Mushrooms вЂ“ those are the ones you really canвЂ™t trust. Pinned to the wall is a corpse of a previous expedition member, their body turned inside out and extended by some sort of monstrous fungal growth.

One of the most powerful images from the film is found in the basin of an emptied concrete swimming pool.

In Alex GarlandвЂ™s Annihilation (an adaptation of the first novel in Jeff VandermeerвЂ™s Southern Reach trilogy), four women enter a strange, shimmery forest and come face to face with various weird plants. In film, killer greenery has been going through a bit of a renaissance. From the carnivorous Venus flytrap to the bleeding tooth fungus, from plants that smell like rotting corpses to one's that trap prey and dissolve them with digestive fluids, itвЂ™s an unknown, often dangerous world, and one that overlaps closely with our own. The vegetal realm is entirely inaccessible to us, its behaviour strange and habitats dark. We ourselves arenвЂ™t vegetable, and differences so often motivate our deepest fears. I see my suspicion of all things green and floral as a natural, even instinctual thing. Ever since I witnessed a little red-and-blue plumber-man tumble into the gnashing jaws of a Piranha Plant, I knew vegetables werenвЂ™t to be trusted.

The underground 2 morrowind