5 Best Survival Movies Streaming On Netflix

Nothing gets you on the edge of your seat faster than a good survival movie. It draws you in with its impossibly high stakes life or death situations, and then leaves you hanging in the hope the characters will overcome the odds. It's a tried and true formula that's been adapted to countless genres of film. For this list, however, we've narrowed the definition of what should be considered a survival movie, because of how many films have these intense stakes built into their DNA. 

Most horror movies could be considered as stories of survival, but we think facing off against zombies, vampires, and anything else that goes bump in the night should be considered a category of its own. Another genre where the very art of survival is baked into the premise is the war movie, but we've removed anything set on the frontlines from this list for similar reasons to horror films — it could be a list all its own. A film where war rages on in the background does appear, but as the characters don't get swept up in it, it's easier to define as a survival story. 

The five films we've chosen — which are all streaming on Netflix at the time of writing — represent the very best of different kinds of survival stories, from intense thrillers and serial-killer stories to emotional journeys as likely to make you cry as they are to make you pass out from the sheer intensity.

• Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss
• Director: Steven Spielberg
• Rating: PG-13
• Runtime: 124 minutes

This film invented the summer blockbuster as we know it, and depending on who you ask, is either the best horror, disaster, or monster movie ever made. If you haven't revisited Steven Spielberg's breakout movie in a while, however, you might forget just how much of the action is quarantined off the coast of Amity Island, claustrophobically contained onboard the Orca, the boat owned by local shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw), in the second half. Their mission is to kill the great white shark that's been picking off beachgoers, but the boat is ill-equipped to withhold every attack coming from the ocean below. The survival drama is as much about three men learning to co-operate enough to get back to shore as capturing and killing the shark.

Of the five movies on this list, "Jaws" needs the least introduction. The production's many well reported challenges with the shark prop — lovingly nicknamed Bruce — ensured Spielberg and his team had to actively work around the constraints of this low-budget practical effect, making it appear onscreen as fleetingly as possible. As a result, the shark largely makes its presence known through the damage it inflicts upon the Orca, which only raises the tension. It's a survival movie at its most stripped-down, which is why it's such a surprise revisiting it now, knowing it was responsible for the industry-wide move from gritty New Hollywood storytelling into populist blockbuster fare. It feels a lot more like the former than the latter.

• Cast: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi
• Director: Isao Takahata
• Rating: PG-13
• Runtime: 89 minutes

All war movies are inherently stories of survival, which is why the genre has been excluded from the list, with this one eternally heartbreaking exception. Director Isao Takahata's anti-war drama "Grave of the Fireflies" is considered amongst the most upsetting movies ever made, following Seito and Setsuko, a brother and his younger sister left to fend for themselves after their mother is killed in a bombing toward the end of World War II. Forced into extreme poverty and moving in with their aunt, Seito tries his best to conceal their mom's death from his sister to help her maintain some hope — nearly impossible as rations dwindle and food grows harder to source.

Takahata always denied that his film was "anti-war," stressing that his movie was instead speaking out against the kind of totalitarianism that could lead two young children to live in isolation, stuck fending for themselves as adults refuse to help. But by keeping the audience away from the frontlines and documenting the human cost of a war on a vulnerable population, it's as powerful an anti-war statement as you could possibly make, turning the focus squarely onto the narrow possibilities young people have to survive in such a hostile environment.

On its original release in Japan, "Grave of the Fireflies" was infamously released as one half of a Studio Ghibli double bill alongside Hayao Miyazaki's delightful "My Neighbor Totoro." It was the worst possible release plan, seemingly tailor-made to torture children and their parents by a distributor who didn't seem to realize animation wasn't just for kids; this is one of the most grueling survival dramas in cinema history.

• Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Patrick Stewart
• Director: Jeremy Saulnier
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 95 minutes

Nazis? We hate those guys. Director Jeremy Saulnier's bloody-and-brutal thriller "Green Room" pits an anti-fascist punk band against a club full of Neo-Nazis led by the terrifying skinhead Darcy (played by a deeply committed, never-more-against-type Patrick Stewart), after one of their band members finds the body of a murdered girl backstage. Locked inside the venue, their phones confiscated by the white supremacist organization running the joint, they must consistently improvise with whatever tools are at their disposal to overpower the imposing group they've been forced to go up against. It's a tale as old as time: Even if you're a musician and desperate for money, there are some gigs you should probably say no to.

Saulnier finally had his mainstream breakthrough with the thrilling Netflix success "Rebel Ridge" back in 2024, but this gnarly punk rock thriller is the best encapsulation of his approach to storytelling. "Rebel Ridge" is an outlier in his filmography for having a protagonist who wasn't totally in over his head. The members of the Ain't Rights — played by Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner — are constantly scrambling, their hastily improvised plans to escape often as darkly hilarious in their failures as they are brutal. They're nowhere near as incompetent as leads in Saulnier's other films (such as his 2013 cult gem "Blue Ruin"), but the idea that they'll survive the night is always up in the air. This is the most edge-of-your-seat movie on this list.

• Cast: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt
• Director: Robert Zemeckis
• Rating: PG-13
• Runtime: 143 minutes

When you hear the term "survival movie," chances are the first image you'll think of is a bearded Tom Hanks stranded on a deserted island with only a volleyball for company. "Cast Away" was a phenomenal box office success — the third highest grossing movie of 2000 — and its influence can still be felt throughout pop culture; everything from "Lost" to "Send Help" has offered brand new approaches to its core premise of a man learning to survive the elements with no connection to the wider world.

Unlike those titles and the many more it's influenced, "Cast Away" doesn't have an additional thriller premise. It focuses entirely on Chuck Noland (Hanks) adapting to life in the wilderness as he tries to find a way to be located and return to the nearest mainland. As a FedEx employee sent out on a cargo plane to resolve an issue overseas, Chuck's struggle is helped via what's contained in the various packages which will never arrive at their designated addresses, and the film uses his ingenuity as a way to explore that age-old cliche: the triumph of the human spirit in a time of hardship.

"Grave of the Fireflies" might be a bigger emotional gut punch, but Robert Zemeckis' second collaboration with Tom Hanks (after "Forrest Gump") is the most unashamedly sentimental, whilst also straying away from some of the bigger cliches of the genre. The ending is more bittersweet than triumphant, closing on a melancholy note that subverts typical survival movie expectations, even if it's fondly remembered as the definitive one by many.

• Cast: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover
• Director: James Wan
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 103 minutes

Before it kickstarted the "torture porn" horror subgenre, with sequels going increasingly over-the-top with punishing kills for Jigsaw's (mostly posthumous) victims, "Saw" was as stripped down as a horror movie could be. James Wan's ultra-low budget directorial debut followed two men (played by Leigh Whannell and Cary Elwes) waking up in a dilapidated bathroom, with a dead body in-between them, and no clear explanation for why they'd been chained up.

While victims of each game in the sequels weren't given probable chances of survival, the first movie in this unexpected franchise keeps that possibility alive throughout – even if neither man would be the same if they were to make it out. This aspect was also lost by the countless horror movies which arrived in the wake of the success of "Saw," such as the "Hostel" franchise, where focus was moved entirely to the creative cruelty of the kills.

It's always said that Hollywood learns the wrong lessons from a success, and that couldn't be truer than in the case of "Saw." An inspired serial killer thriller wrapped into a tightly wound survival story triggered a wave of movies where the spectacle of the violence was the point — the original holds up well because it possesses a driving tension and clear stakes that were impossible for the franchise to maintain when it pivoted to full blown torture porn.