It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast about it to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here with Genevieve Koski, Scott Tobias, and Tasha Robinson. Here on the next picture show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context. So every other week, we get together to talk over a classic film and consider how it relates to a current movie.

This week, we're off to a pair of lands transformed by idigmatic forces from outer space.

Tasha, after you slowly emerge from an underground tunnel filled with terrifying noises, could you tell us about this week's pairing?

Sure, I could, but alternately, I could spend a long time building up to revealing this week's pairing and then ultimately choose to walk away from it. The problem is I don't think that would do a lot for our listeners. So sometimes on this podcast, we make pairings based somewhat loosely on two films' themes or moods or general subject matter. At other times, we look at a new film and find an older one without which it's impossible to imagine the new one existing. Lately, we've had good luck at finding direct points of comparison, with our episodes pairing a phantom thread with Rebecca, and the shape of water with the creature from the Black Lagoon. This week finds us looking at two similarly closely related films. Alex Garland's Annihilation is a loose adaptation of Jeff

van der Meerer's 2014 novel, the first in a trilogy. But the film's premise, themes,

and style give it just as strong a connection to stalker, Andrew Tartofsky's philosophical

science fiction film released in Russia in 1979 before rolling out to the rest of the world in the

early 1980s.

Both feature characters braving danger as they head into territory claimed by an alien force.

Both find those characters exploring landscapes that have at least one foot in the world of dreams and metaphor,

and both ultimately reveal that their journeys have become quests for nothing less than meaning itself.

But they also seem at times like mirror versions of one another.

Tarkovsky's deliberate pace and

opakness actively work against the traditional expectations of a narrative movie, but Stalker

still contains enough recognizable genre elements to be unmistakably a science fiction film,

and one with ties to other thoughtful science fiction films in the 1970s. If you squint,

Garland's movie looks like a sci-fi blockbuster. It's got gun-packing

movie stars headed into a strange land filled with mysteries and dangerous beasts. But folded

into it is a story that's extremely stalker-like in its concerns, especially when the journey

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