Yorker’s David Denby “as a highly controlled film about an out-of-control event, a film so sure-handed and intelligent that it has an invigorating, even an enlightening, quality, as if a blurred picture had suddenly come into focus.”
Watch “Contagion” on Prime Video now
