アレックス・ガーランドのスリリングな存在主義ジャンル映画のガイド

Alex Garland’s films are not content with the comfortable. Discomfort courses through his work: the ever-present fear of human barbarity, doubt in your own identity, a burst of violence that will easily and without hesitation consume you. Beginning his career as a novelist, and later becoming a screenwriter and video game writer, the director’s interest in science-fiction and horror has generated a refined body of work that injects a frenetic anxiety and existential numbness into genre conventions. What if a machine’s communication was filtered exclusively through a will to escape? What kind of pain would make us secretly yearn for our cells to be completely overridden by a parasitic alien? What if Western partisanship collapsed into the type of bloody, chaotic conflict that it reserves for foreign campaigns?

With Warfare, Alex Garland defers back to being a creative collaborator, co-writing and directing a snapshot of the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Ramadi alongside Ray Mendoza, who he met as a military consultant on Civil War and whose memories the visceral, faithful dramatisation are based on. In denying us the conventions of the war film, Warfare strips the murky perspectives Hollywood has given of the Iraq invasion and occupation of its traditional emotional power. By playing a “supporting character” to Mendoza’s directorial debut, Garland imbues Warfare with gnawing, disorienting peril that undermines the expected pleasure of a film about combat, stitching his precise formal instincts with Mendoza’s dedication to play every minute as it felt.

As Warfare opens in cinemas, we recommend six uncomfortable, existential genre works by Alex Garland. 

In scratchy, consumer-grade digital images, a bedraggled Cillian Murphy treads London’s abandoned streets: new millennium horror has hit our shores, and the deathly quiet is as frightening as the hordes of bleeding, baying monsters. Garland took advantage of a lull in zombie movies, correctly assessing that the video game Resident Evil was the first chapter in a new era for the genre, and penned an apocalyptic story for Danny Boyle that seriously questioned what conditions of survival would be acceptable as the world fell apart. Garland’s knack for following a concept to its most destructive and challenging endpoint translates into breathless, teeth-gnashing performances from Murphy and Naomie Harris, and the way movement and textures are translated into Boyle’s off-putting visuals reveal the script’s ugliness better than attractive, celluloid cinematography ever could.

Many British men of a certain age have affection for Judge Dredd, the satirical lawman from a dystopian future published by anti-establishment comic label 2000 AD. Garland produced and wrote (and depending on who you ask, directed) this pulpy romp set in Mega-City One, where Dredd (Karl Urban) and a rookie Judge (Olivia Thirlby) are trapped in tower block by a brutal drug lord (Lena Headey) pushing a narcotic that makes you experience time at 1% speed – which allows shootouts to be shot on 4,000 frames per second 3D cameras. Dredd is Garland’s most commercial project, even if it disappointed at the box office – the genre spectacle is so garish that it taps into the same indulgent, ironic pleasure of 2000 AD’s fascist parodies. A must-watch for anyone who finds Garland’s films too cold.

Few directorial debuts have made such a splash as this: an early winner for zeitgeisty film studio A24, this chamber piece about a demented tech guru, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), challenging his meek employee, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to prove the humanity of his android Ava (Alicia Vikander) holds up better as a film about data rather than AI – do not get into a high stakes chess match with opponents who know your entire digital footprint. At any point during the Turing Test interviews that Caleb holds with Ava (on Nathan’s instruction and under his observation at a week long retreat at his remote hideout), each of the three characters is surveilling the others, trying to find the exact affectations and confident tone to deceive someone of their intentions: humanity reduced to predictive programming.

In adapting Jeff VanderMeer’s masterpiece of eerie ecology, Garland wrote a script based on his memory of the novel, trying to capture the same balance-shifting derangement of journeying deeper into the unknown, while drawing closer to discovering the self. Five women (led by Natalie Portman) venture into a mysterious, irradiated zone behind an impossible “shimmer” border, all with fraught, traumatic histories and a desire to, maybe without realising how, become whole. Garland’s film doesn’t hold a candle to VanderMeer’s transportive text, but the director’s scientific fascinations are clearest here – a mix of biology and psychiatry mixed in a chemical compound that approaches Lovecraftian levels of “I can’t comprehend this, but it still soothes me.” With an infectious Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow score, Garland explored our desire to come undone.

A quiet contender for Garland’s most sophisticated and affecting work, this tech thriller miniseries premiered at the start of March 2020 and was quickly swallowed by the pandemic. Set in present-day San Francisco, the series follows an encryption programmer (Sonoya Mizuno) whose boyfriend dies under mysterious circumstances at their advanced tech company, Amaya. As Garland takes us behind the curtain of Amaya’s secret project, led by the grief-stricken CEO (Nick Offerman), Devs probes the issue of predestination – raising questions of fatalism and futility as our protagonist finds her agency restricted and safety jeopardised by the conspiracy plot that killed her partner. Drawn out over eight episodes, the cool, dispassionate rhythms of Garland’s storytelling have room to breathe, making Devs a curious and compelling look at tech playing God. 

Garland’s most divisive project was also his most successful: a reflection of US hostility and apathy that, for all its faults, did capture a certain bleak doomerism about how things were going in 2024. During America’s Second Civil War at some point in the near future, a band of roving journalists and photographers journey to the nation’s capital to record what will certainly be the President’s last stand against invading forces. Lee (Kirsten Dunst) becomes the cynical photographic mentor to the over-eager Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – instead of seeing an array of organised battles, they find pockets of inhumane depravity performed without urgency or fear of reproach. All the while, we get the feeling that our journalists should be reacting more strongly, that they should be fighting the numbness of their preferred definition of objectivity – making this film a startling precursor to Warfare.

Read our interview with Alex Garland on Civil War here. 

