The 32 greatest revenge thrillers ever made

Revenge is a dish best served with a cold soda and a hot bucket of fresh, buttery popcorn. Some of the greatest movies are about quests for vengeance. While the heroes or antiheroes on the big screen are trying to get even, the viewer watching along is getting thoroughly entertained.

These are the 32 best movies about revenge. Most of them are thrillers, which makes sense. Getting revenge is typically a high-stakes, high-stress endeavor, and it frequently involves convoluted plans that'll keep you on your toes. Along with actioners and dramas, you'll also see a couple of horror movies on the list. (Perhaps the person trying to get revenge is the slasher villain, taking out what might otherwise be a reasonable desire for justice in all the wrong ways by murdering a bunch of teenagers?) Revenge is universal and isn't held back by any genres.

There's an old saying that goes, "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." It's good advice, but luckily, advice you don't need to heed when you're merely watching somebody get revenge in a movie. Read on for some of the best quests for justice.

32. Do Revenge

Year: 2022
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke star in this high school comedy that's basically Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train by way of Cruel Intentions. The pair are two students at a fancy private school who have both been wronged and decide to work together so that each of them can exact revenge on the other one's nemesis. Darkly funny and enjoyable despite being so clearly derivative of a number of teen comedies (or perhaps that's why it's so enjoyable), Do Revenge is a solid bit of streaming vengeance with twists and some killer jokes.

31. Nobody

Year: 2021
Director: Ilya Naishuller

One of the better John Wick knock-offs, Nobody stars Bob Odenkirk—better known as a comedic actor with some drama gravitas, as seen in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul—as a butt-kicking retired assassin. Hutch Mansell (Odenkirk) is living an ordinary, mundane life, but when robbers target his home, he goes to track them down because they've taken his daughter's kitty bracelet. This soon has Hutch dealing with a Russian crime lord who wants his own sort of revenge because Hutch killed his son. It's a good action flick, though the high point comes early during a long, brutal, and expertly choreographed brawl on a bus.

30. The Machine Girl

Year: 2008
Director: Noboru Iguchi

Ami Hyūga is a normal high school girl until her brother is killed by ninja-yakuza who cut off her arm. So, Ami does what anybody would do in that situation: attach a big machine gun to the stump of her arm and set out for some gloriously gory revenge. The Machine Girl is a truly absurd movie in the best way. It's an overwhelming assault of gonzo ideas and special effects that don't exactly look, uh, "good" but are, in fact, perfect for this type of proudly over-the-top action comedy.

29. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Year: 2024
Directors: Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham

The beloved British claymation duo's sixth outing (and second feature-length film), Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, brings back one of the best characters from the best short, The Wrong Trousers. Feathers McGraw, a penguin thief who pretends to be a chicken by putting a red rubber glove on his head, has escaped prison, and he wants to get back at Wallace and Gromit for foiling his attempt to steal a diamond in the 1993 short. As with all Aardman Animations outings, Vengeance Most Fowl is exceedingly charming, though it perhaps spends a bit too much time on Wallace's new robot garden gnome invention.

28. Friday the 13th

Year: 1980
Director: Sean S. Cunningham

Any horror fan knows that Jason Voorhees, the famous hockey mask-wearing slasher, is not doing the killing in the first Friday the 13th movie. Instead, it's his mother, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who is targeting the teenage counselors at Camp Crystal Lake because she blames counselors like them for letting her son, Jason, drown many years prior. In her defense, the counselors should have been watching the children rather than sneaking off to hook up with each other, but that doesn't give her the right to murder them. (Jason, who did not actually drown, wouldn't be doing any killing until the second movie, and he doesn't wear a hockey mask until the third.)

27. Prevenge

Year: 2016
Director: Alice Lowe

Ruth (Alice Lowe) is very pregnant when her husband dies in a climbing accident. She's grieving his death, but she starts to believe that the fetus inside her belly isn't just a normal baby—it wants revenge, and it's going to force mama to kill those responsible for cutting the rope that led to dada's demise. It's a novel premise for a horror movie, and Prevenge executes the, well, executions with all of the gore you'd expect, though the psychological aspects are perhaps the most interesting. Is Ruth's unborn baby making her do these things, or is there something else going on?

