Annihilation

Alex Garland adapts Jeff VanderMeer into something all his own. A biologist, played by Natalie Portman, joins an expedition into the Shimmer, an expanding zone around a coastal lighthouse where everything living is being refracted and rewritten. Plants grow in human shapes, animals carry the screams of the people they killed, and the team starts to come apart in step with the landscape. It is science fiction that treats self-destruction as a biological fact rather than a metaphor. The final act trades explanation for a long strange sequence that is closer to a fever than a climax.