4 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies on Apple TV, Ranked

Apple TV has already made its case as one of the best places to stream sci-fi television. Shows like Silo, Foundation, and Dark Matter treat the genre as a sandbox for big ideas rather than just a delivery system for CGI spectacle. What’s more interesting is how that philosophy carries over to its original films. Instead of chasing dystopian aesthetics or trying to out-Marvel Marvel, Apple’s sci-fi movie slate stays pointedly cerebral, favoring intimacy over explosions and moral dilemmas over multiverse math. These are stories about love tested by technology, humanity measured against extinction, and the quiet terror of making the “right” choice in the wrong future.

4 'Fingernails' (2023)

Christos Nikou’s Fingernails is the distant cousin of a quirkier, more stylistic Yorgos Lanthimos joint. (The Lobster is the first that comes to mind.) A sci-fi romance that turns love into a clinical experiment, complete with body horror and scent kink, the film follows Anna (an always excellent Jessie Buckley), a young woman in a relationship with her long-term boyfriend Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), who begins questioning the results of a specially designed matchmaking test that determines compatibility via torn fingernails. Anna and Ryan’s romance is middling at best, but when she takes a job at the same institute that created the assessment, she starts to believe they may be entirely wrong for one another. Of course, the growing attraction to her co-worker, Amir (Riz Ahmed), doesn’t help things either, but the question of who Anna ends up with isn’t as interesting as her realization that being coupled up (with anyone) can be just as lonely as being single.

What makes that thesis compelling is the film’s retro-futuristic setting. Nikou mines the most from his genre of choice, crafting a world that’s just one step removed from ours — analog phones, vinyl records, and yet, complex technology that microwaves DNA to predict the future — where the stakes feel both fantastical and painfully real. Fingernails is sharp, strange, and heartbreakingly observant — the kind of sci-fi that makes you think, “Yes, love is a science, but it’s one we’re all hopeless at.”

3 'The Gorge' (2025)

The Gorge takes a high-concept sci-fi hook — two enemy snipers stationed on opposite sides of a forbidden chasm — and turns it into something surprisingly sweet and romantic… before letting its monsters loose. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play lethal loners named Levi (an ex-Marine sniper) and Drasa (an assassin with a thick Eastern European accent), who are ordered not to speak, not to cross enemy lines, and definitely not to ask what’s festering below the foggy geological rift. Naturally, they break all three rules.

For its first half, Scott Derrickson’s genre mash-up plays like a long-distance romance conducted through binoculars, mixtapes, and shared kill counts, finding real chemistry in the quiet, watchful stretches where nothing happens except connection. Once the film drops into the gorge itself, it leans harder on creature-feature thrills, delivering jump scares and CGI-crafted nightmares that force both actors to stretch their stunt work skills. Still, the blend of sci-fi paranoia, action-horror, and slow-burn intimacy gives The Gorge a distinctive pulse and a refreshing point of view. It’s a movie less interested in saving the world than in watching two isolated people realize they don’t want to guard it alone.

2 'Finch' (2021)

Finch is a post-apocalyptic road movie that’s powered more by sentiment than spectacle, but it’s got a lot going for it. Tom Hanks, for one; a cute dog named Goodyear, for another. It’s the kind of sci-fi tearjerker that understands exactly what it’s got in its movie star lead and exploits all that likability and goodwill to wreak havoc on our emotions.

Set on a sun-blasted Earth where humanity has all but vanished, the film follows Hanks’ dying engineer as he builds a sentient robot with one specific mission: take care of the dog after he’s gone. From there, it settles into a melancholy, often gentle rhythm, pairing dusty Americana with an unexpectedly funny odd-couple dynamic as the newly minted AI (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) learns what it means to be human from the most humane Hollywood A-lister alive. Director Miguel Sapochnik keeps the apocalypse spare and quietly menacing, but the real hook is Hanks, radiating vulnerability and stubborn kindness in a genre that usually prizes grit and deafening explosions. Finch may be slight on plot, but as a meditation on legacy, companionship, and what we choose to save when everything else is gone, it earns its place on this list.

1 'Swan Song' (2021)

Set in a near future where cloning has become a quiet, boutique solution to terminal illness, Benjamin Cleary’s directorial debut uses its speculative premise as a pressure cooker for questions about love, autonomy, and what we owe the people we leave behind. Mahershala Ali gives a remarkably controlled dual performance as a dying husband and the man built to replace him, turning what could have been a high-concept twist into an intimate reckoning with mortality and individualism. The film is all about mood, not mechanics — filled with futuristic set design and ominous tech — and it resists easy moral answers as it lingers on the unbearable choice of who gets to live your life. It’s tender, melancholy, and quietly devastating, proving that the most unsettling sci-fi doesn’t come from technology going wrong, but from it working exactly as intended.