These days, the options are endless for movie genres, and luckily, Hulu is known to have the best of the best. Not only does Hulu have some of the best documentaries viewers need to watch immediately, but the platform has cross-over genres that need to be recognized immediately. If viewers are fans of several genres wrapped into one, these psychological thrillers will need to be added to the queue immediately.
Psychological thrillers are good genres to pair together because there’s a little bit of everything for movie-goers. These types of movies elude mystery, drama, action, and paranoia that sets the scene for basically any type of storyline or character.
Goodnight Mommy: 6.7 (2014)
Directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy is a unique horror-mystery thriller about two twin boys named Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) and Elias (Elias Schwarz) and their loving mother. After she opts to have cosmetic surgery on her face, the twins welcome her back but realize she’s not the same.
Lukas and Elias start to experience odd happenings when they’re around this woman and begin questioning who she is and what she’s done to their actual mother.
Coherence: 7.2 (2013)
Coherence is a 2017 sci-fi psychological thriller directed by James Ward Byrkit. Byrkit made his directorial debut with Coherence and centered the story on Em (Emily Baldoni), who begins experiencing strange occurrences after a comet passes over the planet.
When she and her boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling) join a group of friends at a dinner party, strange things start happening around the neighborhood. Whether it’s the comet or something else, the string of events causes the group to question their sanity or if they’re stuck in an alternate reality.
Identity: 7.3 (2003)
Starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, and John Hawkes, Identity is a psychological slasher thriller loosely based on Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel, And Then There Were None. The movie centers on ten strangers who are stuck in a hotel during a horrendous rainstorm.
One by one, the strangers are killed off, and for the rest of the pack to survive, they must figure out who the villain is while there is still time. Identity introduces each character and the key moments that brought them there in the first place. Cusack leads the pack as Ed, and of all his movies so far in his career, Identity is among his best yet.
Flight: 7.3 (2012)
Robert Zemeckis, director of Forrest Gump, produced Flight in 2012, which stars Denzel Washington, Nadine Velazquez, and Don Cheadle. Washington plays Whip Whitaker, a senior commuter airline pilot who is good at his job but is also an alcoholic. Usually, he can separate the two, but he crash-lands a plane full of people after a mechanical failure.
He nearly saves everyone on board, but the incident opens an investigation that causes problems for Whitaker in his personal and professional life. Flight is loosely based on the plane crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, and even though it’s not recognized as one of Washington’s best thrillers, his performance is impeccable.
We Need To Talk About Kevin: 7.5 (2011)
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a psychological thriller centered on a mother named Eva (Tilda Swinton) and her strange son, Kevin. From the get-go, it’s obvious her son (Rock Duer/Jasper Newell/Ezra Miller) is a unique child and lashes out in malicious ways. Once a successful writer, Eva tries to grapple with the situations that arise, but his words and actions become more dangerous as he ages.
After Kevin is incarcerated, Eva tries to piece her life together while staying close to the prison to visit her son. The movie follows Eva as she recounts what leads to Kevin’s demise and what she could’ve done differently.
The Guilty: 7.5 (2018)
A man named Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is an alarm dispatcher who answers emergency calls for a living. After he picks up a call from a kidnapped woman, the call drops, and from that point on, the race is on to find the missing woman and her kidnapper before time runs out.
But what Holm doesn’t know is that the situation is much bigger and more dangerous than he thought, but it’s much too late to back out now.
A Simple Plan: 7.5 (1998)
Brothers Hank (Bill Paxton), Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and their friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) discover a crashed plane that contains $4.4 million in cash. The men and Hank’s wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) do everything they can to keep the money a secret and “a simple plan” to do so.
But as time goes on, the men start to doubt one another, and trust, lies, deceit, and murder become the main concern. A Simple Plan is a 1998 neo-noir crime thriller set that is one of Thornton’s best films to date.
The Tenant: 7.7 (1976)
The Tenant is a 1976 psychological horror movie directed by Roman Polanksi. It’s based on the 1964 novel called Le Locataire Chimérique by Rolan Topor, and stars Polanski as well. The Tenant is the last installment of Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” and centers on a man named Trelkovsky (Polanksi) who rents an apartment without a personal bathroom.
The previous tenant passed away, and while Trelkovsky continues to live in the apartment, he’s chastised by his neighbors. He also experiences odd happenings around his new digs, and as they continue, he becomes more agitated, hostile, and paranoid towards the situation. Is this all in his head, or is something more ominous going on in Trelkovsky’s building?
Gone Girl: 8.1 (2014)
Dave Fincher, known for Se7en, Zodiac, and The Social Network, directed Gone Girl, based on the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn. The movie centers on a devastated man named Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck,) whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) has just gone missing.
Nick’s life becomes a complicated mess, and while it focuses on the media frenzy that surrounds Amy, Gone Girl goes back in time to show how the two met and what went wrong.
Parasite: 8.6 (2019)
The Kims live in poverty, and to make ends meet, they often operate minor scams to get by and prefer not to work a normal job. Ki-Woo (Woo-sik Choi), the Kims’ son, gets a chance to break out of the mold when he takes over a tutoring job at a nearby university. This opens up a whole new scheme for the Kims, as their sights are set on a wealthy family. They want to take over their lives and feel what it’s like to live a normal lifestyle. But not everything goes smoothly, which is why the movie is so well-liked.
Known as one of the best movies of 2019, Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite is a movie to watch. This thriller has a little bit of every genre: greed, class discrimination, and what it takes to survive.
