2018: Annihilation
Turns out, I really like psychological thrillers with Natalie Portman as the lead (see also, Black Swan). After her husband inexplicably appears at their house months after being declared Missing in Action and then promptly drops into a coma, Portman's Lena is drawn into the project he was working for. This project is an attempt to understand/destroy "the Shimmer" a mysterious and ever-growing area centred around an asteroid crash site, in which the laws of nature no longer seem to apply.
Film buffs might be tempted to write off Annihilation as a gender-swapped version of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, but whilst there are a lot of surface similarities, at the core of each film is something quite different. Both feature a group of troubled individuals journeying through a strange, altered landscape in a quest to reach the mystery at its centre. However, whilst Stalker plays around with the nature of desire and how desire shapes us, Annihilation deals much more directly with questions at the heart of our notions of identity. What does it mean to be "you"? Is a copy or an echo of you also you? If so, might that echo be able to become more than you? How far can you be transformed before you cease to be you?
Both the world around Lena and her group and the interior world of their minds become haunted by doubling and mirroring the further they venture, culminating in a bone-chilling encounter at the heart of the Shimmer. I absolutely love sci-fi, so I admit that I'm biased, but for my money Annihilation is not only one of the best sci-fi films of this century so far, but one of the best films of the century so far, full stop.
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