Recent crime thrillers: an Argentine car trap got a Hollywood remake

A crime thriller is a film built on a crime and the suspense that follows it. It sits where two older genres overlap: the crime film, where a crime is central to the plot, and the thriller, which runs on tension. Film scholars note that these films often follow a criminal, or an ordinary person caught up in a crime, rather than a police officer.

The genre has outlasted most others. The critics Silver and Ursini wrote in 2020 that, unlike the western, horror or war film, the popularity of crime cinema has never waned. It also gave film noir its raw material: directors who had fled Nazi-era Europe, including Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder, made crime films in the late 1930s and 1940s that French critics later labelled film noir. In his interviews with François Truffaut, the director Alfred Hitchcock described the whodunit as an intellectual puzzle that stirs curiosity, not the emotion that suspense depends on.

Relay lists 33 crime thrillers from 2015 onward that passed review. The ones below come from Iran, India, Germany, Croatia, Pakistan and Argentina, and each has a story behind it that is stranger than its poster. Two of them, The Constitution and Walnut Tree, fit the label loosely: one is an ensemble drama driven by a hate attack, the other a drama built around a war crime.

What makes a crime thriller

• A crime at the centre. Everything follows from a kidnapping, a poisoning, a raid or a theft.
• Tension over mystery. The viewer often knows more than the characters and waits for the trap to close.
• A place that shapes the plot. A highway, a port city, a car.
• A society behind the crime. Many of these films use one crime to look at law, class or prejudice.

7 recent crime thrillers to watch

Just 6.5 (2019)

Just 6.5 (Metri Shesh-o Nim) is an Iranian police thriller about a narcotics detective chasing a drug lord, written and directed by Saeed Roustayi, an Iranian director whose second feature this was. Programme notes describe it as having broken box-office records at home, the highest-grossing non-comedy in the history of Iranian cinema. Variety's critic Peter Debruge compared it to The French Connection.

It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, in the Horizons section, and at the Tokyo International Film Festival that year Roustayi won Best Director and the lead actor Navid Mohammadzadeh won Best Actor. Roustayi's next film, Leila's Brothers, competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May 2022 and won the critics' FIPRESCI prize. In August 2023 a Tehran court sentenced him to six months in prison over the Cannes entry, with only about nine days to be served and the rest suspended for five years.

Drama

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NH10 (2015)

NH10 is an Indian thriller directed by Navdeep Singh and named for National Highway 10, which then ran from Delhi to Fazilka in Punjab. A couple driving to a weekend retreat cross a dangerous gang. It was the first film produced by the actor Anushka Sharma, through her company Clean Slate Filmz. The story draws on real honour-killing cases, and Dawn noted that it echoes events that occurred, and continue to occur, in Haryana.

The film was due out on 6 March 2015 and moved to 13 March because India's censor board had not cleared it. It was finally given an adults-only certificate with nine cuts. Sharma said the team stayed true to the story and subject. FilmiBeat reported about 260 million rupees in its first ten days and called it a hit.

Action/Adventure

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Effigie: Das Gift und die Stadt (2019)

The film is set in 1828 in Bremen, Germany, and follows two women: one who wants a career in law at a time when women could not attend university, and one who has lived outside the law and may have to pay for it. It is based on a true case. Gesche Gottfried poisoned 15 people with arsenic. She was arrested on 6 March 1828, her 43rd birthday, and neighbours had called her the "Angel of Bremen" because she nursed the people she had poisoned.

Gottfried was beheaded on 21 April 1831 on Bremen's Domshof, the last public execution in the city's history. Bremen's tourist board says a stone in the square marks the spot, and residents spat on it out of disgust. The playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder based his 1971 play Bremer Freiheit on her crimes. The film, directed by Udo Flohr and running 85 minutes in German, was in competition for the Golden Aphrodite at the Cyprus International Film Festival, and German Films Quarterly lists it as the winner for Best Feature.

Crime

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The Constitution (2016)

The Constitution (Ustav Republike Hrvatske) follows four residents of one apartment building in Zagreb, Croatia, who keep apart because of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and class, until misfortune pushes them together. A professor is beaten in a homophobic attack and nursed by the wife of a Serbian police officer who lives in the building. The policeman's own prejudices come out in the days that follow.

The director Rajko Grlic, described as a doyen of Croatian film, wrote the script with Ante Tomic. The film won the Grand Prix of the Americas for best film at the 40th Montreal World Film Festival in 2016, by a unanimous jury decision. In 2017 it added Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Performance at Raindance and Best International Film at Santa Barbara. The film's sales company, Latido, calls it a parable of the neighbourhood animosities behind the Yugoslav civil war.

Drama

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Walnut Tree (2020)

The crime in Walnut Tree is a war crime. On 28 June 1987 Iraqi aircraft attacked Sardasht, a Kurdish town in north-west Iran, with chemical weapons. It is considered the first time chemical weapons were deliberately used against civilians in an urban area, and a victims' association head told JusticeInfo that about 8,000 people were exposed to mustard gas. The film follows Qader, a bricklayer who tries to save his pregnant wife and their three children, and they die one by one from their wounds.

It premiered at the 38th Fajr Film Festival in February 2020, where Mohammad Hossein Mahdavian won Best Director and Payman Maadi, who plays Qader, won Best Actor. Tehran Times reported that Mahdavian shot on 16mm, a format used in the 1980s, to match the period of the story, and that it was a contender to be Iran's Oscar entry, though Majid Majidi's Sun Children was chosen.

Drama

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Carma (2022)

The title plays on "karma" and "cars", with the K swapped for a C. Carma is a Pakistani revenge thriller set mostly inside cars, built around car kidnappings, a crime Dawn says is common in Karachi. A kidnapping and assault turns into a tale of deception and double-crosses. The director, Kashan Admani, is a music producer making his first film, and he also composed the score. The writer and producer Fawad Hai said he knows of no earlier Pakistani attempt at a revenge thriller.

Dawn lists Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Ridley Scott among its influences, and the film runs in chapters with flashbacks and flashforwards. Admani got the idea during Covid-19, and the studio where he planned the sound work flooded in 2020. Dawn reported that about 85 to 90 percent of the film was shot in sequence. It opened in Pakistani cinemas on 2 September 2022, a day after its premiere in Karachi.

Thriller

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4X4 (2019)

4x4 is an Argentine film directed by Mariano Cohn. A petty thief named Ciro breaks into a black SUV, finds the doors locked and the windows bulletproof, and is phoned by the car's owner, a physician who has turned it into a trap for thieves. Cohn based it on news stories about a thief trapped in a car he tried to steal, first in Brazil and later in Cordoba, Argentina. It was shot in 22 days on a single set at Estudios Baires.

It opened in Argentina on 4 April 2019 and had its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, that year. Then came the remakes: a Brazilian version, A Jaula, in 2022, and Locked, with Bill Skarsgard and Anthony Hopkins, which Fangoria describes as a remake of the 2019 Argentinian thriller and which reached US cinemas on 21 March 2025.

Action/Adventure

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Where to go next

• Film noir: the movies that show what the term actually means
• Recent dark comedies: a ten-day shoot got a Turkish remake