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

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

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

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here again with... Genevieve Kosky. Scott Tobias. And Tasha Robinson. On the first half of this episode, we discussed Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, a science fiction journey into a strange, frightening, eerily beautiful, and highly symbolic

landscape. In this episode, we'll consider its modern-day descendant, Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland.

This is Garland's second film as a director, and a follow-up to his 2015 film, X Machina,

which explored the most extreme implications of artificial intelligence. Here, Garland seems

more concerned with the farthest reaches of biology rather than technology, with a side interest in how the human mind

constructs reality and what happens when the world stops making sense and we literally can't

believe our eyes. The setup is enough to make fans of stalker do a spit take. After some kind

of extraterrestrial incident, an area in the American South has become a quarantine space known as the shimmer, so-called for the glowing opaque light that encases it.

Expeditions have been sent into it, but they mostly haven't come back.

Mostly.

As the film opens, a biologist named Lena, played by Natalie Portman, mourns the apparent death of her soldier husband, Kane, played by Oscar Isaac.

But unexpectedly, Kane returns one night, only to soon fall ill, an incident that results in Lena

being drawn into the next expedition into the shimmer, one led by a psychologist played by Jennifer

and Jason Lee, that also includes a paramedic played by Gina Rodriguez, a physicist played by Tessa

Thompson, and a surveyor played by Tuva Novotny.

And though the all-female makeup of the party seemed significant, it never draws explicit comment.

Once inside, they start making their way to the lighthouse that served as ground zero for the alien

incursion, and then they noticed this landscape has changed from the world they knew. First, subtly,

then drastically. And with these changes come new

...