Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, is an exciting, imperfect genre success. It follows four scientists and a paramedic – all female – who enter the Shimmer, a quarantined zone from which no living creature has emerged alive. Read moreBeginning as science-driven sci-fi, the film shifts gears into horror-thriller territory, before abandoning those narrative beats in favour of an ambitious, “conceptual” final half-hour that scrambles a little to wrap itself up. However, to call it highbrow is both to underestimate audiences and to overstate the film’s intellectual designs. Garland seems to be going for something more poetic and mood-based, with images of Portman climbing into a scorched hole in a white, webbed room, and a burning lighthouse lingering long after the film ends.

Source: The Guardian March 18, 2018 07:52 UTC