Following his breakout hit Ex Machina, Alex Garland has returned with a new sci-fi stunner in the form of Annihilation. A hypnotic, uncompromising story with genuine thrills and chills, it stands to be one of the most impressive genre films of 2018.

A nightmarish landscape takes its form as a group of female scientists, scholars, and soldiers make their way through the Shimmer; a jungle-like zone where the laws of physics and nature don’t apply. It bears a striking resemblance to Russian avant-gardist Andrei Tarkovsky’s own environmental sci-fi landmark Stalker, but the effect displayed is more psychological than physiological. We watch as the primary characters are ensnared by the metaphysical forces at bay, as a number of captivating, otherworldly horrors to take form.

If Ex Machina revolved around the idea of what humanity means in the face of ever-evolving technology, Annihilation takes this notion a step further by considering the very components of humanity itself. Within this notion, Garland provides a dissection of externalized paranoia we concoct in our imaginations, as the group comes face to face with numerous unnatural creations that are near-hallucinatory. At the same time, he provides a more realistic encapsulation of the real, destructive tendencies that we inflict on others and ourselves - eventually these elements coming together to create one singular organism.

Annihilation aspires to reach the same heights of the greatest works in intellectual sci-fi cinema. In this pursuit, it detaches itself greatly from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name. Garland’s screenplay (which he wrote as a re-imagining of the original plot via his own recollection) instills a feeling of unease from the start, permeating throughout as the narrative unfolds in non-linear fashion. It lets the viewer attempt to put the pieces together scene-by-scene, while on another level, enabling them to engage deeply with its visual and sensory display to the very end, and then some (thanks to a truly psychedelic end credits sequence).