Alex Garland, the filmmaker who keeps writing his own ending

Alex Garland

Photo: Jay Dixit / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 26, 1970 London, England
Occupation	Filmmaker
Awards	Academy Award (nomination) · British Independent Film Award: Best British Independent Film · British Independent Film Award: Best Director · British Independent Film Award: Best Screenplay · 2 BAFTA (nomination)

There is a version of this story that says Alex Garland does not want to be a director. He has said so himself, at regular intervals, with apparent conviction. After Men he announced he was stepping back from the camera. After Civil War the same signals came. Right now he is in production on Elden Ring for A24, shooting in IMAX at a scale — budget reported above $100 million, a cast that includes Ben Whishaw, Kit Connor, and Jonathan Pryce — that makes everything that came before look like a warm-up. The career and the self-image appear not to have spoken in years.

He grew up in London, the son of Nicholas Garland, a political cartoonist whose work ran for decades in British national newspapers, and Caroline Garland, a psychoanalyst. His maternal grandfather was Peter Medawar, the biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1960. The gene for precision — the sense that ambiguity, if left untended, will do real damage — runs visibly through everything Garland eventually made. He read History of Art at the University of Manchester, not film. He graduated into the mid-1990s with no particular route into cinema visible.

The route he found was fiction. The Beach, published in 1996 when Garland was twenty-five, described a generation of travelers hunting for something unspoiled that the act of finding immediately destroys. The novel sold widely and was labeled a generational document — a label Garland largely resisted, correctly recognizing that the book was also about the violence of wishful thinking. When Danny Boyle adapted it into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Garland was already writing the screenplay for the next collaboration.

28 Days Later, written for Boyle and released in 2002, did something that then seemed unlikely: it made the zombie film feel modern, urgent, philosophically serious. The rage virus was less a genre device than an argument about social fragility. Sunshine followed in 2007 — a mission to reignite a dying sun that functions, essentially, as a meditation on the cost of certainty. Never Let Me Go, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel for director Mark Romanek, preserved the source’s emotional indirection in ways that amounted to a minor technical miracle. In this phase Garland was consistently described as a screenwriter, which was accurate but slightly incomplete. The films he wrote were shaped with the structural confidence of someone already functioning as a co-director of ideas.

Ex Machina, which Garland wrote and directed himself in 2014, confirmed the suspicion. Set almost entirely inside a single modernist compound, the film examined artificial intelligence through a chamber drama so controlled that the camera choices themselves became arguments. Alicia Vikander‘s performance as Ava — and Oscar Isaac’s as the billionaire who built her — lodged in the conversation about AI and personhood in ways that required no updating when that conversation accelerated a decade later. The British Independent Film Awards gave Ex Machina its top three prizes. The Academy nominated Garland for Best Original Screenplay. He was, by this point, a director — whatever he chose to call himself.

Annihilation (2018), adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, pushed the methodology further. A team of scientists enters an expanding environmental anomaly and begins to dissolve — physically, psychologically, ontologically. Paramount, uncertain about what to do with a film that resists summary, sold its international streaming rights to Netflix before theatrical release. Garland went on record about his frustration. The film was widely recognized as a significant work; its US theatrical run was abbreviated enough that some audiences encountered it only through a screen at home. Men (2022) was more overtly allegorical and significantly more divisive — earning some of the harshest reviews of his career alongside fervent defenses from critics who read its mythology as precisely what the detractors had failed to decode.

The charge that Garland’s more hermetic films are deliberately obscure — that they use symbolic overload as a shield against critical purchase — is not entirely unfair. Men in particular seems at times more invested in its visual system than in earning the weight it wants to carry. That said, the film’s reception illustrated something that runs through all of Garland’s work since Ex Machina: he makes films that require the viewer to do work, and reviewers who decline to do that work often mistake the resistance for emptiness.

Civil War (2024) reframed the debate about what kind of filmmaker Garland is. Shot for $50 million and starring Kirsten Dunst as a war photographer navigating a second American civil war, it grossed $127 million worldwide and premiered at SXSW to broad recognition that Garland had made his most accessible film without simplifying his concerns. The film’s studied neutrality about the nature of the conflict — declining to specify causes or identify the president’s faction — drew criticism from commentators who wanted it to take a position. It had already taken one. Refusing to editorialize about a war is itself an editorial choice, and the film’s formal discipline made that argument quietly but continuously.

What he is doing now is directing Elden Ring for A24 — an adaptation of the video game developed by FromSoftware with narrative contributions from George R.R. Martin. The film will be A24’s first IMAX production, with a cast including Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw, Cailee Spaeny, Tom Burke, Havana Rose Liu, Sonoya Mizuno, Jonathan Pryce, and Nick Offerman. Release is set for March 3, 2028. Alongside it, Garland is developing Stages, a ballet drama also for A24.

Garland has spoken, in various interviews, about screenwriting as the version of filmmaking he actually wants — the work done at distance, before the camera arrives, when decisions are still reversible. The problem is that his directing career shows no sign of reflecting that preference. Elden Ring will test whether the formal precision that has defined his work at contained scale translates into a production built for the largest commercial format in cinema. Whether it does or doesn’t, the director who keeps trying to stop will still be at work when the answer comes.