10 Gripping Movies Like Prisoners You Must Watch

Many critics praised Denis Villeneuve’s thriller Prisoners, which took the world by storm and was the first of a string of highly successful English-language movies from the director. Since then, many movies have tried to copy Prisoners’s success. Fans of movies will remember these movies for a long time, and not many movies will ever really live up to the standards they set. This means that some of the best movies like Prisoners that are also some of the best stories out there and should be looked for.

Prisoners is one of those movies that stands out for its beautiful scenery and unforgettable performances. Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal are just two of the many great actors who make up this amazing cast. Most of the time, movies like Prisoners are based on real events or are driven by strong performances and don’t fall short in any way. Rarely seen, these movies are of a very high quality, and you can watch many of them on big streaming services.

10 Best Thrillers Movies Like Prisoners:

1. Gone Girl:

In the psychological movie Gone Girl, Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike play Nick and Amy, a couple who have a lot of things they want to keep from everyone, including each other. Nick does everything he can to clear his name when Amy goes missing and more proof comes in that her husband did it. Because he knows his wife well, he thinks she faked her death and blamed it on him. He needs to find out the truth soon, though.

In both Prisoners and Gone Girl, there is a mystery where one character has to solve the case on their own because they don’t trust the cops to do it right. But because the people involved are setting up so many twists and turns, people are left with so many ideas and hints until the truth comes out. Both movies were in the top 10 at the National Board of Review in their own years.

2. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson was turned into a movie series in Sweden, and now David Fincher has made a movie based on it. But Fincher made this movie stand on its own with great acting by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, award-winning photography, and great use of music.

The film is a mystery about someone who has been kidnapped, and like Prisoners, it shows how pain from the past can show up in the present. Craig plays a reporter who is asked to look into the disappearance of a young girl 40 years ago. Some people want the past to stay buried.

He gets help from a tech detective named Lisbeth Salander. Mara gives an amazing performance, just like Noomi Rapace did in the Swedish versions. Fans of Prisoners will love this movie because it has great acting and an interesting plot.

3. Taken:

No one can forget Liam Neeson’s voice, but there is something especially scary about the way he plays Bryan Mills in Taken, who vows to hunt down, catch, and kill the people who took his daughter. This movie is about Bryan’s trip through Europe as he tries very hard to find his daughter and her best friend, who were sex traded in Paris. For the sake of finding his daughter, Bryan is willing to kill, hurt, and destroy an entire city. He has nothing to lose.

Taken is about a father and his daughter in a way that is similar to Prisoners. However, Neeson’s character is not just any dad trying to find his daughter; he goes full CIA on anyone who gets in the way of him getting her back. It moves faster and has more brutal killings and chase scenes, but it is worth seeing to understand how far a parent will go to protect their kid.

4. Kiss The Girls:

Kiss the Girls was based on the Alex Cross books by James Patterson, which are about a police officer and forensic psychologist in Washington, DC. At the time, Morgan Freeman played Cross in the first two movies of a series that never went anywhere else.

This movie is about Cross’s search for his niece, who is the most recent person reported missing in Durham, North Carolina. Ashley Judd is one of the girls who was kidnapped, but she gets away and helps Cross save his niece and the other girls who are lost before it’s too late.

Like Prisoners, this showed a family member looking for answers and a determined agent trying to solve the case even though he doesn’t know how close he is to coming across the truth. Freeman is his normal tough and bossy self on screen, making Cross a fascinating hero.

5. You Were Never Really Here:

In You Were Never Really Here, Joaquin Phoenix gives an amazing performance as Joe, a suicide gunman whose job it is to find and save the young daughter of a politician from a human trafficking ring. As if that wasn’t confusing enough, Joe finds out that the government is behind it all and starts seeing bodies. He does everything he can to keep Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) safe.

This is another story about an adult and a child. This time, a skilled man does everything he can to save a young girl. Keller Dover and Joe both break morals and ethics to save an innocent child. But compared to Prisoners, You Were Never Really Here has a lot of killings and beatings that happen quickly.

