‘No More Time’

Rent or buy it on major platforms.

Death, isolation and conspiracy theories are just three of the pandemic-era horrors that drive this eerie thriller, the debut feature from the writer-director Dalila Droege.

To escape city life, a couple (Jennifer Harlow and Mark Reeb) drive until they reach a mostly deserted mountain town, one of many such communities barely hanging on in an America under siege by an unnamed contagion. Armed and on edge, they settle in at an abandoned home and get to know the few neighbors they have, including a little girl who claims her mother flies in the clouds. What this couple doesn’t know is that they’re being monitored by a mysterious stranger who communicates with trees, the kind of supernatural touch that Droege uses sparingly, to her film’s benefit.

What the story lacks in plot, it makes up for in a mood that’s as artful as it is disorienting. Jay Keitel’s stark cinematography and Mary Ellen Porto’s unnerving sound design do the heavy lifting, alternating between chilling and warm, mirroring how horribly topsy-turvy our world felt not that long ago. If you’re willing to revisit that sanity-crushing time, this film is worth the nightmare it might trigger.

‘Friendship’

Stream it on HBO Max.

HBO Max includes this dark comedy in its “Make It a Thriller Night” category. It’s not immediately evident why a film called “Friendship,” that stars Tim Robinson, a master of cringe comedy, would be in the same company as “Blood Simple.” But this feature debut from the writer-director Andrew DeYoung is just as dark as that and other films about awful people doing terrible things in ordinary circumstances.

As Robinson does in “The Chair Company,” his nutso HBO Max comedy series, he plays a suburban Everyman dad who makes well-intentioned but savagely awkward attempts to connect with other people. Here that man is Craig, a corporate middleman who befriends Austin (Paul Rudd), a handsome weatherman and guitarist in a punk band. Eager for bromantic affection, Craig falls hard for his friend, an obsession that quickly turns toxic.

Did I mention this is a comedy? Your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for Robinson’s Craig, a Frankenstein’s monster of Pee-wee Herman and Josef, the title killer in the “Creep” films and series. Let’s call it cringe horror.

‘Marshmallow’

Stream it on Shudder.

Morgan (Kue Lawrence) gets shipped off to summer camp even though he’s still mourning the sudden death of his grandfather. One night, the counselors tell a campfire ghost story about a maniac doctor who created monsters out of mutilated bodies he stored at his cabin. The campers are warned that they may encounter the boogeyman doctor roaming the grounds.

It’s best not to know much more about Daniel DelPurgatorio’s shape-shifting film before watching, which you should, especially if you’re willing to have your heart broken. The film isn’t set in the 1980s, the golden era of summer camp horror movies, and for good reason: Its coming-of-age concerns — about loss, identity, memory — are more timeless, much like they are in “The Plague,” a stellar new horror film about tween anxieties.

Andy Greskoviak’s script loses steam midway through as it relies too heavily on cat-and-mouse games. But then comes a twist that subverts expectations about what came before and about what camp-set horror should be. This film made me deeply nostalgic for the 1980s, just not in the way I expected.

‘In Our Blood’

Rent or buy it on major platforms.

Emily (Brittany O’Grady) reluctantly travels from Los Angeles to New Mexico to visit her estranged addict mother, Sam (Alanna Ubach), for Thanksgiving. Emily’s friend Danny (E.J. Bonilla), a cinematographer, joins her, insisting that it will be good for both women if they document their reunion on camera.

But the following day, Emily’s mother goes missing, triggering a search that her mother’s tight lipped friends don’t seem eager to join. A severed pig’s head that winds up in Emily and Danny’s hotel room is the first of many omens that something sinister is afoot.

This crafty little thriller looks and feels like nonfiction — no surprise, considering that it’s the first narrative feature from Pedro Kos, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. Kos and the screenwriter Mallory Westfall seamlessly and convincingly weave together fiction with documentary techniques to tell a compelling (if well-tread) story about addiction and its lasting scars. A genre detour at the end turns the mostly naturalistic film into something more supernatural and silly, but also enjoyably bloody.

‘Self Driver’

Stream it on Tubi.

Horror fans who are rideshare drivers — or anyone who hustles to make ends meet — will get a demented kick out of this resourceful thriller from the Canadian writer-director Michael Pierro.

D (an excellent Nathanael Chadwick) is a Toronto rideshare driver who spends his day picking up the usual finance bros, wasted party girls and older grouches. But he’s got bills to pay, so when one of his customers offers him the chance to work for a shady new company that pays its drivers generously, D accepts. But there are catches: Drivers must accept jobs, never talk to their customers and, if they turn down or quit a job, their fare will be docked or eliminated.

Determined to get paid, D does what the app tells him to, including, in the film’s most distressing scene, making $50 for every punch he lands on a sad sack customer — a kink-like transaction that D seems to relish.

Although it feels like a short film stretched thin, “Self Driver” is nonetheless a keenly-observed and engaging meditation on how soul-sucking the gig economy is, and the lengths people will go to make a paycheck in a world stacked against the working class.