It came out of the sky

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2018)

Lena, a biologist, is taken to a secret government facility near a zone that was quarantined off after an extraterrestrial object landed in it. Looking for answers regarding the abrupt reappearance of her military husband who was supposed to have been killed in that very area, she joins a team of other women to conduct an expedition into the strange place, but things take a turn that defies understanding very quickly...
Annihilation, adapting the first in a series of novels into a self-contained story, is a solid horror/sci-fi film which was unfortunately denied cinematic release outside the US. It has a cast of sympathetic characters who all get a fair amount of development and portrays a very strange world that contains equal amounts of beauty and grotesquerie. As our characters delve deeper into this alien zone, the more mundane mysteries they chase get clearer while what concerns the zone itself becomes stranger and stranger, culminating in a final fifteen or so minutes that can be described as a surreal nightmare. The film rewards attentive viewing as it contains certain small elements that foreshadow later events or clarify the currently ongoing ones.
In the beginning of the film, a scientist in a hazmat suit questions Lena about something that is apparently in the Zone. The man's questions are very rational and analytical, but they all meet the same answer: "I don't know". This sense of the unknown and of incomprehensibility is handled exceptionally well in Annihilation, making it a rare and quite good example of cosmic horror in film.