Annihilation Set Photos Offer Fleeting Peek Into Area X

Principal photography on Alex Garland sci-fi Annihilation has now wrapped – and the first set photos have emerged online to prove it.

First spotted by The Film Stage, the images are pulled from Tessa Thompson’s Instagram feed, offering a fleeting glimpse into the stretch of cursed land known as Area X. Thompson, who boarded the adaptation late last year, forms part of the 12th expedition to venture into the preternatural sanctuary alongside The Hateful Eight‘s Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Natalie Portman as the Biologist.

David Gyasi and Ex Machina‘s Oscar Isaac round out the core cast, with Garland pulling from Jeff VanderMeer’s enigmatic Southern Reach trilogy. From the Crawler, to the Lighthouse, to the seemingly never-ending tunnel (ahem, Tower), Annihilation is bursting at the seams with sci-fi tropes, and we’re excited to see the feature film light up the silver screen at some stage next year.

Lit with the magic of movie making, on Annihilation, with my sunshine @hereisgina ?? . Photo by director Alex Garland

A photo posted by Tessa Thompson (@tessamaethompson) on Jun 28, 2016 at 12:37pm PDT

wrapped on Annihilation. quite possibly a very beautiful film. can’t wait [for you] to see.

A photo posted by Tessa Thompson (@tessamaethompson) on Jul 5, 2016 at 9:57pm PDT

For the uninitiated, Jeff VanderMeer’s mind-bending novel orbits around a “team of four (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor) set out into a place known as Area X. The area is abandoned and cut off from the rest of civilization. They are the 12th expedition. The other expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma.”

Now that Annihilation has wrapped principal photography, we can safely expect the first teaser trailer to land before the year’s end.