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MT 18 March 2018

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maltatoday SUNDAY 18 MARCH 2018 43 This Week she can do for her husband while cooped up within the walls of the Southern Reach – where the en- croaching "wall" of the Shimmer is visible, and threatens to expand into the wider world – Lena volun- teers for the mission herself, deter- mined to find answers that could help restore her husband to the man she knows and loves. Ex Machina – a feminist chal- lenge to genre conventions wrapped around an AI thriller – proved that Garland is more than capable of handling brain-tickling concepts and placing them into a taut thriller. Annihilation expands upon this streak with an equally unsentimental grasp on its charac- ters – Portman's Lena is a margin- ally softer cookie than her coun- terpart in VanderMeer's novel, but only by a small margin – and a desire to challenge the audience rather than coddle them with pre- fabricated re-enactments of genre tropes. In this age of corporation-ena- bled copy-paste adaptations – I'm looking at you, Marvel Studios – and their more "relaxed" variants in longform TV series – where me- andering, gradually unspooling lit- eral adaptation is made possible by the serialised format – Garland's film is refreshing – it's the work of a filmmaker engaging directly with the material on his own terms. In fact, he's described it as a "dream of the book", which is appropri- ate in many ways. VanderMeer's tightly controlled prose achieves a hallucinatory effect by stealth. The Biologist, unnamed in the novel, along with the rest of the team, delivers the story in a flinty first- person narration that has the effect of making the inherent weirdness all the weirder. Reshaping this in a way that matches the many bod- ily and natural metamorphoses we witness as we follow the team on this strange trek, Garland finds visual and psychological equiva- lents that depart from the source but which cumulatively achieve a similar effect. It's a project that takes the path of least resistance, and that deserves multiple viewings in order to soak in its full interpre- tations. Open-ended and psy- chedelic, it is the perfect tonic to a cinematic landscape that's be- coming more and more safe and predictable at every turn. The verdict Bravely eschewing the opportu- nity to play to the gallery by re- warding neither fans of the source material nor the general audience with low-hanging thrills, Alex Garland's idiosyncratic take on Jeff VanderMeer's slim novel – the opening salvo of a trilogy we aren't likely to see on screen – is a visually stunning and deliciously disturbing spectacle. Unflinch- ing in its portrayal of defeated, disintegrated lives but colour- ful, revelatory and dynamic in its letting loose of a freaky natural landscape, this is a film that will unscrew your mind, but reward multiple viewings. For that reason above all, Paramount's decision to "dump" it on Netflix for the sake of our continent might just be the most disorienting silver lining in the history of recent cinema. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the taciturn group leader Dr Ventress Mutations: the landscape is a character in this bracing, trippy film

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