Thrillers live or die on pressure. They do not need giant budgets, perfect realism, or profound dialogue every minute. They need tension that tightens, characters whose bad choices make the room hotter, and a sense that every new scene is pushing somebody closer to exposure, collapse, or death.
And when thrillers fail, they fail in a special way. They do not just become bad movies. They become dead machines. You can see the gears turning, and none of them catch. That is what these eight are. Not fun junk. Not glorious trainwrecks. Mostly just hollow, frustrating, tensionless wastes of good premises, good stars, or both.
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8
‘Unforgettable’ (2017)
Image via Warner Bros.
Unforgettable is the kind of psycho-ex thriller that thinks a raised eyebrow and a few passive-aggressive smiles count as escalation. Julia Banks (Rosario Dawson) and Tessa Connover (Katherine Heigl) both deserve better. The setup, new wife, unhinged ex, domestic sabotage, should have produced tight, nasty fun. Instead the movie keeps choosing the safest, flattest version of every scene.
The biggest issue in this film is rhythm. A thriller like Unforgettable should keep turning the screw until ordinary life feels infected. Here, the tension arrives in obvious, prepackaged beats. You are never leaning in. You are just waiting for the next act of sabotage to show up on schedule.
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7
‘Secret Obsession’ (2019)
Brenda Song, looking at something suspiciously, as Jennifer in Secret ObsessionImage via Netflix
Amnesia thrillers can work beautifully when memory itself becomes a trap. Secret Obsession has that hook and does almost nothing with it. Jennifer Williams (Brenda Song) wakes injured, confused, and vulnerable, and the movie immediately squanders the unease by making everything too obvious too early.
That kills the entire game. A thriller needs the viewer to feel unstable with the protagonist, not twenty steps ahead of the movie. Once the central threat is this transparent, the film turns into a slow walk through foregone conclusions. Even the detective subplot, which should add urgency and crosscutting pressure, feels generic and drained. But there is no paranoia here, only plot.
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6
‘Sliver’ (1993)
Sharon Stone and William Baldwin in Sliver Image via Paramount Pictures
Erotic thrillers need danger in the seduction and seduction in the danger. Sliver has Carly Norris (Sharon Stone), a voyeuristic apartment building, surveillance, possible murder, and absolutely no clue how to fuse any of it into real heat. It just sits there, glossy and vacant.
The premise should have been irresistible. A building where somebody is watching everyone should feel diseased from the inside. Instead the film never develops an atmosphere of corruption thick enough to matter. Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin) is a black hole of charisma here, and the mystery keeps flattening instead of deepening. It wants to be sleek and perverse. It ends up feeling weirdly bloodless.
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5
‘Twisted’ (2004)
Samuel L. Jackson in TwistedImage via Paramount Pictures
This is one of those detective thrillers where the protagonist’s damaged psyche is supposed to make everything unstable, but the movie mistakes instability for muddle. Jessica Shepard (Ashley Judd) plays a police inspector with trauma, alcohol problems, and a serial killer possibly circling her life. Good ingredients. Bad execution.
The whole film feels secondhand, stitched together from better thrillers about compromised investigators and memory gaps. John Mills (Samuel L. Jackson) brings some gravity, but the movie never earns the reveals it is hoarding. Thrillers can get away with contrivance if the tension is sharp enough. In Twisted, the tension is so weak that every twist feels less like a shock than a screenwriter tugging your sleeve.
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4
‘The Woman in the Window’ (2021)
Amy Adams in The Woman in the WindowImage via Netflix
This one hurts because the bones of a good movie are visible. Agoraphobic woman. pill haze. possible murder seen through a window. unstable perception. Anna Fox (Amy Adams) trapped in a house full of dread. That should have been catnip. Instead the film plays like a prestige thriller that lost its nerve in the edit.
Nothing settles into menace. The house never becomes the oppressive psychological chamber it should be. Adams is giving the movie more emotional weather than it knows how to use, and the supporting cast feels imported from different tonal universes. A good paranoid thriller makes you question what is real while tightening your chest. The Woman in the Window just turns fuzziness into drift.
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3
‘Serenity’ (2019)
Image via Aviron Pictures
Serenity is less a bad thriller than a baffling collapse of genre judgment. The film follows Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) as a fishing boat captain being pulled into a murder plot by Karen Zariakas (Anne Hathaway), and for a while you think the movie is heading toward sweaty neo-noir trash. Then it keeps swerving into stranger territory without any control over tone, suspense, or payoff.
A thriller can survive absurdity if the absurdity sharpens the unease. Here it just melts the movie. Scenes arrive with the wrong energy, revelations land with accidental comedy, and the whole thing seems convinced it is blowing your mind when it is really just losing the room. Wild twists are fine. Wild twists with no tension underneath are fatal.
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2
‘Basic Instinct 2’ (2006)
Sharon Stone in black dress in ‘Basic Instinct 2’Image via Sony Pictures
The firstBasic Instinctis ridiculous, but it understands how to weaponize style, star power, and erotic menace. The sequel has Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) back and none of the voltage. That is the disaster. It tries to recreate transgression in a world where everything feels clinical, airless, and tired.
The psychological games are weak, the sexuality is forced rather than dangerous, and Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey) is left carrying a role that needed much more instability and allure than the film can generate. Erotic thrillers depend on appetite making people stupid in ways that feel believable. Here everybody just seems trapped in an expensive imitation of provocation. Nothing pulses. Nothing seduces. Nothing threatens.
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1
‘The Snowman’ (2017)
Michael Fassbender walking through a snowy tundra in The SnowmanImage via Universal Pictures
A serial killer thriller with Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender), snowbound misery, Jo Nesbø source material, and a title this good should not be this inert. ButThe Snowman is the worst of the bunch because it does not merely waste potential and instead seems structurally broken. Scenes do not connect with proper momentum. Clues appear without force. Characters drift in and out like the movie misplaced whole reels.
And that is basically what it feels like: incomplete. A thriller can be dark, cold, and fragmented. It still needs a pulse. This thing has none. Hole wanders through the film looking stranded, Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson) never gets a real dramatic line to hold, and the killer plot never turns sick fascination into actual dread. It is just frozen sludge. For a thriller, that is death.
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
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🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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