Fi1m guide

The best thriller of the last five years

Q: The best thriller of the last five years

Conclave is the thriller to start with from the last five years.

Answered 21 September 2026 · where to watch is for the US, today

Conclave is the thriller to start with from the last five years.

It is rare to see a thriller this tidy, and the pleasure of watching good actors in good rooms is real. Set it beside the 1970s conspiracy films it resembles and it is shorter, prettier and less angry ¹. Watch it in company, because the arithmetic is more fun done aloud, and do not expect to remember the plot in a fortnight.

Missing keeps the first hour sharp about how the internet actually works, with a password reused across three accounts and a true-crime series playing in a corner of the screen ². The tension holds at the airport and through the digging, but the script spends its plausibility once the twists begin to queue.

Last Breath turns a documentary into a lean procedural that stays as tense as the genre gets for its middle stretch ³. The calm voice on the radio carries the dread when air runs out on the seabed, though the people on either side of the accident remain sketched.

After these, A Haunting in Venice improves on its series by keeping to one building and a dozen people for 104 minutes ⁴. Avoid A House of Dynamite, where the repeated scenes turn fear into waiting ⁵.

Ask Discover the follow-up →Your country, your mood, your evening; it answers in a sentence or two, with our reviews cited.

Sources

1 Conclave (2024) · Fi1m 76 — Conclave (2024). Most critics are a little warmer than we are. It is rare to see a thriller this tidy, and the pleasure of watching good actors in good rooms is real. Set it beside the 1970s conspiracy films it resembles and it is shorter, prettier and less angry. It is a 12A and
2 Missing (2023) · Fi1m 64 — Missing (2023). Fi1m review standfirst: The screen-bound follow-up to *Searching* is quick, clever and, for an hour, properly tense. Then the twists arrive in a queue, and a story that ran on plausibility starts spending it. Storm Reid holds it together longer than the script des
3 Last Breath (2025) · Fi1m 66 — Last Breath (2025). Fi1m review standfirst: Alex Parkinson turns his own documentary into a lean, procedural thriller, and for its middle stretch it is as tense as the genre gets. The people on either side of the accident, though, stay about as sketched as their radio call signs.
4 A Haunting in Venice (2023) · Fi1m 65 — A Haunting in Venice (2023). The solution is delivered at speed, in one room, and it puts the whole thing to bed in about five minutes. We will not say who did it. We will say that Christie’s plots run on the pleasure of watching the pieces fit, and Green’s script has the pieces
5 A House of Dynamite (2025) · Fi1m 73 — A House of Dynamite (2025). The structure is where the film costs itself. Oppenheim divides the eighteen minutes in three and hands each third to a different set of rooms, and the idea is sound: the same phone call sounds different depending on which end you are holding. But the

Written by Fi1m Discover from our own reviews, checked before publication and kept in step with the data: the picks' scores and where they stream are today's. How we use AI.