Netflix is not one catalogue. It is roughly one per country, and they differ more than most people realise.
Streaming rights are sold country by country. A studio licenses a film to Netflix in Portugal, to a different service in Canada, and to nobody at all in Australia. Your subscription does not change. What it shows you does.
This is why a friend recommends something, you search for it, and it is not there. They are not wrong. You are just in a different country.
It is also why this app asks where you are.
Availability here is checked against your country specifically. When a card says a title is on Netflix, it means Netflix where you are, not Netflix somewhere.
We only ever show what is included with a subscription. A film you could rent for five pounds is not "available" in any sense worth telling you about, so we leave it out.
Set your country under . It detects where you last signed in, which means a VPN will move it. If you use one regularly, pin your country manually instead.
A VPN routes your connection through another country, so services see you as being there. People use them for privacy on public wifi, and people use them to see a different catalogue.
Worth knowing before you try it: most streaming services' terms of service do not allow using one to get around regional licensing, and they actively detect and block VPN traffic. It works until it does not. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
The privacy case is more straightforward. On hotel or cafe wifi, a VPN stops the network operator seeing what you are doing, and that has nothing to do with catalogues.
Private Internet Access is what I use. It has been audited, it does not keep logs, and it works on everything without much thought.
That is an affiliate link. If you sign up through it, this site earns a commission at no extra cost to you. The app itself is free and stays free either way.
Your detected country follows where you last signed in. Sign in from Lisbon and you get the Portuguese catalogue. That is usually right, and occasionally not.
After changing country, use Reset and re-check in Settings. Results found under the old country are not cleared automatically, and stale availability is worse than none.