26. The Gift

Year: 2015
Director: Joel Edgerton

Joel Edgerton stars in his directorial debut, a tense psychological thriller about a couple, Simon and Robyn Callem (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall), who move into a new house only to learn that they now live near Gordo, an old classmate of Simon's. At first, Gordo is friendly, perhaps too friendly. He keeps dropping by and giving them gifts, but this new relationship soon becomes ominous and sinister, and eventually we learn that Gordo and Simon's past together is not an especially happy one. What's happening is a form of revenge.

25. Nightmare on Elm Street

Year: 1984
Director: Wes Craven

No adult comes out clean in the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is haunting teenagers' dreams and killing them in their sleep from beyond the grave because he's out to get revenge on their parents for burning him alive. However, the parents killed Freddy because he spent his life murdering children, and the people of Elm Street did some vigilante justice when Freddy got off on a technicality. It's hardly an ideal situation, but it makes for one of the best horror movies of all time.

24. Revenge

Year: 2017
Director: Coralie Fargeat

French director Coralie Fargeat's first film (and her only movie prior to The Substance, a body horror movie that was a surprising 2024 award season favorite) is an explicit tale of revenge, just like the title implies. Matilda Lutz stars as Jen, a young woman who goes on a trip to the desert with her married boyfriend and two of his buddies, only for them to assault her and then leave her for dead. Though grievously injured, she is not dead, however, and she sets out to get back at the three. It's a graphic, visceral, daringly feminist, and controversial film.

23. Enter the Dragon

Year: 1973
Director: Robert Clouse

Bruce Lee stars in one of the greatest martial arts films ever made as an instructor at a Shaolin temple (named Lee) who is asked to go undercover and participate in a fighting tournament that a crime lord named Han (Shih Kien) is hosting on his private island. Lee agrees to participate, in no small part because Han's bodyguard, O'Hara (Bob Wall), killed Lee's sister some years back. Part of what makes Enter the Dragon so great is that you watch it for the first time expecting Lee and O'Hara's eventual face-off to be some sort of big, epic bout between equally matched opponents. Instead, Lee easily and brutally trounces O'Hara in a way that's almost too intense to really be satisfying.

22. Kuroneko

Year: 1968
Director: Kaneto Shindō

In this acclaimed 1960s Japanese folk horror film, a woman and her daughter-in-law (Nobuko Otowa and Kiwako Taichi) are killed by samurai in war-torn feudal Japan. Their ghosts come back, appearing as alluring women who draw any and all samurai into their spooky mansion only to reveal their supernatural, cat-like nature and tear their victims to shreds. This revenge from beyond the grave gets complicated when Gintok (Kichiemon Nakamura), the son and husband of the deceased, comes back home, and he has become a samurai while he was away.

21. Coffy

Year: 1973
Director: Jack Hill

Quentin Tarantino considered this classic blaxploitation action flick to be one of his favorite films, and you can see its influence in many of his movies. Pam Grier stars as a nurse named Flower Child Coffin (she goes by "Coffy") who switches from saving lives to taking them when her sister gets in trouble. Coffy becomes a vigilante femme fatale, taking down all sorts of criminals who flood Los Angeles with various unsavory vices. As Coffy goes about her revenge, it's easy to see why Grier is one of the all-time best action movie heroines.

20. The Fall

Year: 2006
Director: Tarsem

There are few films like The Fall, a glorious and beautiful-looking movie with an absurd production story. (It took four years, was shot on location in 24 countries, and you can completely understand why Tarsem, the director, went bankrupt while making it.) Lee Pace stars as a stuntman in 1915 Los Angeles who was injured on the set. He wants to end his own life, but he needs another patient in the hospital, a little girl (Catinca Untaru), to get the pills for him. So he enthralls her with a story inspired by her imagination about five heroes who are each seeking revenge on the evil Governor Odious. It's a wondrous, singular fable, a story about storytelling that's a feast for the eyes.

19. The Northman

Year: 2022
Director: Robert Eggers

"I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir." So goes Amleth's mantra. A Viking prince whose life was turned upside down when his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), overthrew his father, the king (Ethan Hawke) Amleth grows up to become a man (Alexander Skarsgård) with revenge on his mind. Robert Eggers' brutal berserker epic is an exciting vision of the past brought to life with a staggering degree of faithfulness to not just the aesthetic of the period but to the Viking mindset. It's a revenge film like no other.

18. The Quick and the Dead

Year: 1995
Director: Sam Raimi

Sharon Stone leads Sam Raimi's extremely fun Western as a woman gunslinger who enters a dueling competition in an effort to get a chance at revenge against John Herod (Gene Hackman), a notorious and powerful outlaw who was responsible for her father's death. It's a deadly tournament full of colorful characters and a wonderful amount of Dutch angle dolly zooms. Russell Crowe and a young Leonardo DiCaprio co-star, and it's fun to see the two of them in a movie that came out before either of them really exploded in fame.

