Six sliders. No stars.
Nothing on this site is recommended because people liked it. Films are described by what they are (how heavy, how fast, how far from the real world), and you get the ones closest to what you asked for.
Neither of these is the better film. They are just at opposite ends.
63 films tagged dystopia, showing 50
Move a slider to sort by what films are like.
2025 · Science fiction
A man walks into a Los Angeles diner saying he comes from a future where artificial intelligence wiped out humanity, and that the people eating there can stop it. It is his hundred and seventeenth try.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Thriller
A well-off family gathers for a 25th wedding anniversary, and the son's fiancee turns out to be a former student with a political book of her own. It jumps forward in years, and it is mostly relatives arguing.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Science fiction
Paris in 2045 has been split into zones by class and the police take their orders from an artificial intelligence. When the man who built the system is murdered, two investigators are put on the case together.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
2000 · Action
A class of Japanese ninth-graders is taken to an island, handed weapons, and told that in three days only one of them may be left. It moves fast and does not soften what the kids do to each other.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Thriller
In an America run by the military, fifty teenage boys set off on an annual walk they have to keep at three miles an hour, with three warnings before the soldiers shoot. The last one going wins.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Science fiction
In a near-future America run by a television network, a blacklisted worker joins the show where runners are hunted for thirty days and have to film themselves daily. It moves at a sprint from there.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
In a Brazil that ships its old people off to state colonies, a 77-year-old slips onto a boat up the Amazon instead, wanting one plane ride before she goes. It is a quiet trip among strangers.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Documentary
Raoul Peck follows George Orwell's career and the warnings in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and sets them against today's wars and authoritarian politics. Built from archive film and photographs, with Orwell's words read over them.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Science fiction
In 2085, with the world being torn apart by religious war, the governing powers stage a no-holds-barred martial arts tournament in which the last fighter standing wins the world for one faith. Most of the film is the tournament.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
2026 · Science fiction
In a Los Angeles where an artificial intelligence tries violent crimes, a detective is strapped into a chair and given ninety minutes to argue it out of executing him for his wife's murder. Mostly one room and a clock.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Comedy
Sex outside marriage is illegal except for one night a year, and two strangers keep crossing paths across that night. He meant to propose to someone else; she meant to find a connection worth having.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Thriller
An actress comes back to her family's suite in a tower hotel as a strange mist swallows the city, bringing with it a killer in diamond gloves. Mostly the hotel, the film set, and her father's circle.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
2006 · Science fiction
Nobody has been born anywhere on earth for eighteen years, and Britain has become a locked-down state rounding up refugees. A tired civil servant is asked to get one woman to the coast.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Comedy
A Malayalam comedy running in three times at once: an Earth ruled by one regime in 2370, a broke little kingdom facing invasion in 1790, and the present day. Nearly three hours, and it keeps cutting between them.
AI estimate, not yet described
2024 · War
Four journalists drive from New York to Washington through a United States at war with itself, trying to reach the president before the fighting does. A road trip, with quiet stretches between loud ones.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
A boy who arrived as a refugee falls in with a man and then a woman, and the three of them make for a city in a broken-down world where his odd gifts start to show. It runs over three hours.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Crime
In a near-future Korean city run by gangsters, the people society has given up on gather at a place called Texas Hot Springs, and a new arrival named Jane upsets the order of it. Bleak and stylised.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Science fiction
In 2090 the first child born on Mars is left behind when the colony packs up, with only a few broken-down robots for company. She sets off across the planet to find the mineral that could clean Earth's water.
AI estimate, not yet described
1999 · Science fiction
A software developer who moonlights as a hacker is told the world he lives in is not the real one, and is offered a look at it. Kung fu, long coats, and a lot of talk about what is actually there.
AI estimate, not yet described
2009 · Science fiction
Twenty years after an alien ship stalls above Johannesburg, its passengers live in a fenced-off slum and a company man is sent in to hand out eviction notices. It starts as a fake documentary and turns into a chase with a lot of gunfire.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Action
A driver hauling a stolen war rig runs for the desert with five women escaping a warlord, and picks up a drifter on the way. Nearly the whole film is one chase, out across a stretch of desert and back again.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Science fiction
A police officer whose job is retiring old synthetic humans turns up a buried secret and goes looking for a man who disappeared thirty years earlier. Slow, very large, and mostly quiet.
AI estimate, not yet described
2024 · Action
A girl is stolen from a green, hidden place and grows up among the warlords of the wasteland, working her way back toward home. Told in chapters over many years, with long stretches of vehicles chasing each other.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Animation
A Japanese city banishes every dog to a rubbish island, and a boy flies out there alone to find his. The dogs talk in flat deadpan, and the whole thing is stop-motion built like a doll's house.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2002 · Science fiction
In a Washington where murders are stopped before they happen, the cop who runs the unit is named by the system as a future killer and has to run from his own team. It is a chase with a mystery underneath it.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Science fiction
In a future where almost everyone spends the day inside a vast online world, its dead creator has hidden three keys in it for whoever wants his fortune. A treasure hunt at full speed, stuffed with references to old films and games.
