A woman seems to have the perfect life. She looks like Robin Wright or Meghann Fahy or, remarkably often, Nicole Kidman. Her career, if she has one, is creative or philanthropic. Her blue-blooded husband is a silver fox (Hugh Grant) or an Adonis (Alexander Skarsgård). They have a cute kid or two. And whether they reside in a chic suburb, a beachfront mansion, or a city loft, their kitchen is sure to have the most majestic island you’ve ever seen.
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Then comes the crisis. The woman is assaulted. The husband is cheating. A child disappears. A suspicious stranger arrives. Someone gets murdered. That perfect life becomes a nightmare, or is revealed to have been one all along.
These are the contours of the contemporary domestic thriller, a niche that has come to dominate every form of narrative entertainment by, for, and about women. At first, its proliferation seemed to constitute a typical case of Hollywood copycatting; Big Little Lies becomes a smash, wins eight Emmys, begets flimsy imitations that lots of people watch anyway. But at this point, the trend’s persistence and the thirst with which its products are consumed suggest a more profound connection between these stories and their audience. Domestic thrillers have always existed because women’s fears of patriarchal violence and control, particularly in the supposed sanctuary of the home, spring eternal. Certainly, American life has given us many new causes, since the mid-2010s, for worry.
Yet the domestic thriller is no longer just a fever dream of gender anxiety. Not anymore. On an abstract level, these are stories of an enemy infiltrating intimate spaces: a husband, a neighbor, a nanny—people who are supposed to be safe but are actually dangerous and communities fractured along invisible rifts. These literal houses divided against themselves have broad resonance in a paranoid society in the throes of what the journalist Jeff Sharlet calls a “slow civil war.” Just as slowly, the domestic thriller has become the defining metaphor of our time.
A posh murder mystery with a wrinkle—we don’t know who the victim is until the finale—HBO’s Big Little Lies, based on Liane Moriarty’s novel, set the template for the current generation of domestic thrillers. One of TV’s starriest casts (Kidman, Skarsgård, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, Shailene Woodley) was matched by veteran creator David E. Kelley, the late director Jean-Marc Vallée (Wild). Along with those big names, Lies lured in viewers with its soapy twists, rich-bitch moms, and lush coastal setting, then surprised us by spinning scandal into an astute study of how abuse compounds across generations and a vision of solidarity among women. Premiering weeks after Donald Trump took office in 2017, it was more fun to watch and more optimistic in its feminism than another new series that overtly confronted right-wing misogyny: The Handmaid’s Tale.
Lies didn’t invent the domestic thriller. Also known as domestic suspense or domestic noir, the term generally encompasses psychological thrillers that are set in the home or neighborhood; interrogate familial or community relationships; and, usually, center around female characters. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, with its haunted female narrator and madwoman in the attic, retroactively fits this brief. (Some have argued that the domestic thriller can be traced back to Medea.) The format flourished in the middle of the 20th century, in books by Daphne du Maurier and movies like Gaslight, mirroring the psyches of women who’d been empowered to run the homefront during World War II, then married into suburban cages. As the crime writer Sarah Weinman noted in her midcentury anthology, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: “stories of domestic suspense frighten precisely because in depicting ordinary, everyday life—especially in the context of larger anxieties about rapid social change—the nerves they hit are really fault lines that, despite tremendous progress, show no signs of going away.”
For that predominantly white, middle-class Feminine Mystique cohort, whose frustrations would fuel the ’70s feminist revolution, those fault lines mostly concerned gender. When Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl became a phenomenon two generations later, it illuminated the subtler power imbalances that persisted within heterosexual relationships. A rant by its psycho wife character about how women contort themselves into perfect “cool girls” in order to be deemed lovable by men went viral because readers related.
Thirteen years later, the domestic thriller reigns supreme. It has gone highbrow in layered series like Vallée and Martin Noxon’s adaptation of Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Roma auteur Alfonso Cuarón’s stylish Disclaimer. It’s hit new—yet popular—lows, in Netflix’s nonsensical Behind Her Eyes and the clumsily written domestic-thriller-meets-romance novels of Colleen Hoover, whose work will have fueled four films between 2024 and 2026. Roughly 3% of print adult fiction books sold in the U.S. last year were by The Housemaid author Freida McFadden. Released in December, the Housemaid film has earned more than $250 million and counting, making it arguably 2025’s biggest movie aimed at adult women. We’re even seeing work that filters gendered horrors through male eyes. What is Adolescence, a portrait of a family destroyed by the son’s murder of a female classmate and Netflix’s second-most-watched series of all time, if not a domestic thriller?