6. Changeling:

Changeling starred Angelina Jolie and was directed by Clint Eastwood. It was a story about a parent who would do anything to find their lost child, which Prisoners fans will recognise. The title of the movie gives away the plot twist: the cops bring her a boy who she quickly realises is not her missing son.

But because it happened in 1928, the police said she was crazy and closed the case. She ends up in a mental hospital when she finds proof that the child is not hers. At times, this is as tense as Prisoners.

Police corruption was shown on a very high level in this story, and Jolie was nominated for an Oscar for her part as a mother who desperately wants to find her son. Eastwood writes an interesting and gripping story that is about more than just finding answers. It’s also about a woman’s fight for justice.

7. Gone Baby Gone:

In Ben Affleck’s first movie as a director, the neo-noir crime film Gone Baby Gone, the Affleck brothers work together. Casey Affleck plays Patrick Kenzie, a private detective who has just lost all hope after failing to save the lives of two children. When Patrick spends time with the local cops, he finds out that more secrets are being kept that point to different suspects in at least one of the children’s cases.

In Prisoners, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Detective Loki. In this movie, Casey Affleck plays a police officer who thinks something more dishonest is going on with his case. Loki is the only one who gets two success stories instead of one, which is a shame. Both movies have more vague endings that make people feel uncomfortable, but the ending of Gone Baby Gone feels more real because Patrick sits with the girl he saved and knows that her life will not get better with her drug-addicted mother.

8. The Lovely Bones:

Peter Jackson had only made big movies for years before The Lovely Bones. It was a quiet movie. The Lovely Bones was based on the best-selling book by Alice Sebold about a freshman in high school who was taken and killed by a serial killer.

He did, however, make the body disappear, so her parents never got closure on her death. This caused Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz to start to fight because they had different ways of dealing with their sadness.

Susie’s (Saoirse Ronan) ghost stayed behind and wouldn’t leave until she helped solve her own murder. And that was the trick. Even though the parts about the afterlife don’t quite work, the parts about a family falling apart after a tragedy and the father becoming obsessed with finding answers are a lot like the realistic parts of Prisoners.

9. Zodiac:

Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo all work together in the mystery movie Zodiac as real people who spent a lot of time trying to figure out codes and find the Zodiac killer. In David Fincher’s neo-noir mystery drama, things get tense because people get mad when they feel like they are always behind schedule. When lives are at stake, no one can relax and pick up where they left off the next day.

The professional relationships between the characters in Zodiac feel very real, a lot like the friendship between Jackman and Gyllenhaal’s characters in Prisoners. They want to help each other, but their jobs make it hard for them to share knowledge and get involved. But that doesn’t stop some of them from looking into things in their own unique ways.

10. Jar City:

The script for this movie was written by the famous Icelandic author Arnaldur Indriðason. It is based on the third book in his popular series of stories about the tough detective Erlendur Sveinsson (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson). In a small town where the movie is set, a murder is linked to a crime that happened decades ago.

This makes the agent and his team, who are tired of the world, look into the quiet, isolated community’s dark secrets. It’s an unfavourable take on hard-boiled detective fiction, and the main characters’ hard and often empty lives give it a haunting quality that Prisoners fans will enjoy.

Not only is Jar City an unusual murder mystery story because of its setting, but it also has strong emotions that come from its complicated characters and a crime that is slowly solved, but its effects last for decades.

Conclusion:

If you movies like Prisoners for how gripping, scary, and emotional it was, these ten movies will do the same. Each movie is a thrilling ride full of mystery, moral ambiguity, and unforgettable performances. Zodiac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have a haunting atmosphere, Changeling and Gone Baby Gone have a heavy emotional weight, and Taken and You Were Never Really Here have an unstoppable pace. Like Prisoners, these movies will make you think about how people are and how the lines between right and wrong are fuzzy.

If you want to add movies like Prisoners to your list of things to watch, these are the ones you should choose. Most of them are available on major streaming services and are ready to keep you on the edge of your seat. Read these scary, interesting stories to find out how far the characters will go when things go wrong in their lives.

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