What’s new to obsess over on Netflix when you want a thriller that feels less like a puzzle and more like a slow, invasive takeover? Start here: three titles that take the comforting idea of “right and wrong” and rub it raw until it stops helping. In these three Netflix European psychological thrillers, danger does not always kick the door down. It sits across the table, smiles, asks a polite question, and waits for you to answer wrong.
One film traps investigators inside a locked-down town where fear spreads faster than facts. Another drags a weary private eye through a missing-person case that keeps mutating, forcing him to confront how easily empathy becomes leverage. The last turns suburbia into a pressure cooker, where identity, passing, and buried history generate a dread so tight it feels physical. Here’s what to know about Infiesto, 10 Days of a Good Man, and The Strays, including plot, cast, atmosphere, and what makes each one hit differently.
Infiesto
All the key details
- Title: Infiesto
- Original title: Infiesto
- Format: Film
- Length / Runtime: 96 minutes
- Genre: Mystery thriller
- Country of production: Spain
- Original language: Spanish
- Release date: February 3, 2023 (Netflix)
- Director / Creator: Patxi Amezcua
- Lead cast: Isak Férriz, Iria del Río
- Produced by: Netflix; Vaca Films
What Infiesto is about
Infiesto drops two detectives into a small mining town in the Asturian mountains on the first day of Spain’s March 2020 state of emergency for the Covid 19 epidemic, when roads empty, routines fracture, and everyone suddenly watches everyone else. A young woman, missing for months and presumed dead, reappears battered and disoriented, like a message delivered by the landscape itself. The case should look like a rescue story. Instead, it behaves like a contagion. Each answer opens into something older, stranger, and far more organized than a single crime, pushing the investigators to read the town the way you read a face that refuses to confess what it knows.
Infiesto genre, atmosphere, and why it hits
This is a Spanish mystery thriller with a grounded, procedural spine and an escalating sense of menace. It uses the early-pandemic setting as an emotional amplifier: isolation intensifies suspicion, and every closed door feels like a decision someone made. Expect tense interviews, uneasy silences, and a case that keeps narrowing toward a single, dangerous nucleus.
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Infiesto cast: the faces at the center
The film anchors itself in the pairing of Isak Férriz and Iria del Río as the two investigators called into a town that does not want outside attention. Their dynamic stays practical rather than flashy: they push, they doubt, they commit, and they keep working even when the case turns personal. Around them, the supporting characters widen the net of suspicion, from locals with selective memories to figures connected to a more unsettling belief system.
10 Days of a Good Man
All the key details
- Title: 10 Days of a Good Man
- Format: Film
- Length / Runtime: 2h 3m
- Genre: Mystery thriller (with noir shading)
- Country of production: Turkey
- Original language: Turkish
- Director / Creator: Uluç Bayraktar
- Lead cast: Nejat İşler, Nur Fettahoğlu, Şenay Gürler
- Produced by: Netflix
What 10 Days of a Good Man is about
10 Days of a Good Man follows a former lawyer who now works as a private investigator, and it wastes no time giving him a case that looks straightforward until it starts changing shape. A missing-person job pulls him into an “unexpected and life-altering” search, one that forces him to navigate other people’s secrets while trying to keep his own cynicism from calcifying into cruelty. The film leans into a noir mood: a worn-down investigator, conversations that double as tests, and a city that never feels neutral, only transactional.
The tension here comes less from action than from moral friction. Every step forward asks the same question in different clothes: how much damage can a person justify while insisting they are still “good”? The story frames “goodness” as a performance people demand from you, a shield you carry until it becomes heavy, then a label that others weaponize when they want to control the narrative. By the time the investigation tightens, the film has already made its point: certainty is a luxury, and “helping” can turn into obsession faster than anyone admits.
Genre, atmosphere, and why it hits
This is a Turkish mystery thriller with a brooding, talk-driven pulse and a private-eye edge. It favors pressure over speed: long scenes that let meaning shift mid-conversation, and a protagonist who reads people for a living but still gets surprised by what they hide.
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The faces at the center
Nejat İşler plays the investigator at the center of the story, a man who carries intelligence and exhaustion in the same posture. Nur Fettahoğlu and Şenay Gürler co-star, rounding out a cast built for this film’s strengths. Emotional subtext, shifting alliances, and characters who never reveal everything in a single scene.
The Strays
All the key details
- Title: The Strays
- Original title: The Strays
- Format: Film
- Length / Runtime: 100 minutes
- Genre: Psychological horror thriller
- Country of production: United Kingdom
- Original language: English
- Release date: February 22, 2023 (Netflix)
- Director / Creator: Nathaniel Martello-White
- Lead cast: Ashley Madekwe, Bukky Bakray, Jorden Myrie, Justin Salinger
- Produced by: Netflix
What The Strays is about
The Strays weaponizes “perfect life” imagery and turns it into a threat. Neve, a biracial woman who has built a polished, upper-class existence as a respected professional and parent, moves through her days with the smooth certainty of someone who believes she has finally outrun her past. Then two unsettling figures appear at the edges of her world, not with obvious violence, but with presence. They sit where they should not sit. They watch for a beat too long. They make her feel seen in a way that doesn’t flatter. And that quiet attention starts to crack the facade.
The film builds dread through social discomfort and psychological escalation: the fear of exposure, the fear of losing status, the fear that the version of you that “made it” rests on a lie someone else remembers. It plays like suburban horror without the usual monsters. Instead, it uses identity, memory, and denial as the engine of suspense, until the question stops being “Who are they?” and becomes “Who have you been pretending not to be?”
The Strays genre, atmosphere, and why it hits
This is a psychological thriller that brushes against horror, not through jump scares, but through the slow collapse of safety. In other words, it makes ordinary spaces feel hostile: school corridors, well-kept living rooms, friendly neighborhood routines. The camera lingers where you want it to cut away, turning silence into accusation.
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The Strays cast
Ashley Madekwe leads as Neve, playing control like a survival skill. Bukky Bakray and Jorden Myrie co-star as the disruptive presences who destabilize Neve’s carefully managed world. Justin Salinger appears in the supporting cast. The performances matter because this story depends on micro-shifts. A glance held too long, a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, a line delivered as if it means something else.
What these Netflix thrillers have in common
All three titles treat morality as unstable, something you negotiate rather than possess. Infiesto tests duty against obsession in a community where fear and belief distort the truth. 10 Days of a Good Man frames “goodness” as a story people tell about themselves, then pressures the protagonist to prove it in a case designed to corrode him. The Strays turns identity into suspense, showing how a curated life can become a trap the moment the past stops cooperating. In each film, the most dangerous thing is not a single villain. It’s the way people protect their version of reality.
Key differences: which one should you start with?
Start with Infiesto if you want a procedural pulse and a rural setting that feels sealed off from help, where the investigation steadily tightens into something more sinister. Choose 10 Days of a Good Man if you prefer noir-flavored mystery, character friction, and an investigator-led narrative where talk, psychology, and compromises drive the suspense as much as clues do. Hit play on The Strays if you want psychological horror energy: a sleek surface, a creeping sense of exposure, and dread that builds from social tension into something that feels personal, intimate, and sharp.
Release on Netflix
All the titles are available now on Netflix.
▶ WATCH INFIESTO ON NETFLIX
▶ WATCH 10 DAYS OF A GOOD MAN ON NETFLIX
▶ WATCH THE STRAYS ON NETFLIX
