Skip the Summer Heat: Three Thrillers Worth Streaming Now

Summer’s almost here, but you don’t need to wait for the season to officially kick off to find something genuinely gripping to watch. Netflix, Peacock, and Tubi have all loaded up their catalogs with smart thrillers that’ll keep you riveted indoors when the heat gets too much.

If you’ve made it your mission to watch everything Timothée Chalamet has ever done, Hot Summer Nights is the gap you didn’t know you had in your filmography. Released in 2017 around the same time Chalamet broke through with Call Me by Your Name, this neo-noir crime thriller got lost in the noise and landed with middling reviews. But now that it’s landed on Netflix, it deserves a second look. The film follows Daniel, a gawky teenager forced to spend 1991 summer in Cape Cod with his aunt, who quickly discovers excitement through his friendship with Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe), a local dealer roping him into the pot business. Complications arise when Daniel falls for Hunter’s sister, McKayla (Maika Monroe), setting off a chain reaction of forbidden romance and escalating stakes. Sure, the movie overreaches—it piles on subplots and characters that strain its thin narrative—but Chalamet’s performance signals the star he’d eventually become in projects like Dune and Marty Supreme.

For a masterclass in how to construct a thriller that doubles as tragedy, Peacock has Robert Towne’s 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown, waiting for you. Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private investigator hired by what he thinks is a worried wife to catch her cheating husband. When the woman ends up dead and another Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) emerges, Gittes realizes he’s stumbled into something far darker involving murder, corruption, and a drought strangling Southern California. The genius is how Towne weaves these seemingly unrelated threads into a narrative that’s both intellectually satisfying and emotionally devastating. Nicholson is perfectly cast as a man in over his head, while Dunaway brings haunting complexity to a woman hiding ugly secrets behind a beautiful facade. The film’s closing line—Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown—has echoed through cinema history for good reason.

If you want something more gleefully absurd, Tubi’s The Call gives you exactly that. Halle Berry plays Jordan Turner, a 9-1-1 operator carrying the weight of a caller’s unsolved murder, who gets a shot at redemption when a kidnapped girl named Casey (Abigail Breslin) calls from the trunk of a speeding car. As Jordan pieces together Casey’s location, she uncovers a disturbing connection to her own haunted past. Yes, the movie embraces logic gaps that’ll make you laugh, and yes, Berry’s famous wig has become its own cultural artifact (the actress herself has joked about it online). But here’s the thing: it works. The film sustains genuine suspense while giving Berry enough to work with to make Jordan a hero worth rooting for.

These three films represent wildly different approaches to the thriller genre, but they’re united by one thing—they’re all worth your time this June.