In the mood for a sci-fi movie, but feel like you’ve already exhausted the genre’s greatest hits? Prime Video actually hosts a surprisingly deep selection of titles that have likely stayed under your radar. While the big blockbusters get the glory, a wealth of inventive storytelling is currently hiding in plain sight.
These hidden sci-fi gems cover the full spectrum of the strange. Some lean into the icy chills of alien paranoia and the terror of missing time, while others play with the mind-bending mechanics of time loops and multiverses. It’s a veritable treasure trove of science fiction goodies that bypasses the top 10 lists, allowing you to cast a much wider net.
If you’re feeling like there’s nothing left to discover, don’t worry — there is plenty of gold to sift through. Not sure exactly where to start? These five overlooked sci-fi movies are the perfect way to kick off your next deep dive into the unknown.
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‘Communion’
Whitley Strieber (Christopher Walken) is a writer whose getaway to a remote cabin ends up ruined by a strange occurrence that begins with odd lights in the sky. As Whitley tries to understand what happened that night, fragments of that bizarre memory keep coming up in flashes, pulling him into a spiral of hypnosis sessions as he tries to remember what occurred. Was it an alien abduction, and did it actually happen? Nothing is certain, but Strieber will push himself trying to recall what went on that fateful night.
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‘The Endless’
Two brothers thought they escaped a mysterious cult years ago, but when a strange videotape arrives, it drags them back toward the secluded community they left. When they return to the site of the cult they thought they left behind for good, they find something stranger than fiction: a group of people who seem unchanged by time, living under rules they can’t explain, surrounded by bizarre phenomena like a tug of war with the sky. The pair investigates the odd happenings and the implications that come with it while struggling to find a real explanation for what they’re witnessing.
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‘Companion’
What starts as a weekend getaway for three couples at a remote lake house turns nightmarish when it’s revealed that one of the guests isn’t who they seem. One half of one of the seemingly perfect couples in attendance is actually an android, and the “beautiful” relationship she’s in isn’t what it appears to be. But by the time she (and everyone else) picks up on that fact, the damage has already been done. And this android will have to face a difficult future as she learns her entire past was a lie.
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‘Previously Saved Version’
A couple living in the far future has a seemingly perfect life in a luxurious space colony. Except everything about their daily experiences is little more than a facade. The wife is actually an android, and her husband has been repeatedly reconstructing her memories in an attempt to restore the happiness they once shared. There’s just one problem: You can’t keep overwriting someone’s mind or personality like a hard drive. Eventually, this behavior has to come to a stop, and the “wife” has to figure out a way to escape the hell her husband has been putting her through in the name of “love”.
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‘Parallel’
A group of friends stumbles onto a mirror that functions like a doorway into the multiverse. It’s a strange curiosity at first, and the friends treat it as such: it could be dangerous, after all. But with such an addictive temptation in their hands, they can’t help but start using it in an almost obsessive frenzy to explore endless alternate realities. They start importing knowledge and advantages from the other side, convinced they can hack their own lives into something better. But they soon find out that there’s a limit to how many times they can do such a thing, and how much their lives may end up changing for the worse with continued use.
Watch on Prime Video
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