30 Best Thrillers on Tubi Right Now

30 Best Thrillers on Tubi Right Now

February 5, 2025

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Sometimes, we want to get our minds racing and our hearts pumping with a good thriller. There’s plenty of ’em to find across different platforms– we already listed some of the best available on Hulu– but before subscribing to a streaming service, why not watch the ones that are already available for free? As one of the biggest free streaming services, Tubi has a great selection of thrillers from all over the world for you to choose from, and we’ve listed some of the films that we think would best deliver the adrenaline rush you crave for.

21. Lost Illusions (2021)

7.8

Genres

Drama, History, Romance

Director

Xavier Giannoli

Actors

Alexis Barbosa, André Marcon, Benjamin Voisin, Candice Bouchet

Moods

Gripping, Smart, Thrilling

Despite being based on a 19th-century serial novel, Lost Illusions feels remarkably close to contemporary concerns about fake news and the devaluing of art for profit. But as the story is also, obviously, set in the 19th century, all this bribery and these backdoor dealings are done entirely through the written word and by sending runners from one Parisian theater to the next—and the result is uniquely thrilling. Nearly every character is a terrible person (like in an old-timey Goodfellas way) and it can get tiring seeing the film glorify their hustle, but the energy it brings is rare to find in any other period drama.

22. Burning (2018)

7.7

Genres

Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Director

Chang-dong Lee, Lee Chang-dong

Actors

Ah-in Yoo, Ban Hye-ra, Cha Mi-Kyung, ChoI Seung-ho

Moods

Character-driven, Dark, Intense

Vague statement alert: Burning is not a movie that you “get”; it’s a movie you experience.

Based on a short story by Murakami, it’s dark and bleak in a way that comes out more in the atmosphere of the movie rather than what happens in the story.

Working in the capital Seoul, a young guy from a poor town near the North Korean border runs into a girl from his village. As he starts falling for her, she makes an unlikely acquaintance with one of Seoul’s wealthy youth (played by Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, pictured above.)

This new character is mysterious in a way that’s all-too-common in South Korea: young people who have access to money no one knows where it came from, and who are difficult to predict or go against.

Two worlds clash, poor and rich, in a movie that’s really three movies combined into one – a character-study, a romance, and a revenge thriller.

23. Cairo Conspiracy (2022)

7.7

Genres

Drama, Thriller

Director

Tarik Saleh

Actors

Fares Fares, Jalal Altawil, Makram J. Khoury, Mehdi Dehbi

Moods

Dramatic, Intense, Original

When he’s accepted into the prestigious Islamic university Al-Azhar, fisherman’s son Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) gets an eye-opening education — but not the kind he expected. A place associated with notions of purity is imagined as a hotbed of hypocrisy and corruption here, as naive young Adam finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a state plot to seize control of Al-Azhar (because, as one government official puts it, “We can’t accept having two pharaohs in the land”). Cairo Conspiracy’s intricate plot confronts monsters in government and strips away religious leaders’ veneer of divinity as a reminder that they’re merely fallible men. What’s more, the film grapples with the knotty mess of politics raging inside the institution’s walls in such a way that even its palatial courtyard feels claustrophobic. Rife with paranoia and subterfuge, Cairo Conspiracy feels utterly unique thanks to this skillful transposing of the shadowy machinations of courtly intrigue dramas and ’70s paranoid thrillers into a very contemporary Egyptian setting.

24. Omar (2013)

7.6

Genres

Drama, Romance, Thriller

Director

Hany Abu-Assad

Actors

Adam Bakri, Adi Krayem, Doraid Liddawi, Eyad Hourani

Moods

Raw, Thought-provoking, Thrilling

Ask yourself how many Palestinian movies you have seen before. You will want to give this smart and twisty Academy Award nominee by Golden Globe winning director Hany Abu-Assad a chance to change your answer. Omar, a Palestinian baker, climbs the West Bank Wall to see his lover, Nadia, whom he wants to marry. When Israeli soldiers catch and humiliate him, he gets implicated in the shooting of an Israeli soldier, and eventually gets arrested and faces an extremely lengthy sentence. Later, his captors’ motives and his own get tangled up in politics, friendship, trust, and love. Omar is a highly realistic, compelling crime drama you don’t want to miss.

25. The Collini Case (2019)

7.6

Genres

Crime, Drama, Thriller

Director

Marco Kreuzpaintner

Actors

Alexandra Maria Lara, Anne Haug, Axel Moustache, Bettina Lohmeyer

Moods

Character-driven, Sunday, Suspenseful

A young lawyer has to defend a murderer after passing the bar only three months prior in this satisfying German drama. To make matters worse, the victim happens to be his mentor, a wealthy and seemingly kind-hearted business man. As for the perpetrator, he refuses to say a single word. Caspar, the lawyer, is from a German-Turkish background, which is a hint to where the complexity of this legal drama lies: in Germany’s history and racial legacy. The Collini Case is satisfying to a fault, but if you’re looking for substance-filled entertainment, this is some of the best you’ll get.

