100 Best Foreign Thrillers of All Time

Of course, there are plenty of great films from the Italian Master of the Thrill, but one of the best from Dario Argento is Deep Red (1975), released just before his Three Mothers trilogy. The film follows a musician and a journalist, linked together by the body they found of a psychic medium, and the ensuing rush to investigate the murder before they become the next victims. Released at the peak of the giallo genre, Deep Red heightens the tension and terror through Argento’s trademark kaleidoscopic shots, eerie score, and excellent performances. While the lizard scene was genuine, Profondo Rosso nonetheless is considered to be one of the director’s best.

There’s a cruelty to In My Mother’s Skin that may seem off-putting at first, but one must reckon with the sheer scale of the violence already occurring before these characters are even introduced to us. The Japanese occupation of the Philippines was a particularly vicious period in the country’s history; if Filipinos weren’t fighting or hiding from their invaders, many of them were trying to maintain a precariously submissive, neutral existence, or they were being turned against each other due to the conflict of war trickling down between the social classes. All these things are implicit throughout Kenneth Dagatan’s film, which doesn’t try to reenact World War II but capture the total absence of hope during this period.

Dagatan’s style of horror insists on a very slow pace, emphasizing every footstep leading to a horrifying reveal, and not just the main scare itself. This choice doesn’t always work, especially as certain beats begin to repeat themselves, but the film’s incredibly confident visual style fills every moment with an eerie paranoia. Gothic, shadowy interiors, nasty gore, and one opulently costumed fairy make everything perpetually unsettling—gradually forcing us to accept that these contradictions are just the reality of life under war.

When reading the premise, Tokyo Fist seems, at first glance, like the primordial eclectic mix of Challengers and Fight Club, with tennis swapped for boxing, and with sweat swapped for bruises. The film is entirely centered on a love triangle spurred on by a sport, with both players out to settle their rivalry, triggered again by a girl. However, being directed by cyberpunk horror auteur Shinya Tsukamoto, Tokyo Fist takes on a more visceral approach, with repressed resentment only able to be released through beating the hell out of each other, beating the hell out of themselves, and through bloodying both their fists and their opponents’ faces. It gets avant garde at certain moments, but Tokyo Fist is a sports horror ahead of its time, and an unexpected, underrated film from the man behind cult classic Tetsuo: the Iron Man.

When a regime falls, what follows isn’t a clean slate– it lingers, and it haunts those that were able to survive, part due to what was done to them and part to what they have done. Marshland ostensibly is a police procedural investigating a series of women murdered in rural Spain, but it’s also a clash of ideologies between New Spain, that wants to unearth the injustices that haven’t been acknowledged, and Old Spain, that wants to let sleeping dogs lie. The two plot threads don’t weave together as neatly as it could be, but La Isla Minima still works on both fronts, recreating that feeling of betrayal within that key transition period of Spain.

In a few seconds, a mistake can change your life forever. Insomnia is centered on a Swedish detective trying to solve a murder while trying desperately to cover a mistake made from the difficult mix of the fog and human exhaustion, but in doing so, his guilt, shame, and suspicion that no one would believe him due to past mistakes, weigh down on him, twisting the police procedural upon itself. Stellan Skarsgård holds an incredibly restrained performance throughout the entire film, and it’s well-framed by writer-director Erik Skjoldbjærg, whose use of cold white light in this debut feature eventually became the staple of on-screen Scandinavian noir.

Pan’s Labyrinth is often considered director Guillermo Del Toro’s best film, and rightfully so. But if you’re looking for a straight-up ghost story, this is the film that gets the job done. Everything about this film is sad and beautiful and unnerving, from the setting (an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War) to the atmospheric visuals.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and Swedish Netflix’s new horror-comedy takes this idea to the extreme. Based on the novel by Mats Strandberg, who’s known as the Swedish Stephen King, The Conference is centered around a group of employees on their company retreat. With its ensemble, the film crafts a relatable dynamic, with the exact petty back-and-forth and the same exact corporate politics many adults have to deal with. It’s no wonder one of them snaps, and takes them out one by one. The film isn’t exactly new, with the decades’ collection of slashers all over the world, but this Swedish thriller is a fun take on it, with match cut transitions, quick paced sequences, and the gruesome murders of the group most adults spend time with – their colleagues. It’s an interesting watch as the world gets back to the office.

In the years since Fan Girl’s original release in the Philippines, its ultimate message and execution has become polarizing: is it enough that the film shows the corruption of a parasocial relationship into an abusive one, without offering much hope? Is its vision of justice actually constructive or disappointingly limited? No matter where you fall, it’s exciting that a movie can stir up these kinds of questions through a bizarre dynamic between characters, in a place that’s clearly set somewhere between reality and delusion. The narrative is circular and frustrating for a reason—a constant push and pull as the titular fan girl keeps getting drawn back into the celebrity’s orbit—and the film only grows more disturbing with each repetition.

With plenty of old men having extramarital affairs, taking advantage of younger women and leaving them forlorn in love, it can feel deceptively easy to take sides in the first forty minutes of He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not. Who wouldn’t side with Angélique, especially with the innocent, childlike face of Audrey Tautou? And yet, when the twist occurs, the film fills the gaps in totally unexpected ways, gradually escalating to a terrible and sad conclusion about this seemingly romantic girl. It’s hard to further talk about He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not without getting into spoiler territory, so if this is the first time you’ve heard of the movie, go and watch it without any context.

Frankly, the characters of In The House are in dire need for some therapy after the events of the film. A high school teacher takes an interest into one of his student’s writings, which turns out to be his fantasies of another student’s perfect family, and they end up to be further linked in even stranger ways, to say the least. But as the plot progresses, the film unfolds into a deep meditation of art, with each character serving as either the creator or the admirer, and representing how both can use it to see reality or to dream about another one. The direction is a surprising way to go about it, but the tension and the cast’s excellent performances drive the story to a much more exciting place.