Recent psychological thrillers: a 17-year-old directed Susan Sarandon

A psychological thriller gets its tension from what is happening inside a character's head. The film scholar Peter Hutchings describes these stories as set in ordinary domestic spaces, where action is held back and the thrills come from investigating the characters' minds.

The idea is older than cinema. Critics trace the genre's unreliable narrator, the storyteller you cannot fully trust, to the writer Edgar Allan Poe. In film, the landmark is Alfred Hitchcock, the director whose Rebecca in 1940 and Suspicion in 1941 applied Freudian ideas, and whose Psycho was selected for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1992. Critics have since traced a line from Psycho to a run of mystery thrillers from Hammer Film Productions, including The Nanny in 1965.

Relay lists 42 recent psychological thrillers that passed review. The films below come from the last decade, and most were made on small budgets. Their stories behind the camera are often as odd as the plots.

What makes a psychological thriller

• The danger is in the mind. Memory, guilt, insomnia or a lie that keeps growing.
• Less spectacle, more pressure. A cabin, an office, a kitchen, a small town.
• Doubt is the engine. The audience is never sure what to trust.

Recent psychological thrillers to watch

Forty Winks (2021)

A struggling hypnotist in New York is blackmailed into becoming the world's first hypnotist hitman, after a mysterious woman finds out his degree is fake. William Atticus Parker wrote, directed and produced it, and it is his debut. The Midwest Film Journal and the critic Dennis Schwartz both reported that Parker was 17 when he made it, and Parker told the Montreal Independent Film Magazine that he decided at seventeen that he had to make a movie.

The cast includes the actors Susan Sarandon and John Turturro, and Hart Bochner, who played Ellis in Die Hard, narrates. Parker said Get Out was the true inspiration to go full steam ahead with a career in film. The shoot was fast: Parker said six days, the Midwest Film Journal said seven. Film Threat called the result surreal and noir-inflected.

Drama

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Radius (2017)

Liam wakes from a car crash with no memory, and anyone who comes within 50 feet of him dies. The Canadian directors Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard, partners who have made films together since film school, wrote it as well. Léonard said the first idea was an Oldboy-style story of two people discovering a shared dark past, and the death-radius idea came later. He said development took about 4 years.

Shooting started in Manitoba in June 2016, and the film premiered at the Fantasia festival in Montreal on 17 July 2017. Screen Daily's reviewer said it moves from its premise into emotional territory about Liam's guilt. Behind the scenes, the crew built a body from 50-pound sacks of potatoes for a drone shot. It floated, so the shot was dropped and Léonard made it work in the edit.

Sci-Fi

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The Swerve (2020)

Holly, played by Azura Skye, is a teacher who lives an ordinary-looking life with a husband and teenage children. Insomnia, a daily pill routine and a mouse she cannot get out of the house slowly wear her down. It is the debut feature of the writer-director Dean Kapsalis. It premiered at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in November 2018 and reached VOD in September 2020.

Kapsalis said the screenplay began from a sketch he drew of a distressed woman in a supermarket at midnight, and that he grew up around strong women who carried emotional and physical scars. He said the role was hard to cast because its size seemed to terrify actors. The critic Sheila O'Malley wrote that the film would not work without Skye's performance.

Thriller

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Jackals (2017)

Set in 1983, Jackals follows a deprogrammer, played by Stephen Dorff, who is hired by a family to retrieve their son from a murderous cult. The cult arrives at the family's cabin to take him back, and the story plays out over one night. The director is Kevin Greutert, who earlier directed Saw VI, Saw 3D and Jessabelle.

The project was announced in May 2013 under the title Sacrilege, with another director attached. It premiered at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Miami on 11 August 2017 and reached United States audiences on 1 September 2017. Reviews were mixed, with Rotten Tomatoes listing 40% approval from 15 reviews, though CineVue's reviewer read a pessimistic subtext about family dysfunction in it.

Horror

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Crisis (2021)

Crisis follows three intersecting stories about the opioid epidemic: a DEA agent, a grieving mother and a pharmaceutical scientist. Nicholas Jarecki, who wrote and directed it, said it began with a close friend who started on pain pills, switched to heroin and died within months at 28 or 29. He said almost everything in the film actually happened.

It was first announced as Dreamland, and in February 2019 the actors Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer and Evangeline Lilly joined the cast. Jarecki shot on 35mm film and cited Robert Altman's Nashville as his model for the interlocking storylines. After its home release in March 2021, Film Inquiry reported that it topped the iTunes charts in the United States.

Thriller

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Hazard (2025)

Will is a reluctant drug dealer in an Appalachian mining town ravaged by opioids, trying to reunite his family. Eddie Mensore, who grew up in New Martinsville, West Virginia, said it was the very first screenplay he ever wrote. The film was shot in Harlan County, Kentucky, and Mensore said it is not set in the town of Hazard, having taken the name for its double meaning.

The British actor Alex Roe spent a month in the area before filming to learn the culture and dialect, and attended addiction recovery meetings. Mensore said the cast and crew wanted to avoid being extractive. The film opened in cinemas across Appalachia on 10 January 2025, and it won Best Picture-New Visions at the Bahamas International Film Festival.

Drama

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Soothravakyam (2025)

Soothravakyam is a Malayalam-language film set in a village in Kerala, India, and the debut feature of the director Eugien Jos Chirammel. Shine Tom Chacko plays Circle Inspector Christo Xavier, a police officer who tutors local students in mathematics in a room at the station. When a person goes missing, the officer comes under scrutiny.

It opened in Indian cinemas on 11 July 2025, and its distributor said it opened in Australia on 17 July 2025. It reached streaming on Lionsgate Play on 21 August 2025 and later on Amazon Prime Video.

Drama

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Where to go next

• Hitchcock lost the best director Oscar five times
• Giallo movies: named for yellow paperbacks, they helped shape the slasher