In September, Paramount released the first trailer for Ex Machina director Alex Garland’s next science fiction thriller Annihilation, showing off an expedition entering a bizarre world. Today, the studio released a new trailer that shows off the utter strangeness of Area X.

Based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation is about a journey into a surreal universe. The new trailer gives us a deeper look into the film's surreal world.

It opens with a scientist (Benedict Wong) questioning Natalie Portman’s character, the Biologist, who asks her to start from the beginning. We then see the Biologist and her husband (Oscar Isaac) before he sets off for his own mission into the zone. He comes back ill, and in order to find out what happened to him, the Biologist agrees to go into a mysterious zone to retrace his steps.

The Biologist is joined by four other women who set off to explore the zone behind the boundary, which seems to have been expanding — potentially trapping cities and states. Beyond the barrier, they discover a strange, decaying world. All remnants of civilization are being reclaimed by nature, and the plants and animals that they come across seem to be weirdly mutated or changed. Flowers look strange, while a crocodile looks like it has the teeth of a shark. They also find clues about what happened to the team that went missing: they seemed to have gone crazy, or were killed by one of the zone’s lifeforms. One of the characters says that the zone seems to be destroying everything, to which the Biologist responds that it’s not doing that at all — it’s making something new.

Annihilation hits theaters on February 23rd, 2018.