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The following podcast contains explicit language.

I want to tell you my secret now.

I see dead people.

Silent brain is evil.

Leave my sister and my daughter.

Rosberg.

What's in the box?

And like that, he's gone.

Hello, and welcome to another Slate spoiler special.

I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and today we will be spoiling Annihilation, the second film from Alex Garland, who was the director of Ex Machina a couple of years ago. Joining me in the Slate studio is Marissa Martinelli, a browbeat writer and editorial assistant at Slate. Hey, Marissa. Hello, Dana. And joining us from the Bay Area by phone is Ingu Kang, who is a culture and tech writer for Slate. Hi, Inku.

Hello, hello, hello. So I'm having both of you in because you've both written on Annihilation, which I haven't. Ingu, you reviewed it for Slate, and I don't want to get to your review and talk about that. And Marissa, you've written obsessively on a weird sound in the soundtrack of Anilation and interviewed the composer of the score about the weird sound, and we will get to that as well.

But before we start spoiling, let me just go around. sound in the soundtrack of Annihilation and interviewed the composer of the score about the weird sound,

and we will get to that as well. But before we start spoiling, let me just go around and ask,

just sort of your basic thumbs up, thumbs down reaction. Would you send your friends to see

annihilation? Oh, man. I really liked Annihilation. I'm not sure if I would send my friends

without some caveats beforehand. Depends on the friend. Right. For sure. What about you, Ingo? I would probably say the same thing. I think it's a really interesting experience, but I don't know if that means that you would enjoy the movie. Yeah, you say that in your review, and I find it really very true of the movie for me, is that I felt sort of entranced and fascinated while watching it. But there was also so much dissatisfaction and so many unanswered questions, which I know to some critics, I was reading one critic, Alison Wilmore for BuzzFeed, who loved exactly that, who loved that the movie refused to gratify the desires of science fiction fans who want everything explained for them. So we can get into all the

things that aren't explained and how we feel about them. But first, let's just set up what happens in the movie. So as the movie opens, we get the frame story, which is something that recurs a lot through the movie. This isn't one of those frame stories that just slaps on a beginning and an end and then sticks the whole story in the middle. We keep on recurring to this scene in what seems to be a sterile room

in some kind of government facility.

A man in a hazmat suit sticks the whole story in the middle. We keep on recurring to this scene in what seems to be a sterile

room in some kind of government facility. A man in a hazmat suit played by Benedict Wong is

interviewing Natalie Portman, who is sitting at a table looking sort of stunned, and he's trying to

...