22 Best Sci

Between wonderful, low-budget science fiction and massive spectacle, these were the best sci-fi and fantasy films throughout 2022.

2022 was an incredible year for science-fiction, mostly thanks to technology. Advanced and cheaper cameras and effects have allowed creatives of all sorts the opportunity to make the kinds of films which were unthinkable even a decade or two ago. The result was a panoply of great low-budget sci-fi films this year, many which stood above the bigger CGI productions.

Yes, sequels to Avatar and Black Panther, along with films like Nope, brought massive spectacles to audiences, but it was mostly the smaller films which stood out. Another consistent theme throughout the year would be sci-fi films which either used the COVID-19 pandemic or became thematically associated with it. Pandemics and viruses were a popular subject this year. Scroll down or click through the list to check out the 22 best sci-fi and fantasy films of 2022.

Putting Avatar: The Way of Water in a best-of list feels odd. Sure, the film is absolutely stunning with its special affects, performances, and music, as director James Cameron has truly created the kind of experience which movie theaters were made for. However, this doesn't feel like its own movie; it feels like an extension of the first Avatar (a masterpiece) on the one hand, but also a different extension leading to more Avatar on the other hand. Nonetheless, it's a beautiful epic.

A very fun trip through Scandinavian folklore and Amblin Entertainment-style fantasy films, Troll was a surprise hit on Netflix, and rightfully so. It takes the giant creature feature format of King Kong and Godzilla but injects it with classic myth and gives it a modern conspiratorial twist. The film follows a paleontologist father and daughter as they work both with and against the government to stop a gigantic troll which has recently awakened after an excavation in the Dovre mountains. Beautifully detailed special effects and a strong father-daughter relationship ground the somewhat wacky but very entertaining movie.

A comically quirky, extremely deadpan little sci-fi movie from Riley Stearns (The Art of Self-Defense), Dual is about as dry as a film can possibly be, which works in its favor. Dual presents a future in which cloning is possible, and people are able to clone themselves at the end of their life. One woman (played by the charming Karen Gillan) receives a terminal diagnosis and decides to get a clone; however, when she recovers, the clone doesn't want to be decommissioned (or essentially killed).

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The government mandates that only one of them can live, resulting in a gladiatorial duel to the death. The woman trains to fight her clone with the help of an extremely serious and possibly shady self-defense instructor (a hilarious Aaron Paul), hoping to survive this fight with herself. It's a very weird, allegorical film that's intentionally flat and devoid of expressiveness, but the alienating effect works.

Tin Can was filmed quite a while ago, and yet was finally released theatrically and commercially this year, which is remarkable considering how many parallels the film has to real-world events. A piece of 'Covid Cinema,' Tin Can was one of many, many 2022 films to become associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and follows a scientist (a wonderful Anna Hopkins) who was attempting to find the cure to a vicious pandemic when she became abducted by mysterious forces.

With extensive memory loss and confusion, the woman attempts to not only figure out what has happened to her, but to also escape. Seth Smith, who also made the extremely stylistic film The Crescent, continues to experiment with visuals and narrative, resulting in a truly enigmatic, haunting sci-fi film.

A funny, cyclical, and mind-bending little sci-fi gem, Relax, I'm from the Future greatly expands on a quirky short film from years ago to create a really entertaining, realistic spin on time travel movies. The great Rhys Darby, so funny in Our Flag Means Death and Flight of the Concords, stars as a time traveler who is attempting to save humanity from itself. He needs help, though, so he promises get-rich-quick information based on his knowledge of the future to someone, which, of course, alters the future. The eccentric film spins like a top from there.

Released very early in the year and mostly forgotten about, King Car is an extremely fun, energetic, and funny film about technology and revolution. The Brazilian sci-fi comedy follows a boy who can communicate with his old automobile, a friendship which initially blinds him to the car's megalomaniacal intentions. The titular car itself is actually a really fascinating character, masking its own insecurities with nefarious plots and bitter malice.

As the film branches out to include the boy's family and a technological cult that wants to use the car for a revolution against a corrupt society, it becomes clear that a lot more is going on than just some Christine-style character study.

A haunting little South African thriller with some great performances, Glasshouse is set during a post-pandemic apocalypse where the virus is essentially a contagious form of dementia and extreme memory loss. Updating The Beguiled with a topical sci-fi premise, Glasshouse focuses on a group of women trying to survive the apocalypse when, one day, a man stumbles into their compound. Healing him but never trusting him, this mostly unwelcome guest is the catalyst for an escalating paranoia and dread in a film where you're never quite sure what to believe.

Fresh, inspiring, and very clever, LOLA is one of the many small-budget films of 2022 to toy with sci-fi concepts in a really creative way. The UK film focuses on two close and committed sisters during World War II who have somehow adjusted their radio to pick up broadcasts from the future, leading to all sorts of discoveries (including an embrace of punk rock from the '70s and '80s, leading to some of the film's best moments). Of course, having knowledge of the future affects the future, leading the sisters into all sorts of trouble. With its minimalist visuals and great soundtrack, LOLA is one of the most charming films of the year, albeit a very short one.

Nope was clearly the most divisive Jordan Peele film for fans, and one of the more divisive films of the year. It's hard to call it a great film — it's all over the place, often embarrassingly weak with its logic and motivations, and has mostly thin characters. However, few films were as hotly debated in 2022, with a variety of fascinating Nope theories actually making the film better in hindsight. Not only was it genuinely fun to parse through the allegories and possible meanings of Nope, but it was visually astounding thanks to cinematographer Hoye van Hoytema.