Warfare is out in UK cinemas now. 

Alex Garland’s films are not content with the comfortable. Discomfort courses through his work: the ever-present fear of human barbarity, doubt in your own identity, a burst of violence that will easily and without hesitation consume you. Beginning his career as a novelist, and later becoming a screenwriter and video game writer, the director’s interest in science-fiction and horror has generated a refined body of work that injects a frenetic anxiety and existential numbness into genre conventions. What if a machine’s communication was filtered exclusively through a will to escape? What kind of pain would make us secretly yearn for our cells to be completely overridden by a parasitic alien? What if Western partisanship collapsed into the type of bloody, chaotic conflict that it reserves for foreign campaigns?

With Warfare, Alex Garland defers back to being a creative collaborator, co-writing and directing a snapshot of the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Ramadi alongside Ray Mendoza, who he met as a military consultant on Civil War and whose memories the visceral, faithful dramatisation are based on. In denying us the conventions of the war film, Warfare strips the murky perspectives Hollywood has given of the Iraq invasion and occupation of its traditional emotional power. By playing a “supporting character” to Mendoza’s directorial debut, Garland imbues Warfare with gnawing, disorienting peril that undermines the expected pleasure of a film about combat, stitching his precise formal instincts with Mendoza’s dedication to play every minute as it felt.

As Warfare opens in cinemas, we recommend six uncomfortable, existential genre works by Alex Garland. 

In scratchy, consumer-grade digital images, a bedraggled Cillian Murphy treads London’s abandoned streets: new millennium horror has hit our shores, and the deathly quiet is as frightening as the hordes of bleeding, baying monsters. Garland took advantage of a lull in zombie movies, correctly assessing that the video game Resident Evil was the first chapter in a new era for the genre, and penned an apocalyptic story for Danny Boyle that seriously questioned what conditions of survival would be acceptable as the world fell apart. Garland’s knack for following a concept to its most destructive and challenging endpoint translates into breathless, teeth-gnashing performances from Murphy and Naomie Harris, and the way movement and textures are translated into Boyle’s off-putting visuals reveal the script’s ugliness better than attractive, celluloid cinematography ever could.

Many British men of a certain age have affection for Judge Dredd, the satirical lawman from a dystopian future published by anti-establishment comic label 2000 AD. Garland produced and wrote (and depending on who you ask, directed) this pulpy romp set in Mega-City One, where Dredd (Karl Urban) and a rookie Judge (Olivia Thirlby) are trapped in tower block by a brutal drug lord (Lena Headey) pushing a narcotic that makes you experience time at 1% speed – which allows shootouts to be shot on 4,000 frames per second 3D cameras. Dredd is Garland’s most commercial project, even if it disappointed at the box office – the genre spectacle is so garish that it taps into the same indulgent, ironic pleasure of 2000 AD’s fascist parodies. A must-watch for anyone who finds Garland’s films too cold.

Few directorial debuts have made such a splash as this: an early winner for zeitgeisty film studio A24, this chamber piece about a demented tech guru, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), challenging his meek employee, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to prove the humanity of his android Ava (Alicia Vikander) holds up better as a film about data rather than AI – do not get into a high stakes chess match with opponents who know your entire digital footprint. At any point during the Turing Test interviews that Caleb holds with Ava (on Nathan’s instruction and under his observation at a week long retreat at his remote hideout), each of the three characters is surveilling the others, trying to find the exact affectations and confident tone to deceive someone of their intentions: humanity reduced to predictive programming.

In adapting Jeff VanderMeer’s masterpiece of eerie ecology, Garland wrote a script based on his memory of the novel, trying to capture the same balance-shifting derangement of journeying deeper into the unknown, while drawing closer to discovering the self. Five women (led by Natalie Portman) venture into a mysterious, irradiated zone behind an impossible “shimmer” border, all with fraught, traumatic histories and a desire to, maybe without realising how, become whole. Garland’s film doesn’t hold a candle to VanderMeer’s transportive text, but the director’s scientific fascinations are clearest here – a mix of biology and psychiatry mixed in a chemical compound that approaches Lovecraftian levels of “I can’t comprehend this, but it still soothes me.” With an infectious Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow score, Garland explored our desire to come undone.

A quiet contender for Garland’s most sophisticated and affecting work, this tech thriller miniseries premiered at the start of March 2020 and was quickly swallowed by the pandemic. Set in present-day San Francisco, the series follows an encryption programmer (Sonoya Mizuno) whose boyfriend dies under mysterious circumstances at their advanced tech company, Amaya. As Garland takes us behind the curtain of Amaya’s secret project, led by the grief-stricken CEO (Nick Offerman), Devs probes the issue of predestination – raising questions of fatalism and futility as our protagonist finds her agency restricted and safety jeopardised by the conspiracy plot that killed her partner. Drawn out over eight episodes, the cool, dispassionate rhythms of Garland’s storytelling have room to breathe, making Devs a curious and compelling look at tech playing God. 

Garland’s most divisive project was also his most successful: a reflection of US hostility and apathy that, for all its faults, did capture a certain bleak doomerism about how things were going in 2024. During America’s Second Civil War at some point in the near future, a band of roving journalists and photographers journey to the nation’s capital to record what will certainly be the President’s last stand against invading forces. Lee (Kirsten Dunst) becomes the cynical photographic mentor to the over-eager Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – instead of seeing an array of organised battles, they find pockets of inhumane depravity performed without urgency or fear of reproach. All the while, we get the feeling that our journalists should be reacting more strongly, that they should be fighting the numbness of their preferred definition of objectivity – making this film a startling precursor to Warfare.

Read our interview with Alex Garland on Civil War here. 

Warfare is out in UK cinemas now.