Alex Garland is fresh off writing back-to-back acclaimed horror movies in 28 Years Later and its follow-up, The Bone Temple, and his near quarter-century of experience in genre film has earned him the director’s chair for 2028’s Elden Ring. Since there’s still more than a year to go before we see how he tries to crack that very tough nut, now’s a good time to brush up on his filmography, and Paramount Pictures has made that easier thanks to a new 4K UHD Blu-ray release of Annihilation, perhaps the strangest and most confounding movie in a filmography that can offer a few claims to that title.
Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s short novel, Annihilation stars Natalie Portman as Lena, a botanist and former soldier who joins four other women on an expedition beyond the boundary of the mysterious Shimmer. All anyone on the top-secret project knows is that a meteor landed in Florida and produced an opaque, colorful barrier that’s slowly been expanding across the region. Everyone who’s been sent into the Shimmer to investigate has vanished without a trace… until Lena’s husband (Oscar Isaac) returns, alive but no longer himself. Now it’s Lena’s turn to go inside and find an explanation for the unexplainable before the Shimmer begins to swallow cities.
