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If Prisoners had you gripping the armrest and side-eyeing every character like they were hiding something, welcome to the club. Denis Villeneuve’s masterpiece is a deep burrow into your psyche with its slow-burning dread, moral ambiguity, and desperate search for answers. Fear not, because the cinematic world has more such nightmares in store.
Here are five films that will give you the same adrenaline rush and have you guessing until the very last minute.
The Knives Out franchise
The Knives Out series might look like a cozy murder mystery with funny accents and dramatic, rich people, but deep down, it’s playing the same brutal game as Prisoners. You’re watching a man crumble under the weight of grief, and it’s awful and human and terrifying. Then you’ve got Knives Out and Glass Onion, which waltz in promising fun, but before you know it, you’re neck-deep in murder, manipulation, and masks slipping off privileged faces. The mystery might be glossier, the tone lighter, but the questions they ask? Just as heavy.
What are people capable of when pushed? Who deserves justice, and who gets away with it? These films invite you in with charm and dread and then leave you sitting in the mess. If you liked Prisoners, trust me, Knives Out is a chaos you’ll enjoy unraveling.
They both peel back layers of control, image, and fake perfection. Both make you suspicious of everyone. Both leave you with more questions than answers. So, if Prisoners left you emotionally wrecked, Knives Out will ruin your trust in dinner parties forever, and you’ll love every second of it.
Available to watch on: Prime Video
Shutter Island
Shutter Island is widely known as one of the best mystery thrillers out there, and we're about to tell you why. If Prisoners left you spiraling into moral gray zones, buckle up. These two films are soul cousins. They both start with a mystery, a missing person, and a haunted investigator, but they’re not about neat resolutions. They’re about the ugly, quiet war that trauma wages inside your brain.
On Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy walks in, thinking he’s in control. He’s the cop, the hero, the guy with the answers. But with every step, we see more of his reality getting shifted and how it's fragmented because of everything he has tried to bury. That exact slow-burn horror exists in Prisoners, too. Keller Dover isn’t a detective, but he becomes one out of desperation. His grief turned into an obsession. He crosses lines. Breaks people. Breaks himself. And the worst part? You get it. You might not agree, but you get it.
Both films refuse to give you the comfort of certainty. They’re about men trying to find the truth and losing themselves along the way. No one comes out clean. No one walks away whole.
Available to watch on: Netflix and Prime Video
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo digs up graves, rips open old wounds, and dares you to watch. On the surface, it’s a cold case. A missing girl. A powerful family. A quiet island. But, like Prisoners, it’s never just about the mystery. It’s about the monsters we let hide in plain sight. The secrets people protect out of fear, guilt, or just plain cruelty. And the few people left who are willing to burn the whole thing down just to drag the truth into the light.
Lisbeth Salander is unlike any “investigator” you’ve seen - brilliant, brutal, and guarded like hell. But underneath all that armor is a woman who’s been failed by every system meant to protect her. Sound familiar? Keller Dover isn’t exactly soft around the edges, either. They’re both survivors turned vigilantes, done asking nicely. The justice they’re chasing doesn’t come from a courtroom. It’s something raw, personal, and often painful.
Both films pull you into the shadows and keep you there. They don’t offer comfort. They offer a confrontation. They’re not afraid to be ugly. They’re not afraid to get hurt. Both films are dripping with dread and mystery, and you're sure to love them.
Available to watch on: Prime Video
Murder On The Orient Express
Murder on the Orient Express doesn’t look refined on the outside but is quietly bleeding underneath. Like Prisoners, it starts with a crime, but it’s never really about the act. It's about everything that happened around it. Both stories take justice out of the courtroom and into the hands of people who’ve been broken by the system. People who’ve waited too long for the right thing to happen and decided to do the wrong thing instead.
Hercule Poirot is a man of order, faith in the law carved into his bones. But on that train, surrounded by grief-stricken conspirators who couldn’t bear another day of injustice, his compass falters. And that moment, where he hesitates, where he lets it go, is everything. Prisoners does the same, but louder. Messier. Keller Dover isn’t trying to stay clean. He wants results, and he’s willing to become unrecognizable to get them. Both men are forced to face the same question: What if the rules don’t work?
They’re stories about what’s left after justice fails and what it does to people who care too much. If Prisoners cracked your moral compass, Murder on the Orient Express will gently, devastatingly realign it, and not in the way you expect.
Available to watch on: Sony LIV
The Guilty
The Guilty is proof that you don’t need a massive set, a dozen characters, or a bloody crime scene to destroy someone emotionally. You just need a voice on the other end of a phone and a man barely holding it together. Just like Prisoners, it traps you in a small space with someone who thinks they’re in control, then slowly, painfully unravels every illusion they have about justice, responsibility, and themselves.
The Guilty locks you in a room with a man on the edge and refuses to let you look away. Asger Holm is taking 911 calls as a disgraced cop shoved behind a desk. He’s angry, restless, and waiting for someone to give him a reason to matter again. Then came the call. A woman tells him that she’s been kidnapped, and suddenly, Asger has a purpose. He jumps in, heart first, head later, convinced he can save her. Redeem himself. Rewrite the story.
But this isn’t a clean rescue mission. The more he pushes, the more the truth pulls back. It’s ugly, far from the neat little narrative he’s trying to write. Every choice he makes tightens the noose. Every assumption adds fuel to a fire he doesn’t understand. And slowly, you realize this isn’t about her. It’s about him. His guilt. His past. He needs to fix something when he can’t even look at himself in the mirror.
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Like Keller Dover in Prisoners, Asger thinks justice is about action. That doing something, anything, makes you the good guy. But both stories gut that illusion. Bonus points are that both films feature a wonderful Jake Gyllenhaal, proving his acting prowess with two of the best performances of his career.
Available to watch on: Netflix
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