10 great technothrillers

Our eternal crisis with technology – will it liberate humankind or confine us? – has exploded in the digital age. Issues such as digital security, artificial intelligence and dark web economies all invite a moral ambiguity that filmmakers have eagerly jumped at. Since the invention of complex computers and microchips, ‘technothrillers’ have treated privacy, violence and the fabric of our reality with a playful, cynical zeal, transplanting the bitter sensibilities of film noir on to a world that has been enhanced (or marred) by technology.

Pascal Plante’s Montreal-set Red Rooms combines courtroom drama with the most intense scenes of someone on a computer that you’ll see all year. Professional model and blackhat hacker Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is obsessed with the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a kidnapper, torturer and murderer who streamed his gruesome crimes for an online ‘red room’ of dark-web bidders, and takes it upon herself to find the final missing piece of video evidence.

Full of unsettling thrills, Red Rooms builds on the unofficial canon of films that see technology as something that can extend our grasp but also cloud our view in our search for justice. It’s a genre that evolves with every new tech upgrade, as the shifting veneer of the digital world keeps giving the conspiracy-obsessed and anti-capitalist tenets of classic noir fertile soil to grow. Now we can all log on to the provocative Red Room, here are 10 key technothrillers to help decode the genre.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

A step into dystopian sci-fi for the prolific New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, World on a Wire is a 204-minute miniseries adaptation of the 1964 novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, an early treatment of the theme of simulated reality. The story forces tech researcher Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) through a conspiratorial and existential labyrinth of anguish after he takes charge of a cutting-edge supercomputer (read: vast server rooms and cathode-ray television screens). The machine creates an artificial world and population out of microchips and circuitry, a simulation of unreal life that’s just realistic enough for self-aware paranoia to bleed through to Stiller’s world and infect him with ontological uncertainty. 

It’s an inventive, exhaustive work of European art filmmaking with plenty of resonance to its West German TV audience, who would have been familiar with engaging with a reality with artificial, remotely controlled boundaries.

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

One of Kathryn Bigelow’s finest films, this maximalist sci-fi thriller latched on to the recent 1992 Los Angeles riots, not just to the theme of anti-Black racism within the LAPD, but also to how cameras were used to reveal examples of organised, systemic violence. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is in the memory recall trade, using a device that gives you access to another person’s memories and sensations. Along with bodyguard Mace (Angela Bassett), he is thrust into a complex criminal conspiracy after discovery of a memory disc of someone committing a grisly murder, all seen from the killer’s giallo-tinted perspective. 

Set in the final hours of the 20th century, this explosive dystopian noir doesn’t just feature one of Bassett’s most arresting and immediate performances, it ably grapples with the politically volatile nature of the recorded image. Depending on the intent of its user, technology can be both incriminatory and liberatory, and Strange Days excels at pushing its characters right up to the cliff edge with tech’s oppressive potential.

Director: Tony Scott

The late Tony Scott was an expert at taking rote thriller premises and pushing them to aesthetic extremes, and this Will Smith-led romp synthesises a dozen classics of the manhunt genre on the cusp of the new millennium. Smith is a hotshot attorney in a battle between the cutting edge surveillance state, led by Jon Voight as a ruthless NSA chief, and the old-school spy tricks of a paranoid recluse, played by Gene Hackman (Could he be The Conversation’s Harry Caul in his twilight years?).

This blockbuster feels like a software upgrade to the wiretapping dramas of the 1970s, with Smith playing a cornered but fleet-footed everyman who learns how much of his environment can be weaponised by the state to isolate and discredit its citizens. When it came to technology furthering national interests in a pre-Patriot Act America, the writing may have been on the wall.

Director: David Cronenberg

Trust David Cronenberg to take the existential panic of the virtual reality thriller – previously mastered by authors Philip K. Dick and William Gibson – and discover it’s the perfect setting for psychosexual anxieties. eXistenZ may be Cronenberg at his most playful, but it also thoughtfully expands the Canadian “body beautiful” pioneer’s philosophy that reality can be changed by changing the body. 

It manifests here in a virtual space accessed by game pods that plug into ‘bio ports’ on our spine. Mild-mannered Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is thrust into a corporate struggle and activist war over the revolutionary game prototype, and has to confront his fear of body penetration in order to survive. Technology, and especially that which allows medical science to reach new frontiers, has long pervaded Cronenberg’s work, but there’s something delicious about the way eXistenZ infiltrates the form of an unfeeling corporate thriller with images of organic technology attaching itself to human bodies.