17. Cape Fear

Year: 1991
Director: Martin Scorsese

Both Martin Scorsese's 1991 movie and the 1962 film of the same name, which it's a remake of, are great revenge flicks. Max Cady (Robert De Niro in the '91 movie) has recently been released from prison after serving time for crimes committed against a teenage girl. He blames his public defender (Nick Nolte) for getting him convicted, as the lawyer was so disgusted by Cady that he deliberately hid evidence that might have gotten a lighter sentence. Now an expert in the law and its loopholes, thanks to studying it while in prison, Cady tracks down the target of his ire and threatens and harasses him and his family, while technically doing nothing illegal. It's a tense, scary thriller.

16. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Year: 2002
Director: Park Chan-wook

The first of Korean director Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy—a thematically collected trio of films that are among one of the best movie trilogies ever made—follows Shin Ha-kyun as Ryu, a deaf-mute man who is trying to raise money for his sister to get an operation and attempts to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy man for ransom. This kidnapping goes awry, and soon there are multiple overlapping quests for revenge in this gruesome, twisted thriller.

15. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Year: 2024
Director: George Miller

Anya Taylor-Joy takes over for Charlize Theron in this prequel to the universally acclaimed action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road as the wasteland warrior who will grow up to become Imperator Furiosa. A deft origin story, the film follows her after she's kidnapped from her lush home by the biker warlord Dementus (an incredible, odious Chris Hemsworth) and eventually rises through the ranks of another vile leader's organization, Immortan Joe. Full of exciting vehicular mayhem and thrilling stunts, Furiosa's biggest achievement might be how it depicts the complex relationship between its title character and Dementus.

14. I Saw the Devil

Year: 2010
Director: Kim Jee-woon

This Korean film is one of the most violent, twisted, and disturbing revenge movies out there, so it's very much not for everyone. Lee Byung-hun stars as Kim Soo-hyeon, an agent for South Korea's National Intelligence Service who puts his skills to use after his wife is murdered in a brutal manner by a serial killer (Choi Min-sik). Soo-hyeon wants to track the murderer down and get revenge, but he doesn't just want to kill him; Soo-hyeon wants to make him suffer, a sadistic form of torture that might end up ruining him, too.

13. Promising Young Woman

Year: 2020
Director: Emerald Fennell

Carey Mulligan stars in Emerald Fennell's polarizing directorial debut as Cassie Thomas, a woman in her 30s who is attempting to get revenge on the man who assaulted her deceased best friend, Nina, and other predatory men like him. It's a provocative take on an established subgenre of revenge thrillers that's been updated for the #MeToo era, and it won Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards along with four other nominations, including Best Picture.

12. John Wick

Year: 2014
Director: Chad Stahelski

Keanu Reeves plays the titular hitman in John Wick, though when the movie starts, he's put his life of killing behind him and is instead living a quiet, normal life as he mourns his late wife. She left him a dog that he's taking care of… until some punks in the Russian mob who have no idea who they're dealing with break into his house, steal his car, and kill his dog. They should not have killed his dog, because it prompts John to go back to his old ways and efficiently eliminate everybody involved in the canine murder.

11. The Princess Bride

Year: 1987
Director: Rob Reiner

Is there a more iconic line in all of revenge cinema than Mandy Patinkin's famous quote in The Princess Bride? "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Sure, Westley (Cary Elwes) and his quest to rescue Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) are the main plot of the beloved fairy tale action classic, but it's the swashbuckling Inigo Montoya and his vendetta against the six-fingered man responsible for his father's death that people think of first when remembering The Princess Bride.

10. Memento

Year: 2000
Director: Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan's mind-blowing thriller Memento follows Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a man with anterograde amnesia who has no short-term memory. What he does remember is that somebody killed his wife and attacked him, causing his amnesia. He uses tattoos and Polaroid pictures to remind himself of his mission to find the person who wronged him—but the truth isn't so simple. Told partially in reverse-chronological order, Memento is a fascinating puzzle of a movie that all comes neatly together at the end with a reveal that changes everything about this mission of revenge.

