Alex Garland’s 2018 sci-fi film Annihilation is a loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel of the same name. However, one would be forgiven for assuming that its primary inspiration wasn’t a novel, but an older sci-fi film from the Soviet Union: Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece Stalker. Although VanderMeer has strongly denied that his original novel was inspired by either Stalker or its own literary source material — the novel Roadside Picnic, whose two brother authors wrote Stalker’s screenplay — Annihilation cinematographer Rob Hardy has explicitly cited Stalkeras an influence on the film adaptation.