Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina was already shaping up to be another incredible bit of original, cerebral sci-fi long before Oscar Isaac joined the cast. Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s popular (but not too popular) 2014 Annihilation, the film already boasts an incredible cast featuring Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and star Natalie Portman. So Oscar Isaac is, really, just the frosting on this incredible cinematic cake. VaderMeer excitedly announced the news via Twitter.

Annihilation—the first book in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy—follows an all-female expedition team as they explore a mysterious location called Area X. The women are known only by their professional names (the biologist, the psychologist, the surveyor, and the anthropologist) and, as you would hope in a movie from the director who brought you Ex Machina, strange and unexplainable things start happening. The biologist (Portman) is motivated to join the expedition because her husband (Isaac’s role, according to author VanderMeer) was a member of the previous team who all died mysteriously. So, yes, Isaac’s part will be small. He’s basically in the ghost-wife role made so popular by Leonardo DiCaprio movies.

Isaac as Portman’s ghost wife is just one of several intriguing reversals we can expect in Annihilation, and given all the gender-role debates Ex Machina kicked up, you can expect Alex Garland to treat the material with both intelligence and intentional ambiguity. Though Annihilation is part of a trilogy, this is not exactly the beginning of a traditional franchise. Garland said back in January, “At the point I started working on Annihilation, there was only one of the three books. I knew that it was planned as a trilogy by the author, but there was only the manuscript for the first book. I really didn’t think too much about the trilogy side of it.” Though the Southern Reach trilogy is one connected story, the books are disparate enough in tone that they might benefit from a Cloverfield-esque anthology approach with different directors at the helm.

Either way, it’s a great time to be alive and a fan of original sci-fi. Sure, Star Wars is the titan at the box office, but between Annihilation, J.J. Abrams’s God Particle starring David Oyelowo and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Colin Trevorrow’s Intelligent Life potentially starring Lupita Nyong’o, film lovers won’t have to go to that galaxy far, far away to get a dose of female-friendly, diverse, and creative genre storytelling.