Big Little Lies made wealth disparity a crucial ingredient of the new domestic thriller. Like Jane Eyre—a governess who fell for her affluent employer—Woodley’s character, a young single mother, is a broke outsider in an exclusive community. Yet instead of marrying a local bigwig, she recognizes one of them as her son’s rapist father, catalyzing his demise. Storylines like this, in our age of escalating eat-the-rich sentiment, allow viewers to vicariously enjoy beautiful homes and high-maintenance bodies while also fantasizing about (or, for more comfortable audiences, safely exploring fears of) class warfare.
This scenario—a woman with no money destabilizes a family of means—has become a blueprint. Last year’s relentlessly twisty The Girlfriend, on Prime Video, cast Olivia Cooke as a slightly unhinged working-class striver at odds with her upper-crust boyfriend’s even more deranged mother (Wright). In Peacock’s All Her Fault, a nanny from a rough background (Sophia Lillis) disappears with her rich employers’ little boy. While she and his working mom (Sarah Snook) are initially seen as culprits, the boy’s selfish father (Jake Lacy, who played similar roles in the dire Moriarty adaptation Apples Never Fall and The White Lotus) turns out to be the guiltiest party of all.
These middling domestic thrillers play on simplistic beliefs and fears that their creators might ascribe to the average woman: rich people are bad, male entitlement is out of control, moms can’t win, aging is scary, losing a child is scarier. Yet they also capture ambient anxieties about the boundaries of community, whether conceived as a family unit, a cul-de-sac, or a nation—anxieties interrogated with more purpose and style in the best domestic thrillers. Sharp Objects uses a murder mystery to excavate the rot at the core of a Missouri town whose mythology glorifies the Confederacy. As if cursed since the Civil War, residents continue to mistake their homegrown villains for heroes.
The paranoia that now governs American life echoes the paranoid logic of the domestic thriller. We wheel carts through grocery stores wondering which of the two-faced neighbors who politely greet us in the aisles will vote in a way that hurts or disgusts us. We pray that law enforcement sent to our cities will do its ostensible job of making us safer, not turn on us in a shocking twist. We are always negotiating: Who is one of “us”? Who means us or our kids harm? Is it the outsiders clamoring for a piece of what we’ve earned or the insiders hoarding undeserved advantages? Maybe it’s no coincidence that, from Gone Girl to The Girlfriend, the contemporary domestic thriller so often hinges on dramatic shifts in point of view. In a society that no longer agrees on fundamental truths, everything is a matter of perspective.
It might seem as if the domestic thriller has peaked, but all signs point to another huge year ahead for wealthy, white women in peril. As a Housemaid sequel enters production and we await two Hoover movies, the author’s new thriller, Woman Down, is among the first of dozens to come in the niche in 2026. On TV we’ll see Elisabeth Moss and Kerry Washington (a Little Fires Everywhere star who’s been one of the genre’s few nonwhite leads) as friends torn apart by crime in Apple’s Imperfect Women; Kaley Cuoco as a vacationer whose boyfriend disappears in Vanished, on MGM+; a true-crime domestic thriller in Paramount+’s Unspeakable: The Murder of JonBenet Ramsey, starring Melissa McCarthy; Season 2 of The Last Thing He Told Me. A third season of Lies is in the works.
The trend is evolving, though. Many of the most enjoyable recent domestic thrillers betray some self-awareness about the absurdity of the tropes they recycle. Paul Feig, who directed the dark, preschool-parent crime comedy A Simple Favor and its 2025 sequel, brought the same archness to his Housemaid movie. Fans at my screening howled as ex-con maid Sydney Sweeney and desperate housewife Amanda Seyfried waged their hysterical suburban war.
You don’t have to dig past the premise to spot the irreverence in Netflix breakout The Hunting Wives: A blue state transplant (Brittany Snow) is absorbed into a clique of sexy, sapphic, potentially murderous right-wing society women in Texas. Like straight-faced domestic thrillers, both stories play on the opposition of outsiders and insiders in elite worlds. Both savor catfights but frame men as dogs. Yet, like much of what has transpired during the second Trump presidency, they express a sense of history repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as farce (but also still tragedy).
A pessimistic read on this shift toward self-mockery would be that it’s just an impotent acknowledgment that the bad, enemy-within vibes are here to stay—a way of laughing because our only other option is to cry. But I’d prefer to imagine these stories as seeds of subversion. Poking fun at misogyny, privilege, partisan polarization, and hunting-wife hypocrisy isn’t activism, yet it may be an early step in the long process of wresting our narrative from the grip of despair. In the fight against fear, a weapon too often underestimated is joy.