Imagine you had the chance to choose any director to bring Elden Ring to the big screen—who would be your top choice?

You might lean toward fantasy veterans like Peter Jackson or Guillermo del Toro, or perhaps select Miguel Sapochnik, the mastermind behind Game of Thrones’ most iconic battles such as Hardhome and the Battle of the Bastards. For a more unconventional take, you could even consider visionaries like Robert Eggers (Nosferatu), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), or Bong Joon Ho (Mickey 17)—filmmakers who, much like Elden Ring’s creators at FromSoftware, delight in the surreal, mysterious, and unsettling.

Odds are, Alex Garland wouldn’t have been your first pick. The British writer-director is best known for his grounded, slow-burn sci-fi films like Ex Machina and Annihilation, as well as the straightforwardly titled war movies Civil War and Warfare—none of which bear much resemblance to FromSoftware’s signature style. Yet A24, the studio behind the adaptation, has chosen Garland to translate Hidetaka Miyazaki’s epic into cinema. Given that Garland, who is also set to pen the screenplay, isn’t one to coast on a hefty paycheck, it makes you wonder just how he plans to pull it off.

At first glance, Garland and Elden Ring seem like an unusual pairing. Despite his deep roots in science fiction, Garland hasn’t tackled high fantasy before—a genre that’s challenging on its own, and even more so when adapting a video game. Furthermore, his directorial approach doesn’t obviously align with FromSoftware’s. The storytelling in Ex Machina and Annihilation relies heavily on plot, dialogue, and character development, whereas Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring weave their narratives indirectly through item descriptions and world design. (Civil War, set in a near-future America, was widely panned for its lack of detailed history.)

But never having made a fantasy film doesn’t mean Garland can’t succeed. He has repeatedly reinvented himself and ventured into new territory—Civil War and Warfare are stark departures from Ex Machina and Annihilation, which themselves diverged from his earlier screenwriting work—so who’s to say he won’t do it again?

In fact, directing an Elden Ring movie wouldn’t be entirely unfamiliar ground for Garland. Many people—even some of his fans—don’t realize that he’s an avid gamer. His time with the Resident Evil series reportedly shaped his script for the 2002 horror film 28 Days Later, and the 2000 movie The Beach, based on his novel, includes a scene that Polygon’s Matt Patches called “the closest we’ll ever get” to a Banjo-Kazooie film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Warfare stirs up feelings surprisingly close to those in Elden Ring: being outnumbered, outgunned, and overwhelmed, fearing for your life (or your runes). “

While many directors appear to feign interest in the source material to appease its fan base (I still doubt M. Night Shyamalan ever watched a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender), Garland’s enthusiasm for The Last of Us, BioShock, and—most tellingly—Dark Souls feels genuine. He seems to grasp what sets these games apart. In a 2020 Gamespot interview, Garland remarked, “The Dark Souls games have this embedded poetry. You might stumble upon a cryptic conversation with a broken soul outside a doorway, and it feels like stepping into an existential dream.”

If he embraces that “existential dream” quality, Garland could model his Elden Ring after Annihilation, celebrated for its mind-bending visuals. That’s one valid approach, but it’s not the only one. A less obvious yet potentially more compelling strategy would be to structure the film like Warfare, Garland’s tense thriller about Navy SEALs in Iraq. I suggest this not because the film is fantastical—it’s actually billed as one of the most authentic war movies ever—but because watching it elicits the same visceral sensations you get while playing Elden Ring: being overwhelmed, overpowered, and terrified for your survival (or your precious runes).

Replace the war-ravaged streets of Ramadi with the desolate landscapes of Limgrave, the winding alleys of Leyndell, or the blighted wilds of Caelid, and what remains is a movie that adapts not the game’s sprawling lore—the treacherous tales of Marika, Godrick, Radagon, and the Demigods—but the intimate, second-by-second struggle of the player’s Tarnished adventurer navigating the Lands Between, so focused on reaching the next Site of Grace alive that the grander goal of becoming Elden Lord fades into obscurity.

Rumors suggest Garland is considering casting one of Warfare’s stars—Kit Connor—in the lead role, which hints that his Elden Ring might embrace a similarly intense, nerve-wracking atmosphere, revisiting the themes of terror, hopelessness, and chaotic conflict that Connor has already shown he can portray. Using Warfare as inspiration for Elden Ring would not only play to Garland’s strengths as a director who uses visceral, meticulously staged action to explore the human psyche, but also mirror the strategy behind the—argue with me—only truly successful video game adaptation so far: the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us, whose excellence stems largely from the creators’ deep understanding of what made the original game so compelling.

Elden Ring, like other FromSoftware titles, isn’t a power fantasy where superhuman heroes triumph over colossal beasts through slick cinematics and dramatic quick-time events. It’s an anti-power fantasy that casts players as anonymous warriors who grow familiar with death and stubbornly challenge the fog gate until they break through. To make his adaptation as impactful as his earlier work, Garland should strive to capture that poignant, hard-won emotion. And through his ambitious work on Warfare, we get a preview of what might be in store when Elden Ring finally hits theaters.