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Fantasy movies are in one way the best genre there is because there is a promise most other genres don’t even try to keep. Things will turn out okay in the end. Magic will fix what’s broken. The person who deserves to win will win. That promise is why people still tear up at a fairy tale ending even when they already know exactly how it goes. That happy ending is a real comfort in a story that keeps its word.
These ten movies take that comfort and pull it out from under you, right when you’re leaning on it hardest. Each one plays by fantasy’s rules long enough to earn your trust, real magic, real curses, real quests, and then breaks the one promise the genre is supposed to keep, on purpose. That’s the part that stays with you longer than a happy ending ever could.
10
‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990)
Most fairy tales about outsiders end with the outsider learning to fit in, whether that means a wedding or some kind of big change that finally lets them belong. Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) never gets that kind of ending, mostly because the inventor who built him died before finishing the job, which is why he still has scissors instead of hands. Kim (Winona Ryder) and her mother, Peg (Dianne Wiest), bring him down from his empty castle into their quiet, pastel neighborhood, where everyone treats him like an exciting new toy at first.
That excitement doesn’t last. Once Edward kills Jim (Anthony Michael Hall) in self-defense near the end, the same neighbors who welcomed him turn on him just as fast, chasing him back up the hill to the castle he came from. He stays there alone for the rest of his life, while Kim grows old without him and only tells the story to her granddaughter decades later, as a memory. Tim Burton takes the usual Beauty and the Beast formula, where the beast eventually gets the girl and a place in the world, and simply never lets Edward have either one.
9
‘Beetlejuice’ (1988)
Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) is the title character, yet he barely shows up in his own movie, adding up to less than twenty minutes of screen time total, and he isn’t even the one the story wants you rooting for. That role belongs to Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), a married couple who just died and now find themselves haunting the house they used to live in, trying and failing to scare off the wealthy, rude family that’s moved in and started redecorating.
Most haunted house movies want the audience afraid of the ghosts, but this one flips that completely, since the Maitlands are the gentle, awkward ones who can barely manage a decent scare, while the humans, aside from Lydia (Winona Ryder), the one person who can actually see them, are the real nuisance. Betelgeuse only enters the story because the Maitlands get desperate enough to hire him, and once he’s loose, he nearly wrecks everything for the characters we’ve spent the whole film rooting for.
8
‘The Green Knight’ (2021)
The medieval poem this is based on ends with Gawain surviving his ordeal essentially unscathed, having proven his honor to everyone’s satisfaction. David Lowery’s version doesn’t let him off that easily. Gawain (Dev Patel) spends the whole film wearing a magic girdle that guarantees he can’t be killed, a cheat he never tells anyone about, right up until the moment he’s supposed to keep his promise to the Green Knight and let himself be beheaded.
Before he does, the film shows an entire imagined future where Gawain removes the girdle, flees the challenge, and lives out decades as a hollow, cowardly king, watching everything he built collapse. Then it cuts back to the real moment, where the girdle is still on his waist, and lets him choose. A quest story built entirely around a fight ends instead on a man deciding, alone, whether he’s willing to actually be brave.
7
‘The Shape of Water’ (2017)
Beauty and the Beast stories almost always end with the beast turning human. Guillermo del Toro‘s version ends with the human choosing to become something else instead. Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaner at a Cold War research facility, falls for an amphibious creature (Doug Jones) being tortured and studied by Strickland (Michael Shannon), and it is never visible that their relationship is real.
By the end, Elisa doesn’t get her voice back, and the creature doesn’t get legs. Instead, Elisa is pulled into the water and transforms into something that can breathe there alongside him, which reverses the direction every version of this story usually goes. It’s the human who changes to fit the fantasy world, not the other way around, and a genre film built on that premise went on to win Best Picture, a category it almost never gets invited into.
6
‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)
Guillermo del Toro has never confirmed, in any interview, whether the fantasy world in this film is real or something Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) invented to survive fascist Spain, and he’s said that ambiguity is deliberate. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), is hunting resistance fighters in the forest above the labyrinth, and every fantastical creature Ofelia meets underground, including a faun (Doug Jones) who sets her three brutal tasks, exists right alongside real torture and real executions happening a few feet away.
