Fantasy can easily feel pretty ridiculous when it lacks a beating heart. Sure, talking birds and enchanted puppets are cool, but the magic only hits hard when it touches something uncomfortably real, like the fear of failure or grief. That is why a fine fantasy film would focus entirely on human messiness instead of just empty spectacle.
The movies below are from 2020s and use surreal worlds as a pressure cooker for raw emotion. Instead of hiding behind special effects, they dig into the ugly parts of growing up and losing control. It hurts, but it works. So, let's count down the best of them.
6. 'Wolfwalkers' (2020)
Wolfwalkers feels like a breath of wild air trapped inside a cage. The film follows Robyn Goodfellowe (Honor Kneafsey), who lives in a walled Irish city where every line looks stiff, boxed-in, and watched. Her father, Bill Goodfellowe (Sean Bean), wants obedience. The town wants fear. And, the woods outside the gate are treated like a disease that must be cut back.
But then Robyn meets Mebh MacTíre (Eva Whittaker), and the whole movie starts moving differently. The forest does not just look freer than the city. It is drawn to feel like freedom itself, full of loose pencil energy and rushing movement. Robyn learning to run as a wolf is such a beautiful release because her body finally stops asking permission. Mind you, the story has real teeth too, with colonial control and the destruction of nature pulsing underneath the fairy-tale glow. It is effortlessly gorgeous, angry, and alive.
5. 'Poor Things' (2023)
Fantasy here is pure appetite, and Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) treats the world like a plate she has every right to devour. At first, she is stuck inside that warped London townhouse with Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), framed through fisheye lenses that make everything feel like a laboratory, nursery, prison, and dollhouse at once. Her body moves in blunt, jerky stomps, as if she is still learning to control it.
The second Bella wants the outside, Poor Things becomes completely unstoppable. Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) thinks he is leading her into experience, which is hilarious because he cannot survive the speed of her curiosity. Bella learns language, pleasure, cruelty, money, philosophy, and power with no interest in being embarrassed by her own growth. The joy is watching her movement change. The stomp becomes a stride. The experiment becomes a woman. The weirdness becomes liberation, undeniably. It just works.
4. 'The Boy and the Heron' (2023)
There is a wound at the center of The Boy and the Heron, and Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) keeps trying to make it visible. He loses his mother in a fire, moves to the countryside, and carries himself with that silent, hostile stiffness children get when grief has nowhere clean to go. The moment he strikes his own head with a rock, the movie stops being beautiful in any easy sense. It becomes personal and frightening.
Then the Heron (Masaki Suda) starts talking, ugly and mocking, as the movie plunges Mahito into a world that feels half-dreamed and half-rotted. Frogs swarm him. Pelicans crowd the sky. Parakeets march with awful purpose. The plot is less important than how grief shapes Mahito's imagination. It is profoundly strange, sometimes overwhelming, and unmistakably the work of an artist turning private dread into myth.
3. 'Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio' (2022)
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio understands one brutal truth that most traditional versions completely soften. Look, Geppetto (David Bradley) builds Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) straight out of raw grief, rage, alcohol, and a desperate refusal to accept loss. That heavy emotional foundation makes their bond feel complicated right from the start, leaving no room for easy fairy-tale magic.
That is why the puppet's unfinished body hurts to look at, especially with those nails jutting out of his back like a child born from a wound. Honestly though, things get even crazier when this strange, loud boy wakes up inside fascist Italy where every institution demands total obedience. Pinocchio's innocence quickly turns into accidental rebellion simply because he refuses to accept cruelty as normal. Death keeps taking him and sending him back, but the real heartbreak stays locked inside Geppetto's workshop with those trembling hands trying to love a child without turning him into a replacement. Surely, the stop-motion is gorgeous, but the story about fatherhood is what really sticks with you.
2. 'The Odyssey' (2026)
The Odyssey feels enormous in the old, salt-stung way myths are supposed to feel enormous. Odysseus (Matt Damon) enters the story as a battered king after war, trying to drag his crew home across water that seems determined to erase them. The sea acts as an active enemy, a memory trap, a graveyard, and a test that keeps changing shape.
The sea creatures steal the headlines, but the sheer physical weariness is what makes every frame hurt. The salt-caked stare, the fractured sense of time, the bronze-gong dread in the score, the feeling that every island is a new chance to lose yourself. It is a fantasy that understands the real monster is not the cyclops or the witch, but the long, slow erosion of hope. For more on the best of the genre, check out our list of the best adventure movies of 2026 so far.
1. 'The Green Knight' (2021)
Topping our list is David Lowery's The Green Knight, a film that reimagines the Arthurian legend as a meditation on honor, fear, and the stories we tell ourselves. Dev Patel stars as Sir Gawain, a young knight who accepts a challenge from a mysterious green giant, only to find that the quest is less about glory and more about confronting his own cowardice.
The film is a visual poem, with each frame dripping with atmosphere and symbolism. But what makes it the best fantasy of the decade so far is how it uses the fantastical elements—the talking fox, the ghostly visions, the shifting sands of time—to explore the very human fear of not living up to one's own potential. It is a slow burn that rewards patience, and it leaves you thinking long after the credits roll. For more on the genre, you might enjoy our ranking of fantasy books that deliver from the very first page.
