5 Best Suspenseful Movies On Mubi

Staff & contributors

Some movies are so enthralling they pull you to the edge of your seat, and there you stay. You won't feel the time pass with the following list of great suspenseful movies and shows to stream now.

Find the best suspenseful movies to watch, from our mood category. Like everything on agoodmovietowatch, these suspenseful movies are highly-rated by both viewers and critics.

German writer-director Christian Petzold tells a story of a fateful encounter trapped in a love triangle. Thomas, Laura, and her husband Ali quickly become enmeshed in a three-way relationship rich with desire, pressure, and betrayal. Another Hitchcockian tribute by Petzold, Jerichow has all the elements of a neo-noir, but it's set in broad daylight. The plotting, the secret love affairs, the femme fatale with no back up plan: all the necessary ingredients for a chaotic tale, wrangled by desirous tensions, to say the least.  A film whose mystique is rather haunting, but far from spectral, Jerichow doesn't conceal its clear references to "The Postman Always Rings Twice".

Genre: Drama

Actor: Andre Hennicke, Benno Fürmann, Claudia Geisler-Bading, Hilmi Sözer, Knut Berger, Marie Gruber, Nina Hoss

Director: Christian Petzold

In The Beasts, the idyllic semi-retirement that a French couple seeks in the Galician countryside — growing organic vegetables, fixing up abandoned farmhouses — devolves into a terrifying slow-burn nightmare. This beautifully shot yet spiritually ugly thriller plunges us straight into an atmosphere of crackling social tension that never abates. We begin after the event that turns local farmer Xan (Luis Zahera) and his brother Loren (Diego Anido) against French transplants Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs): the latter two have vetoed the sale of land to a wind turbine company in favor of preserving the village’s rustic character. Incensed by what he sees as the theft of his birthright by an outsider, Xan orchestrates a steadily intensifying campaign of terror against the couple.

Though much slighter than the physically imposing Ménochet, Zahera makes for a profoundly menacing presence, and Xan’s seemingly endless appetite for hostility and vindictiveness charges the film with a deeply unsettling sense of inevitability. His performance alone would mark The Beasts as a standout, but an unexpected switch in character focus late on in the film wrests it out of Xan’s grasp and reorients the movie as a study of grim resolve — making it a film of two equally remarkable halves.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Actor: David Menéndez, Denis Ménochet, Federico Pérez Rey, Luis Zahera, Luisa Merelas, Machi Salgado, Marie Colomb, Marina Fois, Xavier Estévez

Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen

Snowpiercer is an under-the-rader post-apocalyptic thriller that offers the grittiness that many times only Asian cinema may achieve. South Korean director Joon-ho Bong forces audiences to forget that Chris Evans was ever a Marvel superhero, as he leads a revolt of his fellow “low-class” citizens against the self-appointed gentry in a train that contains all remaining members of the planet. With immersive environments and a layered script, this film melds together social commentary and moral discourse in a visually arresting and vastly entertaining package.

Genre: Action, Drama, Mystery, Science Fiction

Actor: Adnan Haskovic, Alison Pill, Chris Evans, Clark Middleton, Dana Green, Ed Harris, Emma Levie, Ewen Bremner, Go A-sung, Go Ah-sung, Griffin Seymour, Jamie Bell, Jim High, John Hurt, Joseph Bertót, Kendrick Roger Ong, Kenny Doughty, Ko A-sung, Ko Asung, Luke Pasqualino, Luna Sophia Bar-Cohen, Magda Weigertová, Marcanthonee Reis, Octavia Spencer, Parry Shen, Paul Lazar, Peter Hallin, Robert Russell, Sean Connor Renwick, Seisuke Tsukahara, Song Kang-ho, Stephen Park, Steve Park, Tilda Swinton, Tomáš Dianiška, Tómas Lemarquis, Tyler John Williams, Vlad Ivanov

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Rating: R

It doesn’t feel quite right to call Pacifiction a political thriller — at 2 hours 45 minutes and with an unhurried, dreamlike pace, it’s hardly the adrenaline rush that that categorization suggests. But Albert Serra’s film is still suffused with all the paranoia and intrigue that the genre promises, just at a slower burn. The specters of colonialism and nuclear apocalypse hang low over the movie, which is set in an idyllic Tahiti, where Benoît Magimel’s Monsieur De Roller is stationed as France’s outgoing High Commissioner, a bureaucratic relic of the country’s imperialist history. As shady figures and strange rumors about a military submarine begin to arrive on the island, a paranoid De Roller struggles to exert political control — and, in the process, seems to lose some of his own sanity. With an ethereal score, defiantly murky plot, hallucinatory cinematography, and some of humanity’s greatest horrors hanging over it like a pall, Pacifiction feels like a fever dream in the truest sense.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Actor: Benoit Magimel, Cécile Guilbert, Marc Susini, Montse Triola, Sergi Lopez

Director: Albert Serra

It would be easy to define Rose Plays Julie as a cross between Promising Young Woman and Killing Eve, but this psychological thriller turns the camp factor down to zero and makes even just the act of watching somebody else an existential experience. Directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy treat this story with stone-cold intensity (perhaps to a fault), transforming their title character from a confused girl to somebody who relishes the power they have to disrupt other people's lives through her mere existence. There's something eerie about it that crawls under your skin if you let it, like a ghost story told among the living.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Actor: Aidan Gillen, Alan Howley, Ann Skelly, Annabell Rickerby, Catherine Walker, Jack McEvoy, Joanne Crawford, Lochlann O'Mearáin, Orla Brady, Sadie Soverall

Director: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor