Alex Garland: 7 Alex Garland movies you must watch KW: Alex Garland

Alex Garland is a known for his contributions to contemporary sci-fi cinema. Stepping into a world where sentient AIs flirt with rebellion, shimmering force fields glitter with cosmic dread, and dystopian futures feel a little too close to our own reality, is the brilliantly crafted universe of Alex Garland, a filmmaker who doesn’t just ask “What if?” but stares into the abyss of “What next?”

Alex Garland, once known primarily as the novelist behind The Beach, has since evolved into one of modern cinema’s most cerebral sci-fi storytellers. Whether he's writing, directing, or producing, his work pulses with philosophical unease, visual poetry, and a deep distrust of human nature. From Ex Machina’s chilling AI seduction to Annihilation’s hypnotic horror, Alex Garland’s stories are riddled with ambiguity, beauty, and danger. His films don’t just entertain, but challenge the audience's opinions and worldviews.

His cinematic, morally loaded themes crawl under your skin, asking questions like: What is consciousness? What does it mean to be human? Would we even know the end of the world if it had already started? And with his most recent, politically charged thrillers, Alex Garland proves he’s not just a master of the mind, but a walking mirror to the madness of our modern world. So, get ready to dive headfirst into existential crises, chilling dystopian futures, and a few mind-melting plot twists.

Here are 7 Alex Garland movies that are an absolute must-watch.

Annihilation (2018)

Alex Garland doesn’t just dabble in sci-fi; he bends it into an existential spiral of horror and beauty. Annihilation, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, is a haunting, painterly fever dream. Released in 2018, the film starred Natalie Portman as Lena, a biologist and ex-soldier whose husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) mysteriously returns home from a covert mission, but with something very wrong with him. Bleeding eyes, memory loss, and a growing, creeping dread are all a part of this mind-bending journey.

Lena joins an all-female expedition into The Shimmer, a quarantined zone of mutating landscapes and rogue DNA. The Shimmer is revealed to be a beautiful and terrifying anomaly that will slowly swallow everything on Earth if it's left to persist. Science doesn’t obey the rules inside the dome, and it is s place of stunning yet horrific encounters. Deer sprout tree branches, a bear screams with a human woman’s voice, and people begin to unravel, mentally and physically.

The stellar cast, featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny, all deliver raw, human performances against an inhuman backdrop. Garland’s genius lies in how he weaves terror with tenderness. This isn’t just a horror story about aliens; instead, it stands as a metaphor for a meditation on self-destruction. Every character enters The Shimmer carrying emotional scars, with Alex Garland raising an interesting question: What if we’re drawn to annihilation because it mirrors something inside us?

28 Days Later (2002)

Before The Walking Dead or World War Z, before fast zombies became the new cultural terror, there was 28 Days Later. Written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, this 2002 film redefined the zombie genre and had horror enthusiasts talking everywhere. Cillian Murphy, in his breakout role as Jim, wakes up alone in an empty hospital, stumbling through a deserted London. Streets are empty, Big Ben echoes in silence, and red letters scream RAGE across abandoned newspaper headlines. Alex Garland creates a chilling image of a man in a hospital gown wandering a post-apocalyptic city, having no idea what happened.

Jim soon learns that a virus, released accidentally by a group of animal rights activists, has turned the populace into rabid, sprinting killers. These aren’t your grandpa’s zombies, that audiences were familiar with back in those days. They were vicious and extremely fast, like a prequel to 'The Infected' from The Last of Us. Naomie Harris (as Selena), Brendan Gleeson, and Megan Burns round out a gritty, morally ambiguous ensemble, with Alex Garland’s script using these characters to dive into the heart of what humanity looks like under extreme collapse. As the infected rage outside, survivors find quickly enough that the true monster isn't the one out there. The brutality in the face of extreme survival and total anarchy renders the base nature of the human desire to dominate and reign chaos bare.

The third act, involving a so-called “safe haven” run by soldiers, is pure Garland being hauntingly bleak, loaded with moral decay, and the symbolic nature of it hit unnervingly close to home. 28 Days Later wasn’t just a hit. It became canon, ushering in a new era of horror realism and elevating Alex Garland to screenwriting royalty.

Ex Machina (2014)

Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, is sleek, seductive, and sinister. Released in 2014, this chamber thriller plays out like a tech-age Shakespearean drama, like a war of minds and morals tucked inside glass walls and silicon hearts. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a young programmer who wins a mysterious contest to spend a week with tech mogul Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), a drunken genius living in a high-security mountain fortress. But there’s a twist. Nathan has built an AI named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and Caleb is there to perform the Turing Test to determine if Ava is truly conscious. Spoiler alert: she is.

Vikander’s performance is transfixing. With subtle facial gestures and precise movements, she makes Ava unnervingly human. Alex Garland makes the film simmer with dread and philosophical tension. Nathan, on the surface, might appear to be a tech bro caricature, but Alex Garland manages to show his terrifying intellect and arrogance.

However, the narrative develops cracks when, by the time the climax comes, Ex Machina reveals itself not just as a cautionary tale about AI, but a fable about control, trust, and the horrifying simplicity of manipulation. Alex Garland's mastery of the film's ambience and tone is commendable however, the plot does seem to fall flat by its culmination. Even so, the minimalist yet monumental grandeur earned Alex Garland an Oscar for Best Visual Effects and a place among the smartest sci-fi auteurs of our time.

