Start with Ex Machina, his first as director and the tightest: three people in a house arguing about whether one of them is a person. Then Annihilation for the dread, and Civil War for the most divisive. His screenplays for 28 Days Later and Sunshine are worth the same attention.
Garland arrived as a novelist, spent a decade writing screenplays for Danny Boyle, and became a director in his mid-forties. That order matters: the films are built on premise and argument rather than on visual instinct, and they tend to resolve into two people in a room disagreeing about something the film will not settle.
His subject is what happens when a system stops being legible: an AI whose motives cannot be read, a zone where biology has gone soft, a country whose politics have collapsed past explanation. He consistently declines to explain, which is either the appeal or the objection depending on the viewer.
Where to start
Ex Machina. Under two hours, three characters, one location, and a premise it executes completely. It also demonstrates the pattern in his work: a system nobody in the film fully understands, and an ending that refuses to tell you who was right. Annihilation is the natural second.
Top picks
Filmography
- Ex Machina (2015)
- Annihilation (2018)
- Men (2022)
- Civil War (2024)
- Warfare (2025) — co-director
Sources and further reading
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FAQs about Alex Garland
Which films did he write but not direct?
28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd, plus the novel The Beach was adapted from. The Boyle collaborations in particular are as characteristic as his own films, and anyone who liked Ex Machina should treat Sunshine and Never Let Me Go as part of the same body of work.
Why is Civil War so divisive?
Because it declines to specify the politics of the war it depicts, which some viewers read as cowardice and others as the point: the film is about war photographers, and the argument is that the mechanics of atrocity look the same regardless of the cause. Neither reading is unreasonable.
Is Annihilation faithful to the book?
No, and Garland has said he worked from a memory of reading it rather than from the text. The premise, the zone and the biologist survive; almost everything else diverges, including the ending. Both versions are worth having, and the film is better encountered before the novel.