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The Completist’s Guide to Streaming Alex Garland Movies
From The Beach to Civil War, we take a closer look at the filmmaker’s fascinating career.
His best works are defined by their psychological depth and genre ambition, and his plots — whether set on a spaceship staring at the sun or inside of a rapidly evolving ecological anomaly — refract the internal tensions of their protagonists into visual spectacle. For my money Alex Garland’s best film, Annihilation adapts the Jeff VanderMeer book of the same name: a horrific descent into a transmogrified landscape overtaken by dense foliage, mutated animals, and a kaleidoscopic light called the “Shimmer.” The movie’s soundtrack is a stress-inducing blend of haunting chorals, hypnotic drones, and warm acoustic guitars — a study in weirdness that does nothing to ground the chaotic visuals. Based on another Garland novel set in Southeast Asia, where he spent time traveling, The Tesseract is like an action-thriller riff on Crash: What if the disconnected lives of a drug runner, an assassin, a psychologist, and a bellhop all collide through a complicated series of events?
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