Don’t movecurrently one of the Top 10 Movies on Netflixhas a crackerjack premise for a thriller: A woman on her own in a remote area encounters a seemingly friendly man who turns out to be a psychotic killer and injects her with a paralyzing agent that will gradually (and temporarily) remove her physical abilities , giving him terrifying control over her body. Now she only has minutes to do what she can to escape him before the drug takes effect – and/or stay for a while until after the drug wears off.

As exciting as that sounds, it can also ring with familiarity, in many different ways: Because women in genre movies so often meet friendly guys who turn out to be malevolent right around the 12-minute mark; since Crank films also use a corporeal form of a ticking clock that sends its hero on a desperate mission; because the title Don’t move sounds a lot like Do not breatheanother containment thriller produced by Sam Raimi, who also produced this one; and therefore Don’t move was made to the directing team of Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, recalling how the two-man team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods also wrote the original, intimately scaled Quiet place and did the upcoming thriller with small roles Heretic.

But in addition, Don’t move may sound familiar because since the streaming boom there have been many small, isolated thrillers where a woman has to think fast and act faster to wriggle out of danger. The closest is this one Alonewhere a woman is stalked on the highway and eventually chased through the woods, much like what happens in Don’t move (there is even a knock-out drug), but in a different order. However, there are many more that feel like spiritual companions even if the details are very different: Netflix did too Oxygena sci-fi thriller about a woman trapped in a cryogenic chamber with her lack of oxygen. Hulu has become a major provider of this subgenre with Significant othera woodsy sci-fi film with an alien-invasion twist on a domestic thriller; No one will save youanother close POV alien invasion movie with the added gimmick of remaining dialogue-free throughout the film; and No exitwhere a woman stuck at a rest stop stumbles upon a kidnapping plot.

Not all of these movies are exactly the same. All of them are at least diverting, which is the bar Don’t move clears; some of them are exactly well made, sort of Alone. But still: There are many mainstream films that play somewhere between knock-offs of Seriously and toned down slasher movie, right? And Seriously came out over a decade ago; why do these movies make it seem like the biggest sensation of 2019?

Part of it is, of course, purely practical. None of these movies could have been that expensive to make. Don’t move has about three major speaking roles, a handful of characters in one scene, and quite a few forests. It is about the size of its various brethren; No one will save you have a few more seats, No exit has a larger cast, but they’re all films that ultimately feel modest in their aims. They also make sense as streaming projects. Direct-to-streaming movies often falter by either fitting too comfortably into the television movie paradigm or fitting uncomfortably alongside true big-screen movies—like “big” movies compressed and algorithmized in your home theater. But it is quite possible for movies like Oxygen or Don’t move taking advantage of small-screen intimacy while looking polished enough to pass muster as a “real” movie. Friday night thrillers for audiences who can’t necessarily hire a babysitter every time they want to see a new movie are just a perfect use for streaming originals.

But there’s another way these films feel particularly appropriate for the streaming era: they all have something of an isolationist streak. That’s not to say they advocate avoiding human interaction; many of them, which Don’t movefeatures a sequence in which a stranger turns out not to be a surprise threat but genuine kindness – although you can often guess what happens to these helpful strangers in the end. Often the main character has isolated himself due to some kind of trauma: the Seriously-like loss of a child i Don’t move; the loss of a spouse to suicide i Alone; death of a friend in No one will save you. Then the unexpected confrontation places them in a fight for their lives, pushing past numbness or despair, forcing their survival instincts to kick in.

Especially, however, that struggle takes place within their isolation. It must; that’s the gimmick. But as basic and satisfying as this formula can be, there’s also something oddly neat about it, a neatness and clarity that can sometimes feel reductive to the experiences of grief they often try to portray. Maybe it’s just that: The dead, in these constructions, are so compartmentalized, included in the story that they’re tastefully revealed at just the right moment, then shoved to the back of the mind when the tension kicks in, and maybe brought back for a moment. cruel mockery or a moment of last-minute inspiration, that they collectively look like check boxes on a screenwriter’s outline.

These films are also particularly legible as pandemic projects, of course, both in terms of the covid practicality of the productions (which must have looked attractive in the early 2020s, when filmmakers slowly and cautiously returned to work) and in their eventual consumption from sofas , as a viable alternative to going outside the house that was desperately needed for years. There is nothing wrong with any of this; it’s actually kind of cool to see a whole class of modest, largely well-made thrillers emerge from technological and social constraints. After several years, however, the restrictions have begun to seem more mandatory than smart, more reassuring than thought-provoking. M. Night Shyalaman has stuck to smaller-scale thrillers in his self-financed era, and they don’t feel that canned at all. Look at Trapa film that moves confinement, counterintuitively but cleverly, into a massive concert attended by thousands, combining parental angst and perverse identification with its villainous role.

Don’t movehowever, does not contain any particular insight into the grieving process; it’s easy to imagine, with the vagueness of the details (like many supposedly parent-centric films, it doesn’t even seem sure what age its main child is supposed to be), that it could be actively annoying to a truly grieving parent. The challenge of the subgenre—the terrifying imperative to fend for oneself, or else—has turned into a kind of reassurance that you can solve anything with the right boot-shredding resilience. Watch too many of these appealing bare-bones thrillers, and you begin to see pain and horror stripped down to the comfort and repetition of a metronomic beat.

Jesse Hassanger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.comalso.

Stream Don’t Move on Netflix