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Why Non-English Thrillers Like Alice in Borderland Are Taking Over Your Watchlist
Remember when streaming homepages felt like a narrow lane of familiar defaults? The high-budget English-language crime series, the prestige drama with a recognisable star, or the thriller that arrived was already pre-approved by the old pipeline…
That lane has now widened. In recent years, Korean survival games, Spanish heists, French capers, and Japanese dystopias have moved from curiosity to habit, sitting in the same queue as everything else. The shift has been shaped by distribution, recommendation systems, and a steady improvement in how shows travel across languages, with suspense, which is built on deadlines and reveals, benefiting the most.
The Charts Stopped Being Mostly English
Netflix’s published rankings underline how mainstream non-English thrillers have become. On its all-time list of most popular non-English shows, the top ten is dominated by suspense and crime, led by Squid Game, followed by Money Heist and Lupin. Netflix notes that the rankings are based on total views in the first 91 days after release, a window that captures the initial binge cycle.
In a separate engagement report for the second half of 2025, Netflix said non-English language titles accounted for over a third of all viewing. The company singled out Korean, Spanish, and Japanese titles as recurring standouts, an indication that the recent wave has become a baseline share of viewing rather than an occasional spike.
Subtitles Became Part of the Interface
Translation used to be framed as the hurdle. It now sits closer to a default setting. Netflix said in 2025 that nearly half of viewing hours in the United States happen with subtitles or captions on, a habit driven by everyday viewing conditions as much as by foreign-language programming.
The tools have also become more flexible. In April 2025, Netflix rolled out a change that lets viewers pick from the full list of available subtitles and dubbing languages on televisions, rather than a limited set based on location.
“We’re entering into a new era now where content and great stories can come from almost anywhere in the world” (Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, on The New York Times podcast The Daily)
In that framing, discovery works like a shelf. Shows can sit in the catalogue and then surge when the platform and social chatter converge on the same title.
Alice in Borderland Showed How Fast a Japanese Thriller Could Travel
Alice in Borderland arrived on Netflix in December 2020 as a live-action adaptation of Haro Aso’s manga. The premise is clean and brutal: a young man and his friends wake up in an emptied-out Tokyo and are forced to play lethal games, each tied to a playing card suit and difficulty.
Directed by Shinsuke Sato and starring Kento Yamazaki and Tao Tsuchiya, the series leans on blockbuster scale, from deserted city imagery to elaborate set pieces. That visual clarity helps it cross borders even when the dialogue is unfamiliar.
When Season 2 was released in December 2022, Netflix reported that it took the number one spot on its global non-English TV list for the week of December 19 to 25, 2022, with 61.2 million viewing hours. A third season followed in September 2025, extending the franchise beyond the original manga’s endpoint and signalling that the platform treats the title as an ongoing global property.
Thriller Grammar Travels Well
Thrillers are built on clocks, rules, suspense, and forced choices. That structure survives translation because it does not depend on local celebrity context or untranslatable joke rhythm. Those cliffhanger moments we crave read clearly in any language.
Many of the international breakouts also arrive with a high-concept hook that is easy to sample. A heist under pressure, a masked game with rules, or a detective puzzle. Sampling is how watchlists are made, and suspense is designed for sampling.
The same viewing sessions tend to spill into second-screen behaviour. Viewers jump from a recap to cast research to an unrelated late-night rabbit hole, sometimes landing far from television, including searches like the online pokies NZ market.
Local Detail Started Reading as Premium
Another reversal of the streaming era is that specificity has become a selling point. A show that feels rooted in its own place can read as more authentic, even when the plot is pure escapism.
“You don’t have to adapt your storytelling to America to work” (Ted Sarandos, describing how authenticity travels when a show succeeds at home)
Sarandos has described a simple platform logic: when a title becomes big in one country, it is surfaced more aggressively elsewhere because the system assumes there is an audience outside the home market, and that model rewards show that they feel distinct rather than engineered.
Alice in Borderland is deeply Japanese in texture, from the manga roots to the urban geography, yet the series does not require cultural translation to deliver tension… The games do the explaining!
Clips and Memes Lowered the Stakes of Trying Something New
The Non-English thrill has been amplified outside the platforms that host them; Short clips, reaction videos, and meme templates carry scenes across borders faster than formal marketing campaigns.
A scene that works as a standalone jolt travels especially well. A rule reveal, a countdown, or a twist that can be understood in seconds, even if the dialogue is unfamiliar.
In that environment, language becomes closer to metadata than a barrier. A series is sorted by genre, mood, and buzz in the same way as anything else, and a subtitle track is treated as one more option that can be toggled without much ceremony.
Final Thoughts…
Non-English thrillers did not climb the watchlist because audiences suddenly became more virtuous about global culture. They climbed because the mechanics of streaming made discovery frictionless, and suspense is a genre that survives translation.
Alice in Borderland sits near the centre of the trend: a story rooted in a specific creative tradition, packaged with blockbuster momentum, and consumed in a global queue. Once subtitles stopped feeling like a barrier, the watchlist followed the buzz.