9. Lady Vengeance

Year: 2005
Director: Park Chan-wook

The middle installment of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy is no less twisted than the films that came before or after it. Lee Young-ae stars as Lee Geum-ja, a young woman who is released from prison after serving 13 years behind bars for a murder she did not commit. Though she appears to be a model citizen, she has actually been devoting herself to getting revenge on the person who actually did the killing, and as the story unfolds, it becomes clear the truth of what actually happened and Geum-ja's past is even more twisted than you could possibly expect.

8. Munich

Year: 2005
Director: Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg's masterful telling of the Mossad assassination campaign in retaliation for the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics is a weighty tale of historical revenge. Eric Bana stars as a fictionalized version of the Israeli agent tasked with orchestrating a covert, off-the-books operation to systematically find and kill nearly a dozen Palestinians believed to have some connection with the hostage-taking and murders at the Summer Games. It is an enthralling thriller that asks some difficult questions about the morality of revenge amidst one of the more loaded, complex geopolitical settings.

7. True Grit

Year: 2010
Directors: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

The Coen Brothers' adaptation of the 1968 novel True Grit (which had previously been adapted into a film starring John Wayne in '69), is a profound and at times melancholy tale of revenge. Hailee Steinfeld, who was only 13 years old when she was cast, plays Mattie Ross, a headstrong woman determined to find the criminal who murdered her father and bring him to justice. To do this, she hires Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a talented and mean deputy U.S. marshal who is decidedly past his prime. It's an extremely exciting Western with all of the style you'd expect from the Coens and plenty of thoughtful reflection.

6. Gone Girl

Year: 2014
Director: David Fincher

Ben Affleck and an absurdly great Rosamund Pike lead David Fincher's take on the best-selling Gillian Flynn novel about a man (Affleck) who is suspected of murder after his wife (Pike) goes missing. In the unlikely event anybody reading hasn't seen Gone Girl, and therefore is ignorant of the film's delicious twists and turns, we'll refrain from explaining exactly how it qualifies as a revenge movie. Let's just say that, in Gone Girl, being a bad spouse is apparently grounds for elaborate vengeance.

5. Gladiator

Year: 2000
Director: Ridley Scott

"My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius," states Russel Crowe's character during an intense moment in this Best Picture-winning swords and sandals epic as he reveals himself to Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, the conniving emperor who so wronged him. "Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." It's incredible stuff, and Gladiator's tale of vengeance in ancient Rome in all of its gory glory, is exhilarating.

4. Oldboy

Year: 2003
Director: Park Chan-wook

The final and most acclaimed movie in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy is also perhaps the strangest. Choi Min-sik plays a man, Oh Dae-su, who has been kidnapped and trapped in a room for a decade and a half by persons and for reasons unknown to him. When he's released as inexplicably as he was taken, he's looking for revenge—and answers. His quest to get them involves eating live octopuses, a famously brutal, one-shot fight in a hallway, and horrifying revelations.

3. Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2

Years: 2003, 2004
Director: Quentin Tarantino

Uma Thurman stars as the Bride, an ex-assassin who is betrayed by her former boss, the titular Bill (David Carradine), and her former killer colleagues after she attempts to leave the profession. She doesn't die, but she's in a coma, and upon waking up, she embarks on an epic quest for revenge that spans two movies in Quentin Tarantino's massive homage to all sorts of genres, including kung fu flicks, Westerns, exploitation films, and more. It's a whole bloody affair.

2. Hara Kiri

Year: 1962
Director: Masaki Kobayashi

One of the most acclaimed films of all time, this 1962 samurai movie doesn't appear to be a revenge movie at first. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Tsugumo Hanshirō, a rōnin who comes to the court of a feudal lord asking for the honor of committing seppuku inside of their estate. Before he goes through with the act, though, Hanshirō explains why he wants to commit seppuku and why he wants to do it here, specifically, and it has to do with another rōnin who met his demise because of the Iyi clan.

1. Ben-Hur

Year: 1959
Director: William Wyler

The biblical epic Ben-Hur might not be what you immediately think of if asked to name a revenge thriller, as the genre tends to be a lot more lurid and pulpy than a stately, elaborate period piece such as this. And yet, Ben-Hur is undeniably a movie driven by revenge, following

Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur as he attempts to get vengeance on his former friend-turned-Roman commander, Messala (Stephen Boyd). Messala betrayed Judah, imprisoned his mother and sister, and sentenced Judah to a miserable life as a galley slave. However, Judah doesn't perish at sea, instead making his way back to the Holy Land, where he confronts Messala in a chariot race that remains one of the greatest action scenes ever filmed. Ben-Hur is an absolute masterpiece.