The best thrillers to watch on Netflix this April

Spring is here, and while the weather may be warming up, Netflix is still full of excellent thrillers for any extra indoor time you want to fill — or for outdoor movie viewing, we won’t judge.

Every month, we handpick a few of the best thrillers on Netflix that fit the current season. Sometimes they pair well with an upcoming release. Other titles might be new additions to the platform.

This month we’ve got a new movie from the Train to Busan director, an early internet cult classic about hackers, and a good reminder that David Fincher has done some excellent work on Netflix movies in the past few years.

Editor’s pick: Revelations

Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Cast: Ryu Jun-yeol, Shin Hyun-been, Shin Min-jae

Nothing is quite as it seems in Hellbound and Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s 2025 mystery thriller. After a young girl goes missing, ex-convict Yang-rae (Shin Min-jae) is implicated as her abductor. Problem is, he’s nowhere to be found. 

Lee Yeon-hee (Shin Hyun-been), a police detective with a personal grudge against Yang-rae, pursues a lead in the form of Sung Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol), the pastor of a local church who was the last person to see the culprit before his disappearance. Revelations blurs the line between the psychological and the supernatural, with a story that lands somewhere in the middle of Memories of Murder and The Telltale Heart. If that sounds like a premise that’s up your alley, you’ll enjoy this one. —Toussaint Egan

The Killer

Director: David Fincher
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Charles Parnell, Tilda Swinton

I know this is a thrillers list, and The Killer is unquestionably that, but the further we get from David Fincher’s latest movie, the clearer it becomes that it’s also one of the funniest movies of the decade so far. The story follows Michael Fassbender as the Killer, a super assassin who has the worst day at work ever after he botches a hit. Fassbender’s wonderful, pitch-perfect narration gives us a peak into his character’s highly inflated ego. He gives lengthy, complex explanations of his methodology and precision, only for his methods to go totally wrong and mess up his mission again. It’s absolutely hilarious every single time it happens.

But the beauty of Fincher’s exceptional filmmaking is that he knows to play the movie totally straight. It’s never winking, or laughing at its main character, it leaves that to the audience to figure out. Instead, he presents the whole thing like the taught thriller it is, it just happens to star someone bumbling through a series of murders. It’s a brilliant choice and makes The Killer equal parts tense and hilarious. —Austen Goslin

The Net

Director: Irwin Winkler
Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller

The ’90s were rife with excellent techno-thrillers produced shortly after the popularization of the commercial internet. While films like Enemy of the State and Hackers tapped into fears surrounding government surveillance and corporate espionage, Irwin Winkler’s The Net channeled the attendant paranoia of identity theft and forgery in the digital age. Sandra Bullock stars as Angela Bennett, a systems analyst who comes across a disk with the ability to access a backdoor into any system on the planet.

After a close encounter with an assassin, Angela discovers that her entire digital footprint has been wiped, leaving her vulnerable to the machinations of a killer intent on procuring the disk at any costs. The Net is a quirky time-capsule from a simpler era and a movie worth experiencing on the merit of that novelty alone. —TE