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

What starts as an asphyxiating horror preying on the isolation of being on the computer late at night soon morphs into something more chilling and lasting, like the dark stains on walls that remain after these characters submit to the ghosts bleeding into our world. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is peerless when it comes to submerging us in liminal spaces, and the creeping, persistent ways that environments are violated by mournful ghosts via the internet gives us a brief taste of the loneliness that defines the afterlife – enough to make our skin crawl imagining what it would be like in its eternal totality. 

Even in his newest film Cloud, which just premiered at Venice, Kurosawa is drawn to new technological developments and probes the human angst and dysfunction they could be masking. The all-encompassing connection promised by a ubiquitous online world could in reality be a channel for limitless grief.

Director: Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas uses the ice-cold, cutthroat movements of the corporate thriller as a lens to explore desensitisation to taboo images including violence and pornography. Connie Nielsen stars as Diane, an executive in the midst of a tricky acquisition deal with a Japanese anime studio, with the intent of partnering with American internet distributor ‘Demonlover’. But as in many Assayas films, identities are not fixed, and as the lethal espionage extends its thorny, twisty reach, we see how the characters’ rigid capitalist lens has corroded them; viewing digitally packaged violence and sex solely in terms of monetary value sends them into a state of detachment and decoherence that modifies behaviour in reckless, harmful ways. 

Assayas explores this in typically opaque fashion: the final half hour descends into out-of-sync, non-linear flashbacks that feel like a sequence of salacious clips overpowering traditional narrative.

Director: Richard Linklater

It would be remiss to not include a Philip K. Dick adaptation on this list, even though the one we’ve opted for lacks the stylised action and lavish production design of Blade Runner (1982) or Total Recall (1990). Faithful to Dick’s eccentric, pessimistic novel, Richard Linklater applied the rotoscope animation techniques of his Waking Life (2001) to a shaggy paranoia thriller about narcotics agent Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) going undercover amid a gang of hapless stoners. 

Among the tech advancements of the film are full-body futuristic disguises that conceal his identity from his superiors and – after prolonged drug use – corrupt Arctor’s sense of identity. Linklater’s casual visual style combines with a live-wire animation texture that indicates something about reality has been altered, a vibe that’s perfectly suited for Dick’s anxieties about vulnerable users having their agency co-opted by corporate programmes. It’s a crisis worsened when the technology vital for Bob’s survival turns against him – by working exactly as intended.

Director: Michael Mann

There is no initially maligned Michael Mann film that won’t be favourably reappraised in years to come, and Blackhat has perhaps shot up the most in estimation since its muted 2015 reception. Chris Hemsworth is Nick Hathaway, the world’s most muscly hacker, who is released from a lengthy prison sentence so long as he can hunt down a dangerous cybercriminal intent on geopolitical devastation. 

The reactive, breakneck camera blocking and unmatched commitment to the mechanics of information security make every computer readout and nest of cables a potential site of suspense and tension. The extent of our hackers’ power makes much of Blackhat feel primal in tone and texture, an electric impulse towards confrontation that’s urgent and burning. The final scenes, captured during a bustling festival, force you to scan through crowds as if you were a CCTV camera. 

Director: Daniel Goldhaber

Set in the world of the online sex industry, this psychological thriller plays on the debilitating erosion of agency that many sex workers experience, as camgirl Alice (Madeline Brewer) learns her streaming account has been hijacked by a doppelganger, and no-one else is willing to help her existential crisis. 

As in his subsequent film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), director Daniel Goldhaber blends urgent, personally felt politics with genre structures – and, in the process, reveals how much everyday political realities had already been infused with horror and thriller archetypes. Both of Goldhaber’s films have been fully collaborative – Cam wouldn’t exist without the insightful screenplay from writer and former camgirl Isa Mazzei and Brewer’s convincing performance. The results update the doppelganger chiller for the livestreaming age, as Alice confronts a version of herself defined by her anonymous clients’ most exploitative impulses.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Just before cameras rolled on her directorial debut Blink Twice (2024), Zoë Kravitz appeared as the lead of a streaming-exclusive surveillance thriller from the king of commercial minimalism, Steven Soderbegh. She plays an anxious and agoraphobic coder who stumbles upon a recording of a violent crime while sorting through data streams from the alpha release of ‘Kimi’, a tech corporation’s new smart speaker, which monitors its user base to evolve its algorithm.

Beyond the seminal voyeur works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Brian De Palma, the motif of a lone worker possessing evidence of a serious crime radiates through noir thrillers (this is the second film on this list to hinge on the trope). Soderbergh grapples with the mutable, tricksy nature of invasive data harvesting for a sharp injection of conspiratorial thrills. As you watch it, you may find yourself wondering what information your streaming platform is gathering about you too.