The 5 best thrillers to watch on Netflix this February

It’s February, Polygon readers. The climate is fickle, however your film selections should not.

As we’ve been doing every month, we’ve picked out 5 nice thrillers which can be good in your February viewing and can be found on Netflix. We’ve obtained a mixture of cold-weather hits, motion pictures with stars doing different large issues, underseen 2022 gems, and extra for you to dive into.

Here are the 5 best thrillers for you to watch on Netflix this February.

Arctic

Image: Bleecker Street/Netflix

Year: 2018
Run time: 1h 38m
Director: Joe Penna
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, María Thelma Smáradóttir, Tintrinai Thikhasuk

Mads Mikkelsen is the caliber of actor whose sheer magnetism, attractiveness, and dramatic display presence all the time make for time, even when his characters occur to be going by way of what is probably going absolutely the worst expertise of their lives. Case in level: Joe Penna’s 2018 Icelandic drama a few man making an attempt to survive in one of the vital inhospitable environments identified to humanity. Mikkelsen stars as Overgård, a Danish pilot stranded within the Arctic Circle desperately making an attempt to sign for rescue. When a close-by helicopter responds to his emergency and makes an attempt to land solely to crash, killing its pilot, Overgård rescues a younger passenger (María Thelma Smáradóttir) who survives.

With the 2 of them misplaced within the Arctic wilderness and incapable of understanding each other due to a language barrier, Overgård should battle to safe rescue for each himself and his cost, all of the whereas making a number of tough selections that take a look at his resolve. Mikkelsen instructions the eye for the whole lot of the movie’s run time, delivering a efficiency that’s completely in step with his penchant for stoic, delicate, but unquestionably succesful and resourceful characters. If you’re searching for an thrilling thriller with a lean and imply premise, crack open a chilly one and watch Arctic. —Toussaint Egan

Triple Frontier

Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix

Year: 2019
Run time: 2h 5m
Director: J.C. Chandor
Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal

You like Oscar Isaac, proper? And you want Pedro Pascal, who’s at the moment killing it in The Last of Us? What if I instructed you there was a strong heist film starring each of them directed by the man behind the upcoming Kraven the Hunter film?

In Triple Frontier, a soldier pulls collectively a bunch of his former Delta Force squadmates to steal $75 million money from a Colombian drug lord’s home. The primary attraction is the forged: Isaac and Pascal are joined by Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, and Garrett Hedlund, however Triple Frontier can be only a strong, by-the-numbers motion thriller about unhappy guys doing dangerous issues.

But on the finish of the day, it’s basic math. Oscar Isaac + Pedro Pascal = time.

Athena

Year: 2022
Run time: 1h 39m
Director: Romain Gavras
Cast: Dali Benssalah, Sami Slimane, Anthony Bajon

“No Church in the Wild” music video director Romain Gavras begins his mesmerizing thriller Athena with a showy, immersive single-take shot of a police press convention being interrupted by violence. It’s a press release of goal — an announcement that the story forward goes to be bold and classy in addition to gripping. When phrase spreads in a French banlieue that one of many residents, a 13-year-old Algerian-French boy named Idir, died after being overwhelmed by police, Idir’s three brothers — a cop, a profession prison, and a livid younger revolutionary — develop into home windows into the chaotic protest that follows. As the three brothers every chase their very own agendas, Gavras’ digicam weaves all through a riot within the banlieue, the police response, and particular person moments of calm, typically captured in these lengthy, superbly composed and immaculately deliberate takes. It’s a panoramic achievement on a technical degree, but additionally, from the primary moments, it’s a gripping story in regards to the relationship between police and neighborhood, and the seething anger on each side. —Tasha Robinson

Phantom Thread

Image: Focus Features

Year: 2017
Run time: 2h 10m
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Vicky Krieps, Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is extra of a Hitchcockian mystery-drama kind of thriller than a revved-up action-drama: It’s a quiet film, the place the most important tensions are probably to be communicated in terse, hissing dialogue relatively than explosions. Vicky Krieps stars as Alma, a waitress who meets and falls for fashion-empire head Reynolds (Daniel Day-Lewis), who seems to be a egocentric, boastful womanizer. The tensions between them escalate as she refuses to again down and be despatched away as soon as he’s prepared to transfer on from her. Phantom Thread by no means breaks out into the type of showy violence that often marks a thriller’s ending; its pleasures are all in Anderson’s wealthy, evocative setting, with its facet characters and finely attuned particulars, and within the twists of Alma and Reynolds’ relationship and their jousting for the higher hand. Depending on your tastes, this is both 2017’s darkest, most caustic, most horror-tinged romance, or the proper Valentine’s Day film. —TR

Synchronic

Image: Well Go USA Entertainment

Year: 2019
Run time: 1h 42m
Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Cast: Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Katie Aselton

Before writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead went to work on the Marvel Cinematic Universe collection Moon Knight, they specialised in making and starring in small, revolutionary, genre-straddling indie motion pictures like Resolution and The Endless. (They went again to that mode in 2022 for Something within the Dirt.) They obtained to work on a barely bigger scale with 2019’s Synchronic, starring the MCU’s Anthony Mackie as a paramedic who experiments with a time-travel drug in an try to save his lacking daughter. While the movie is lacking a number of the private contact and texture of Benson and Moorhead’s smaller movies, it’s filled with unlikely twists designed to maintain the viewers guessing — and it retains the surprises coming proper up to the tip. —TR