There's one scene in Annihilation that is so hair-raisingly horrific, it's still creeping me out days after I saw the movie. I'd like to tell you about it, but of course I can't.

Writer-director Alex Garland, whose first feature, the 2014 Ex Machina, was already fairly disturbing—although not in the throat-grabbing way that this picture is—has adapted a novel by Jeff VanderMeer in an unusual manner. Garland has chucked quite a bit of VanderMeer's narrative, and has chosen instead to preserve the book's atmosphere of cellular chaos and hovering dread within a new structure, and to top it off with blazing psychedelic imagery. If you can deal with the picture's crepuscular ambiguity, there's a lot to look at here, and quite a bit to think about (or at least puzzle over), writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.

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