AI estimate, not yet described
2013 · Science fiction
The last people alive circle a frozen Earth on a train that never stops, and the ones at the back decide to fight their way to the front. Each carriage is its own set piece and it only goes one way.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
2012 · Science fiction
In a country where every district must send two teenagers to a televised fight to the death, a girl volunteers in her younger sister's place. The first half is preparation and television, the second is the arena.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Science fiction
In a world where single people are sent to a hotel and given forty-five days to pair off or be turned into an animal of their choosing, a newly dumped man checks in. Everybody speaks flatly, on purpose, and the rules are followed to the letter.
AI estimate, not yet described
2019 · Horror
In a tower prison where a table of food is lowered floor by floor, the people at the top eat first and the people below get what is left. One cell, two men at a time, and it is not shy about the point.
AI estimate, not yet described
2009 · Drama
A man and his young son walk south through a burnt-out America years after everything died, pushing a shopping trolley and hiding from other people. Grey, quiet, and bleak from start to finish.
AI estimate, not yet described
2008 · Animation
Seven hundred years after people left, one small robot is still tidying up the rubbish on Earth, until a sleek probe drops out of the sky. The first forty minutes are almost wordless.
AI estimate, not yet described
2009 · Action
In a 1985 where costumed heroes have been outlawed and the world is close to nuclear war, one of them is thrown out of a window and an old colleague starts asking why. Long, slow and very violent.
AI estimate, not yet described
2014 · Action
With mutants hunted to near extinction in the future, one of them is sent back to 1973 to stop the thing that started it. Two time periods running at once, and a lot of faces from the earlier films.
AI estimate, not yet described
1995 · Science fiction
A convict is sent back from a ruined future to find the source of the plague that emptied the surface, and wakes up in a psychiatric ward instead. It jumps between times and asks you to keep track.
AI estimate, not yet described
1971 · Science fiction
A teenage gang leader in a near-future Britain is caught and volunteered for a treatment meant to make him incapable of violence. Stylised and cruel, and funny in ways that are hard to sit with.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2006 · Science fiction
An undercover narcotics officer in a surveilled near-future America is assigned to spy on himself, while the drug he takes pulls his mind apart. Animated over live action, and hard to follow on purpose.
AI estimate, not yet described
2001 · Science fiction
A couple with a dying son take in a robot boy built to love them, and he wants to become real enough to keep them. Long and strange, and much sadder than the fairy tale it borrows from.
AI estimate, not yet described
1988 · Animation
In a rebuilt Tokyo of biker gangs and military secrets, a boy in a teenage crew develops the powers the army has been waiting for. Loud and fast, and it does not stop to explain.
AI estimate, not yet described
2019 · Science fiction
A doctor in a scrapyard city rebuilds a cyborg girl found in the junk, and she turns out to have been built for fighting. Bright and fast, built around one long run of combat and sport.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Science fiction
A passenger ship carrying settlers to Mars is knocked off course and cannot turn around, and the years start passing. Bleak and slow, and it keeps going further than you expect.
AI estimate, not yet described
1985 · Science fiction
A clerk in a vast paperwork bureaucracy chases a woman from his dreams after a typing error sends the wrong man to be arrested. Cluttered, funny and increasingly airless.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Science fiction
An engineer smuggles out a damaged police robot and gives it a mind that learns like a child, and a Johannesburg gang gets to raise it. Loud, and sillier than it sounds.
AI estimate, not yet described
1998 · Science fiction
A man wakes in a bath with no memory, in a city where it is always night and the buildings rearrange themselves after midnight. It explains itself slowly and then all at once.
AI estimate, not yet described
2012 · Science fiction
Two judges answer a triple homicide in a two-hundred-storey tower block and the gang that runs it seals the building. One building, straight up, ninety minutes.
AI estimate, not yet described
2013 · Science fiction
A factory worker with five days to live tries to reach the orbital ring where the rich keep the medical machines. Grimy on the ground and spotless above it.
AI estimate, not yet described
1982 · Science fiction
A retired policeman in a permanently raining Los Angeles is brought back to hunt four artificial humans who have come to Earth looking for their maker. Slow, wet, and more interested in the question than the chase.
AI estimate, not yet described
1997 · Science fiction
In a world that sorts people by their genes at birth, a man born the ordinary way buys another man's identity to get a seat on a flight to Titan. Cool, still, mostly interiors.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
1995 · Animation
A cyborg officer in a Japanese security section hunts a hacker who edits people's memories, and starts wondering what is left of her own. Talky, and the action is short and sudden.
AI estimate, not yet described
2006 · Comedy
An army librarian of exactly average intelligence is frozen for a botched experiment and wakes five hundred years later as the cleverest man alive. Broad, cheap and endlessly quoted.
AI estimate, not yet described