The 5 best thrillers to watch on Netflix in March 2023

This month’s installment in our regular roundup of the best thrillers to watch on Netflix brings yet more bespoke recommendations plumbed from the depths of the service’s broad and ever-changing library. Let us show you this week’s recommendations, so don’t follow the algorithms.

This is what makes a March thriller great. We’re nearing the latter half of winter, which means the days are getting drearier with infrequent rain, hail, and intermittent snowstorms combined with bitter wind chill. The only way to survive this season is to wrap up, smile and endure the cold temperatures till spring comes. As such, this month’s thrillers roundup is spotlighting some of the best comedic thrillers Netflix has to offer, as well as an assortment of other more straight-laced choices to enjoy.

These are some exciting suggestions to make March a memorable one.

Croupier

Image: Channel Four Films

Year: 1998
Run time: 1h 34m
Director: Mike Hodges
Cast: Clive Owen, Nick Reding, Nicholas Ball

Clive Owen is the only person to have ever managed his signature combination of cool, masculine and petty-catty smarm. It’s particularly keen in the criminally underseen 1998 heist thriller CroupierThe movie will leave Netflix on March 25. Mike Hodges’ film casts Owen as a would-be novelist who runs out of ideas and cash, so he takes a job at a small casino. Then he watches and judges everyone around him, using them as fodder for his work, until he’s drawn into a heist plan that forces him to decide whether he’s a player in this world, or just a voyeur. It’s a stylish, intense character piece that never goes particularly big on the action, but does find all the possible flavor in Owen as a performer and casinos as a setting. —Tasha Robinson

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Image courtesy of Netflix

Year: 2017
Run time: 1h 33m
Director: Macon Blair
Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, David Yow

In this grungy potboiler, nurse Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) and her gun-toting neighbor Tony (Elijah Wood) become amateur sleuths to find a burglar who stole her laptop, antique silverware, and perhaps the most precious thing to a person who thinks “everyone fucking sucks,” her anxiety meds. Macon Blair stars as the star. Green Room Blue Ruin), I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a frozen slush cocktail of Cormac McCarthy violent turns with Seth Rogen-esque punchlines, where there’s room for cussing octogenarians, ninja-star fights, upper-deckers, friendly raccoons, exploding body parts, and a cast of characters representing the full spectrum of human idiocy. But for all the hijinks, Blair’s still spinning a tight thriller with points to make about our place in the world, and while the light at the end of the tunnel might be dim, it’s there. —Matt Patches

Misty is for Me

Universal Pictures

Year: 1971
Run time: 1h 42m
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills

Before Million Dollar Baby, Mystic RiverAnd Forgiveness is not an optionClint Eastwood directed this terrifying thriller about fan obsession. Eastwood plays Dave, a disc jockey that meets a woman in a bar. He soon discovers their meeting is not accidental: Evelyn.Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter) is his number-one fan. It isn’t a great thriller about stalkers, but the combination of Misty is for Me’s glowing ’70s sheen and lusty danger makes this one to watch. Walter may be known for her late comedic turns, but here’s she’s violent and baroque, stopping at nothing in order to pierce Dave’s heart and become not only his biggest fan, but his only one. —MP

Shimmer Lake

Image courtesy of Netflix

Year: 2017
Run time: 1h 26m
Director: Oren Uziel
Cast: Benjamin Walker, Rainn Wilson, Stephanie Sigman

Shimmer Lake is a comedy-of-errors thriller in the vein of the Coen brothers’ Fargo with the nonlinear editing style of Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Rainn Wilson stars in the film.The Office) as Andy, a hapless prosecutor who is implicated in a bank robbery and the subsequent murder of the bank’s owner — a notable local judge — and Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) as Zeke, Andy’s brother and the town’s sheriff assigned to investigate and apprehend the culprits responsible.

The situation is made even more bizarre by the fact it unfolds reverse-chronologically. It begins in days after the robbery, and then proceeds backwards to uncover the motives and actions both of the complicit parties. The truth is that Shimmer Lake is a fairly standard neo-noir pulp thriller that doesn’t need to be quite as complicated as its editing style makes it out to be, but the experience of watching — and the revelations afforded by dint of its editing — make it a worthwhile watch. —Toussaint Egan

The call

Image courtesy of Netflix

Year: 2020
Run time: 1h 52m
Director: Lee Chung Hyeon
Cast: Park Shin-hye, Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Sung-ryung

He wrote his play in 1610. The Tempest, William Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” Had Shakespeare lived to see the 21st century, he could easily have been describing Lee Chung-hyun’s supernatural horror thriller starring Park Shin-hye (Miracle in Cell No. 7Jeon Jongseo (Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area).

The call Kim Seoyeon (Park), 28, a cashier at a convenience store, travels to the countryside to visit her estranged mother. After her phone is stolen while traveling, Seo-yeon answers the cordless phone in her mother’s house believing it to be the thieves demanding ransom, only to realize that she is speaking to Oh Young-sook (Jeon), a troubled young woman held captive by her controlling mother. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that the call is not only coming from inside the house, but (dun dun dunYou can find a similar ), starting at 20 years.

Seo-yeon, Young-sook, and their mutual help are able to transfer information from the past to the present. However, as their emotions and motivations become intertwined, it threatens everyone’s lives. This is how it works: The call is like 2006’s The Lake House meets 2021’s Black Phone. It’s a brilliant, albeit at times unwieldy, time-tripping thriller, and one that certainly warrants status as one of Netflix’s hidden gems. —TE