Domestic Thrillers Aren’t Just a Trend. They’re the Defining Metaphor of Our Time

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.