Yet another sci-fi film from 2022 seemingly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, The Pink Cloud is different in its laid-back nature and sense of curiosity. The Brazilian film follows the human response to a deadly global weather event, the titular pink cloud, using the occurrence to study how quarantining and forced isolation changes the lives of people over a prolonged time.

As people are forced to shelter in place, they begin to question the foundations of the culture, technology, and governments which led them to this situation, and some of the darker impulses of the human condition emerge. Quietly political, extremely subtle, and with a depression that's contagious, The Pink Cloud is an assured debut and one of the most thoughtful films of the year.

Next Exit is fascinating for taking a unique science fiction premise but using it to make a complicated character study, rather than a flashy sci-fi thriller. In a dystopian future, the afterlife has been somewhat proven thanks to the scientific verification of ghosts. As a result, a medical institution is studying the phenomenon through assisted suicide, where they take volunteers who would rather go to the afterlife than live in this world and study what happens when they die.

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Two characters (played by a wonderful Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) take a road trip to the institute, essentially driving toward their own death in this surprisingly funny, heartfelt, and deeply compassionate intellectual sci-fi film.

Like the second Avatar, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was another anticipated CGI epic that hardly stands on its own. Viewers who haven't seen the first film won't experience nearly as much emotional resonance and suspense as those who are familiar with the original and the MCU franchise as a whole, However, if there is one individual MCU film of the past couple of years which does mostly work in a vacuum, it's Wakanda Forever. The sequel is rousing, dramatic, expertly acted, and filled with Black power, and sets up the future of the MCU.

Disney and Pixar's bold little fantasy Turning Red is a delightful allegory for puberty and coming-of-age, daring to address (through whimsy and metaphor) something which happens every month to half the population of planet Earth. The animation is beautiful, and the pacing and tone of the whole film is consistently fun, sweet, and touching. Much of this is thanks to director Domee Shi, who previously made the adorably brilliant, Oscar-winning Pixar short Bao.

Updating the tired Predator franchise in a wholly unexpected way, Prey takes the story of predatory alien invaders with advanced technology and sends it back to 1719. When a group of Comanches in the Great Plains find their lives threatened by both French fur traders and the dangerous alien, the young hunter Naru proves herself by defending the tribe. While it's the fifth installment of the Predator films, Prey stands entirely on its own as an excellent, visually beautiful little thriller, one of the few big films to focus on Indigenous protagonists; there's even an entire version in the Comanche language.

An immensely disturbing, hauntingly cold film about the future of technology, the environment, and humanity, Crimes of the Future takes the slow, mysterious, alienating mise en scene that director David Cronenberg has developed over the past decade and applies it to his earlier body horror masterpieces. The result is a slow-burn nightmare with some of the most unforgettable images of the year.

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Crimes of the Future depicts a barren world where people are evolving new organs at rapid rates. A famous performance artist uses these organs in his art, something which eventually gets him mixed up in a political conspiracy. The entire cast is wonderfully weird here, from the cold but sensual Léa Seydoux, to the world-weary Viggo Mortensen, and especially the obsessive, hyperactively bizarre Kristen Stewart.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have directed some of the most unique genre films of the past two decades, and they do it again with the excellent Something in the Dirt. As usual, both men star in the film, this time about a couple of lonely neighbors in a run-down Los Angeles apartment who discover what appears to be a supernatural phenomenon. Like a much lower-budget but even better version of Nope, the two men set up camera equipment and attempt to capture the phenomenon for a documentary they'd like to sell in this loose, philosophical, and very meta film.

The incredible world-building and painterly cinematography of Vesper makes it not only one of the year's most visually stunning films, but one of its most assured sci-fi films. A Lithuanian production six years in the making, Vesper is a real anomaly of a film — bleak but ultimately hopeful, it focuses on a bright spot of innocence in a pessimistic, apocalyptic world.

In the film's sad future, genetic engineering and biotechnology has resulted in the proliferation of a variety of viruses which have wiped out much of the planet. Creating an extremely realistic future to tell a fairytale-like story of a teenage girl trying to protect her family and the survivor of a crash-landed ship, Vesper is life-affirming and unforgettable.

The old story of a wooden boy brought to life is ironically given new life with Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio, one of three adaptations of the Pinocchio story to be released in the past year, and undoubtedly the best. With gorgeous stop-motion animation and great voice acting, Del Toro and Mark Gustafson use the famous format to investigate history, fascism, and authority. It's a dark film for a children's story, but arguably more important as a result, spreading a much more liberating and affirming message than Pinocchio usually does.

A radically strange, practically revolutionary film, Neptune Frost is an incredible Afrofuturist musical from the great artist Saul Williams. Taking place in a dystopic future Africa, which in many ways seems similar to our own, Neptune Frost follows a group of miners as they rise up against their physical and technological oppressors thanks to the discovery of a powerful hacker and a liminal dimension where they can hide out.

While fairly lo-fi, the film uses every dollar it can spend to create incredible costumes (jackets made of keyboards, jewelry made of computer chips and wires) and psychedelic, hallucinatory visuals to accompany the brilliant music of the film.

An endlessly imaginative little masterpiece, Strawberry Mansion is simply one of the coolest films of the year. Using the hazy, soft focus aesthetics of cheap '70s cinema to depict a strange future or alternate reality, Strawberry Mansion follows a mild-mannered government employee who stumbles upon a massive conspiracy.

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He's a tax auditor, but in this future, dreams are taxed. When he's sent to run a full audit on an old woman, he discovers that corporations have been using targeted advertising in people's dreams in order to control their economic decisions. What results is an obviously dreamlike, fanciful, and absolutely gorgeous sci-fi comedy romance with a great Dan Deacon score.

Managing Editor and critic for MovieWeb. Lover of film, philosophy, and theology. Amateur human. Contact him at [email protected]