Ofelia dies at Vidal’s hands in the last act, shot in the real world with no rescue arriving in time. The film’s final scene shows her reunited with a magical mother and father in an underworld kingdom, crowned and welcomed home. Whether that’s actually happening, or just what a dying child imagined in her last few seconds, is something the film never settles for you
5
‘Being John Malkovich’ (1999)
There’s a door on the 7½th floor of an office building that leads directly into actor John Malkovich‘s mind for exactly fifteen minutes at a time, and the strangest thing about this movie is how fast everyone treats that as a business opportunity. Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) starts charging people two hundred dollars a ride, while his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), and his coworker Maxine (Catherine Keener) start using the portal to work out their own tangled feelings for each other.
John Malkovich plays an exaggerated version of himself, increasingly horrified as strangers start controlling his body from inside his own skull. The story ends with Craig trapped permanently inside the consciousness of a young girl, watching her life through her eyes with no way out, which turns the fantasy of becoming someone else into a life sentence instead of an escape.
4
‘Brazil’ (1985)
Terry Gilliam fought his own studio so hard over this film’s ending that he eventually took out a full-page ad in Variety demanding they release his cut instead of theirs, and once you see the ending, it’s obvious why he refused to budge. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) spends the film escaping a suffocating, paperwork-choked dystopia through elaborate flying daydreams, and by the final scene, he seems to actually pull it off, rescuing Jill (Kim Greist) and driving free into open countryside.
Then the camera pulls back, and it turns out none of that happened. Sam is strapped to a chair, having just been tortured into a lobotomy by the same bureaucracy he’d been dreaming his way out of, smiling blankly at nothing. The fantasy ending was real inside the film. It just wasn’t real for him.
3
‘Spirited Away’ (2001)
Chihiro’s parents get turned into pigs about fifteen minutes into this movie, punished for eating food that wasn’t theirs without asking first, and Hayao Miyazaki never really lets the story go back to being gentle after that. Chihiro (voiced by Rumi Hiiragi) has to take a job at a bathhouse run by a witch named Yubaba to survive, and the film refuses to give Yubaba a clean villain arc, letting her run the place with genuine competence rather than pure cruelty.
Chihiro and Haku (voiced by Miyu Irino), the boy who helps her, never get a romantic ending, not even a kiss goodbye. She’s told not to look back as she leaves the spirit world, and the film cuts away before showing whether she’ll remember any of it once she’s home. This is a coming-of-age fantasy that hands its hero actual growth and then takes the memory of it away. Very subversive.
2
‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)
Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver) gives lepers and former sex workers real jobs and real dignity inside the walls of Irontown, something almost nobody else in the story is willing to offer them. She’s also cutting down the forest that keeps her furnaces running, and by the film’s climax, her hunters are chasing down the Forest Spirit to take its head. Hayao Miyazaki never gives you a clean reason to hate her for either one.
San (Claire Danes), raised by wolves and ready to kill any human who threatens her home, doesn’t get positioned as the clear hero either. Ashitaka (Billy Crudup), the one character trying to hold both sides together, carries a curse on his arm that never fully goes away, not even by the last scene. The forest grows back changed, not restored, and San and Ashitaka choose to live apart instead of ending up together. Nobody wins here the way a fantasy movie usually lets somebody win.
1
‘Shrek’ (2001)
Shrek is based on a girl named Fiona (Cameron Diaz) who spends her whole life locked in a curse, turning into an ogre every night until true love’s kiss can supposedly fix her for good and make the change permanent. She finally gets that kiss from Shrek (Mike Myers), and it does make the change permanent, just not in the direction she or anyone in the castle was expecting.
Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) had already offered Shrek a kingdom in exchange for rescuing her, a crown and a castle and a permanent place at court, exactly the ending most fantasy movies build their whole story toward. Shrek and Fiona turn it down anyway and go home to the swamp that started this whole mess . There’s no lingering shot of the throne they’re leaving behind at all. They just leave, and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) follows them there too, instead of staying behind in the fancy castle he could have had for himself.
Shrek
- Release Date
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May 18, 2001
- Runtime
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90 minutes
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Shrek / Blind Mouse (voice)
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Eddie Murphy
Donkey (voice)
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https://collider.com/most-subversive-fantasy-movies-ranked/
Safwan Azeem
Almontather Rassoul
