Suspension of Disbelief in Storytelling: How Escapism and Realism Both Drive Emotional Engagement

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Why do we go to the movies or tune into a television show? A key reason is sheer entertainment. We want to temporarily escape our daily routines through storytelling – often by giving a hall pass to films and television series that are fanstastical or require audiences to check their logic at the door via suspension of disbelief. It’s a conscious decision where we all enjoy the ride.

The other reason we turn to both big and small screens is realism. Some audiences want their daily lives accurately portrayed on screen via kitchen sink dramas or even comedies. This helps them to identify and better understand their feelings.

Suspension of disbelief is the psychological contract between storyteller and audience — a willingness to temporarily abandon practical skepticism and accept fictional premises as real within the story. When you watch a superhero defy physics, witness a time-traveling romance, or follow a magical academy’s rules while knowing it isn’t real, nor is it ever likely to be, you’re actively suspending disbelief. You’re saying: I know this isn’t real, but I’m choosing to believe it for the sake of entertainment. No-one is being fooled.

This act isn’t a passive acceptance. It’s an active, collaborative act of imagination that allows impossible worlds to feel emotionally authentic and metaphorically within our reach. Although the scenarios are imagined, the emotions and choices these characters exhibit are very real.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

Odysseus (Matt Damon) Phto couretsy of Universal Pictures

How Suspension of Disbelief Enhances Escape and Entertainment

The power of suspension of disbelief lies in its liberation – an unshackling from established social rules. By accepting a story’s internal logic — no matter how unlikely — audiences gain permission to escape the constraints of reality. When you’re fully immersed in a superhero’s origin story or a sci-fi dystopia, you’re not thinking about your bills, your commute, or your social anxieties. You’re living in a different world with different rules knowing that you’ll eventually return to your regular life. It was worth the price of a movie ticket.

This escape is deeply entertaining and beneficial because it offers psychological respite from daily stresses.

Fantasy, science fiction, and adventure films feed our hunger for wonder, spectacle, and possibilities beyond our lived experience. They expand what feels possible in our imagination. They push our boundaries and ask what we can apply to the real world. Although we may never fly like Supergirl, we explore the possibility of changing the world.

An audience member watching Avatar doesn’t need bioluminescent forests to exist in our world. They need to feel the magic of discovery, the awe of the unknown, the thrill and vastness of an impossible landscape made tangible through technological wizardry, cinematography and sound design.

Entertainment becomes a form of emotional transportation and recalibration. We trade realism for transcendence.

Audiences love this type of psychological manipulation because it encourages us to challenge the status quo. A different world is possible. We have the power to change the trajectory of our lives.

Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Ken Loach's Secrets and Lies

Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) & Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) Photo courtesy of Thin Man Films

Related: Mike Leigh on Mr. Turner

Kitchen Sink Realism vs. Escapist Storytelling

This is where the comparison between the two extremities of storytelling becomes interesting.

Kitchen sink realism (or social realism) does the opposite of escapism — it anchors storytelling firmly in everyday life. Films like Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake or Sorry, We Missed You, Mike Leigh’s work such as Secrets and Lies and Hard Truths depict life’s mundane struggles: bureaucratic frustration, financial hardship, relationship tension, working-class exhaustion. There’s no magic. No spectacle. Not even a promise of a better life.

Just the drudgery of ordinary life, often unvarnished and uncomfortable. There’s relief in knowing that other people experience the same situations, albeit within a fabricated world.

On the surface, these genres seem opposed:

Suspension of Disbelief Films vs Kitchen Sink Realism
Invite us into impossible worlds vs Ground us in recognizable worlds
Ask us to believe in fantasy/sci-fi logic vs Ask us to believe in social reality
Offer escape from everyday life vs Reflect everyday life back to us
Promise transcendence and spectacle vs Promise recognition and validation

Despite these ostensibly oppositional approaches to storytelling, both rely on one factor to reach their audiences – emotional authenticity. This is the point were all these genres converge and find their audiences.

Whether you’re watching Inception (a mind-bending sci-fi thriller) or Moonlight (an intimate realist drama about Black identity and masculinity), the audience’s engagement hinges on whether they believe the emotional journey of the main characters without necessarily drawing on personal experience.

You don’t need bioluminescent forests to understand the interconnectedness of nature, and you don’t need kitchen-sink struggles to feel heard and acknowledged. You don’t need to travel to Ithaca to experience Odysseus’ (Matt Damon)journey of returning home he may not recognize.

In Inception, we suspend disbelief about dream architecture and layered realities because the emotional core — a father’s guilt, his obsession with retrieving a memory, within a memory, within a dread — is achingly real. The guilt is more important than the fantastical world.

In Moonlight, the visceral realism of setting and circumstance carries tremendous weight because the emotional vulnerability — Chiron’s (Ashton Sanders) struggle with identity, his tentative connections with others — resonates with something true in human experience regardless of ethnicity.

The suspension of disbelief isn’t about how imaginative the world is. It’s about how immersible the emotional stakes and the conflict are. It’s about how much of ourselves we see in them.

Ashton Sanders plays Chiron in Moonlight

Chiron (Ashton Sanders) in Moonlight.

Related: Barry Jenkins on Moonlight

Why Both Matter

Escapist and realist storytelling serve different, but equally vital functions:

Escapist stories expand our sense of possibility. They remind us that reality is a canvas, not a ceiling. They dare us to imagine different worlds, different selves, different outcomes. They free us from social norms and plunge us into inspiration and endless possibilities.

Realist stories validate our experience. You matter. Your struggles are worthy of storytelling. Your ordinary life contains dramatic weight. You are not alone in this. They offer recognition and value in a world that often makes people feel invisible and irrelevant.

Every Story is Curated

Even documentary films have a point of view from a main character. Some story beats are emphasized while others are skipped. A hundred screenwriters can write a hundred scripts about the same topic – and they’ll all be different in some way.

Even in escapist cinema which demands the suspension of disbelief, the fantasy world must speak to actual underlying truths. They key here is to make the world-building clear and consistent.

Supergirl, possesses superhuman strength, flight, heat vision, invulnerability, and advanced hearing. Her main limitations include her vulnerability to kryptonite, magic, and red solar radiation. These rules remain consistent in her world. Her vulnerabilities and punk rock sensisbilities make her more human.