Sunshine (2007)

Science fiction rarely shines so brightly, or so tragically, as portrayed in Sunshine. Alex Garland reunites with 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle for this visually stunning, emotionally gutting cosmic thriller. The premise is audacious, with the sun dying, the Earth is on the brink of a cold extinction. Humanity’s last hope is the Icarus II, an aptly named spaceship carrying a nuclear payload to reignite the dying star. But, as always with Garland, this is less about the mission and more about what it does to the people involved.

The crew is a genre-lover’s dream team, with Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, and Cliff Curtis giving their spectacular performances. Playing the scientists and astronauts on the Icarus mission, they are competent, serious, and hopelessly inching toward madness as their minds start to unravel. A distress signal from the lost Icarus I triggers a detour, and things begin to spiral. Equipment malfunctions. Tensions rise. And something, or rather someone, seems to be lurking in the shadows of the lost ship. Pinbacker, played by Mark Strong, emerges as one of Alex Garland’s most unsettling characters, as a sunburned fanatic who believes humanity must die with the sun.

The film’s aesthetic is part Kubrick, part Nolan, but wholly Garland. Sunlight becomes a character of almost godly significance, being both dangerous and awe-inspiring. The closer they get to the sun, the more everything starts to distort: time, space, reason. Sunshine is a visually arresting meditation on sacrifice, obsession, and the psychological toll of playing God. It didn’t get the mainstream love it deserved upon release, but over time, it's earned cult status, and rightly so.

Warfare (2025)

Alex Garland's latest film, Warfare (2025), is a searing psychological descent into the mind of modern conflict, and an instant must-watch. If Civil War was his thesis on the brutality of battle, Warfare is the rage-filled postscript on what happens when that horror is amplified by battlefield pragmatism. The film follows Ray Mendoza, played with harrowing intensity by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, based on the real-life Mendoza's experiences during the Iraq War as a U.S. Navy SEAL.

The opening shot sets the tone: a silent sky, broken by a sudden, surgical airstrike. A drone screams overhead. A child’s laughter stops mid-breath. Welcome to Alex Garland’s new war zone, where the boundaries between justice and vengeance, truth and propaganda, are rewritten every second by mechanisms of politics.

However, even though the direction and aesthetics of the film are impressive, showcasing the tragedies of the young lives lost to battle, falls short in the social implications of such a structured, yet some would say biased, narrative.

Dredd (2012)

Technically, Pete Travis is credited as the director of Dredd (2012), but anyone who’s peered behind the scenes knows the real architect of this cult classic was Alex Garland. Karl Urban stars as the iconic Judge Dredd, pairing with Thirby to make one of the most iconic duos to be seen on-screen, setting Alex Garland's vision into motion.

Set in a hellish future where Mega-City One stretches across the scorched remains of America, the film introduces us to the Judges, who are the law enforcement officers serving as judge, jury, and executioner. No courtrooms. No appeals. Just one man’s judgment and a very large gun. Urban’s Dredd is a monolith of justice, being emotionless, brutal, and endlessly quotable. However, Alex Garland’s script doesn’t glorify violence; it deconstructs it. Olivia Thirlby enters as Judge Anderson, a rookie with psychic abilities who sees more than just the crime. It’s through her empathetic lens that Alex Garland balances Dredd’s cold logic.

Their mission is to take down Ma-Ma, a drug lord played with disturbing calm by Lena Headey, who rules a 200-story tower like a queen of nightmares. Ma-Ma’s weapon of choice is “Slo-Mo,” a narcotic that makes time feel like it’s moving at 1% speed, giving Alex Garland an excuse to unleash some of the most hypnotic, violent, and strangely beautiful slow-motion sequences in cinema.

Though Dredd didn’t ignite the box office at the time, it has since become a beloved cult classic, and for good reason. Alex Garland’s touch is all over the pacing, the world-building, and the way violence is never mindless, but always ideological. The Judges aren’t heroes; they’re a warning against the cold reality of when power remains unchecked.

Civil War (2024)

Civil War is a shattering, slow-burning political thriller wrapped in the aesthetic of a war documentary, designed to feel terrifyingly plausible. In this not-so-distant future, the United States has cracked under the pressure of ideological extremism. Texas and California have formed the "Western Forces", an unlikely alliance, and are marching towards Washington. But rather than focusing on soldiers or politicians, Alex Garland turns the camera (literally) on the storytellers: the journalists.

Kirsten Dunst delivers a career-redefining performance as Lee, a hardened photojournalist who's seen too much, felt too little, and yet remains hauntingly human. Alongside Wagner Moura's adrenaline-addicted Joel and Cailee Spaeny’s wide-eyed rookie Jessie, the trio embarks on a road trip through an America that’s unrecognizable and yet eerily familiar. Civil War, at its core, is ultimately about the ethics of watching violence, recording it, and selling it, instead of exploring the actual consequences behind it.

Alex Garland’s direction here is both clinically stoic and emotionally ambiguous. The climactic raid on the White House feels less like an action sequence and more like a funeral procession for democracy. It's Apocalypse Now for the age of polarization, and Alex Garland isn't interested in providing answers.

Alex Garland is a visionary filmmaker whose thought-provoking, visually striking films blend sci-fi, horror, and political commentary to explore human nature, consciousness, and the fragility of society.