Female scientists fight for survival in a mysterious new dimension in Alex Garland’s bold, straight-to-Netflix genre-shifterAlex Garland’s sci-fi thriller, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, is an exciting, imperfect genre success.
It follows four scientists and a paramedic – all female – who enter the Shimmer, a quarantined zone from which no living creature has emerged alive.
With “no compass, no comms and no coordinates” to guide them, as paramedic Anya (Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez) neatly puts it, “either something kills them, or they go crazy and kill each other”.Told through an efficient series of flashbacks, recounted by Natalie Portman’s serious, clever cell biologist Lena, we gradually learn the creepy nature of the Shimmer, itself a wobbling wall of light that looks like the prismatic rainbow swirls that might collect on top of a sudsy bowl of water, and the mutating horrors it contains.
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