26. Croupier (1998)

7.6

Genres

Drama, Thriller

Director

Mike Hodges

Actors

Alex Kingston, Alexander Morton, Barnaby Kay, Clive Owen

Moods

A-list actors, Suspenseful, Thrilling

Clive Owen stars as a struggling writer who reluctantly accepts a lucrative offer to work as a croupier at a London casino. His characteristic aloofness, hatred of gambling, and sharp observational skills allow him to remain uncompromised and able to catch any attempt at cheating within his field of vision. But when a savvy professional gambler he shares an attraction with asks him to participate in a heist in an uncompromised way, he’s forced to consider playing the angles. Owen’s coolly detached performance is a marvel, and the depiction of the London casino scene is detailed and gritty, both of which make for compelling British noir.

27. The Man from Nowhere (2010)

7.6

Genres

Action, Crime, Thriller

Director

Jeong-beom Lee, Lee Jeong-beom

Actors

Bin Won, Hong So-hee, Hwang Min-Ho, Jang Jun-nyeong

Moods

Action-packed, Dramatic, Gripping

Admittedly, The Man from Nowhere can feel a bit derivative. A quiet and mysterious stranger befriending a child, and ending up enacting his revenge when the child gets kidnapped… It feels like writer-director Lee Jeong-beom took two certain film plots and stitched it together into one. But where the film lacks in original story, The Man from Nowhere makes up for it with style, with high-contrast, rainy, moody scenes that linger into the mystery to make the few brutal, excellently choreographed action sequences pop. It has familiar tropes, and the backstory becomes a bit predictable because of it, but The Man from Nowhere keeps a steady pulse on the beating heart of the film– the friendship that makes these familiar tropes hold heavier emotional weight.

28. Ringu (1998)

7.5

Genres

Drama, Horror, Thriller

Director

Hideo Nakata

Actors

Daisuke Ban, Hiroyuki Sanada, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Hitomi Satô

Moods

Dark, Gripping, Slow

Despite being remade, parodied, and absorbed into pop culture over the years, the original Ring defiantly marches to the beat of its own drum. Focused entirely on building a slow-burn mystery instead of dispensing scares, the film provides ample space for a number of interpretations: on the spread of technology, the erasure of traditional beliefs, or even motherhood. It’s all relentlessly quiet and extremely creepy, the tension building with the same energy as ghost stories told around a campfire. And while famous for its eerie images and the rules surrounding its cursed videotape, Ringu also serves as a reminder that great horror should compel the audience to keep on watching, even if they already know exactly what awaits them if they do.

29. Riders of Justice (2021)

7.5

Genres

Action, Comedy, Drama

Director

Anders Thomas Jensen

Actors

Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Alice E. Bier Zandén, Anders Nyborg, Andrea Heick Gadeberg

Moods

Character-driven, Funny, Gripping

Don’t let the title and poster fool you—Riders of Justice isn’t the testosterone-filled action flick you’d expect going in (though it does get ridiculous at some points). It centers on deployed military man Markus, played by the appropriately masculine Mads Mikkelsen, who has to return home to his teenage daughter Mathilde after his wife dies in an accident. Instead of coping normally and sticking with his daughter to get through the tragedy, he goes down a rabbit hole discovering how the accident that killed his wife is more than just bad luck and may have been collateral damage from a gang orchestrating an assassination.

Surprisingly, director Anders Thomas Jensen injects this violent film with a lot of gentle moments about trauma and togetherness. Mikkelsen and the rest of the cast play off of each other very well, using dark humor to bring together a bunch of characters who are, in oversimplified terms, “fucked up but trying their best.”

It may seem like the guns, blood, and badass moments are a front for this film that, at its core, shows men who badly need therapy banding together to cope with the harshness of life. Extremely funny and deeply moving, it qualifies as a heartwarming Christmas movie, believe it or not.

30. Lore (2012)

7.5

Genres

Drama, Thriller, War

Director

Cate Shortland, Female director

Actors

Antonia Holfelder, Claudia Geisler-Bading, Eva-Maria Hagen, Franziska Traub

Moods

Challenging, Character-driven, Discussion-sparking

What would you do if your parents were Nazis? Based on the second novella of Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room, Lore tells the story of a Nazi officer’s children travelling together after the Allied victory. It’s a harrowing journey, of course, given the end of the war. But writer-director Cate Shortland takes that journey even further, as she pushes the children through terrible situations in such stunning naturalistic shots. The contrast makes it seem that while everything has gone right for the world, it’s only inevitable to dish out societal shunning towards them, but Shortland still manages a tightrope balance between empathizing with the kids, while still acknowledging the natural weight of the guilt, the shame of having benefitted, even if not complicit, in one of the world’s worst atrocities ever committed. It’s because of this that Lore is such an intriguing, complex, but necessary movie to watch.

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