The best thrillers to watch on Netflix this August

Summer is winding down, but there are still plenty of long evenings to fill with movie watching. And what better way to cool down than with a few of Netflix’s best thrillers?

Every month, we handpick a few thrillers on Netflix that fit the current season. Sometimes they pair well with an upcoming release. Other titles might be new additions to the platform.

This time around we’ve got a terrific little mystery about a missing person, a movie about a 911 operator trying to save the day from a call center, and Quentin Tarantino’s chilly, old west murder mystery, all ready for you to help close out your summer.

Editor’s pick: Hateful Eight

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Kurt Russell

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Three lawmen, a female fugitive condemned to death, and a stagecoach driver walk into a haberdashery in the middle of a bitter snowstorm. Inside the store are a cowboy, a hangman, and a man named Bob tending to the store while its owners are away. Each of them is connected to one another’s past, in some way or another, and one or more of these men are not who they say they are. Can you find the wolves in this picture?

The Hateful Eight earns its title through its cast of characters, each of whom are guilty of their share of duplicity and ruthlessness to some degree. Inspired by ’60s Western series like Bonanza and The Virginian, Tarantino’s chamber piece period-drama is a violent, miserable, and nerve-wracking thriller whose story unfolds like a tragedy waiting to happen. By the end, you won’t be wondering which of these men is going to make it out of this situation alive. Instead, the real question is, do any of them deserve to? —Toussaint Egan

Missing

Image: Temma Hankin/Sony Pictures

Director: Nicholas D. Johnson, Will Merrick
Cast: Storm Reid, Joaquim de Almeida, Megan Suri

One of the best and most fun mystery movies of the last couple of years, Missing is a thriller that takes place almost entirely on a computer screen. The movie follows a young woman named June (Storm Reid) who lives with her mom in Los Angeles. Her mom takes off on a vacation with her new boyfriend Kevin, but when she’s supposed to get home a few weeks later, she never shows up. This launches June into an investigation to find her missing mom, mostly using some very clever tricks on the internet.

Missing is savvy and smart about online tools in exactly the ways that most movies get wrong. It understands the limitations and potential of search engines, password phishing, and more, and only stretches them a little bit to craft a terrific thriller. —Austen Goslin

The Guilty

Photo: Netflix

Director: Antoine Fuqua
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Christina Vidal Mitchell, Ethan Hawke

Jake Gyllenhaal is one of the best actors of his generation, known for his melodramatic capacity for portraying brooding, calculating characters whose barely suppressed rage and anguish simmers beneath their otherwise steely exteriors. That quality is at the forefront in The Guilty, a one-room crime thriller where Gyllenhaal stars as Joe Baylor, an LAPD officer working as a 911 operator during a chaotic forest fire that’s choking the city in smoke. After receiving an alarming call from a distraught woman (Riley Keough) whom he believes may have been kidnapped by her abusive ex-husband (Peter Sarsgaard), Joe goes above and beyond to intervene as a redemptive act for his own checkered past.

While not as critically well-received as the 2018 Danish movie upon which it was adapted, The Guilty is nonetheless an excellent showcase of Gyllenhaal’s range as a performer, capturing the jaded cynicism of his character and his fleeting yet defining moments of vulnerability and self-reflection. It’s an intimate and shocking thriller that rests squarely on its terrific lead performance which absolutely makes it a film worth watching. —TE