Genre: Sci-Fi, Eco-Horror, Body Horror
The 2010's saw a boom of excellent, indie science fiction movies like Under the Skin, Arrival, and Looper. Writer and later director Alex Garland was very busy during this period on classic projects like Dredd, and Ex Machina. Early in his career, Garland was known as a novelist for books like The Beach, but he soon transitioned to filmmaking, writing the screenplay for the first two 28...Later movies and Sunshine before transitioning again into directing. The excellent sci-fi movie Ex Machina was his directorial debut.
Annihilation is his second film and is adapted from the novel of the same name, the first of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. I have tried to read the novel version but found it to be a little impenetrable. Both stories detail expeditions to explore a mysterious alienized region of the southern United States, the site of a meteor impact. The movie is a fairly loose adaptation of the book which takes the core concepts and basic characters and runs in its own direction with them, with some additional inspiration from Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space," the old Soviet sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic, and J.R. Ballard's The Crystal World. The resulting film is often genuinely disturbing and features a couple of really outstanding and memorable creatures. It is a movie that was not widely seen upon its initial release but a movie which has gained in reputation over the years. I genuinely love this movie and think it is criminally underrated. I think it is going to be considered a classic in twenty years. This movie makes me wonder what someone like Garland would do with a franchise like Alien.
Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a molecular biologist and cancer researcher who is mourning her husband who at the start of the movie has been MIA on a mysterious military mission. Portman-as always-is great playing a very internalized character with a lot going on under the surface. Indeed, the emotional coolness of Annihilation can be off-putting for some people, contributing to the overall Kubrickian vibe of the movie.
Her apparently-deceased husband, Kane-played by another Star Wars alum, Oscar Isaac, shows up at their house but there is something very wrong with him. He can't answer basic questions about what has happened to him or where he has been. When he begins to become seriously ill, Lena attempts to take him to the hospital but their ambulance is intercepted by government agents, and they are taken to a mysterious facility which is located outside an expanding phenomenon that has developed around a meteor crash. The boundary of this area is marked with a colorful, refracting curtain of light known as "the Shimmer."
Lena's husband is apparently the only survivor of the last mission to investigate the Shimmer and is now dying from exposure to whatever is inside. The director of the facility, Dr. Ventress, asks her to join the next expedition, an all-female group. Seeking answers and possibly a cure for her ailing husband, Lena joins them.
Things in the Shimmer go immediately awry as the group begins losing time and encountering bizarre mutations such as an albino alligator with a maw full of Biollante-esque teeth, mutated flowers, and deer/plant hybrids. The Shimmer is acting as a genetic accelerant, changing animals into strange new creatures and remixing their genes.
In their explorations they also find some evidence of the dark fate of the previous team and the movie juxtaposes imagery that is grisly but also fantastic and beautiful. In an abandoned swimming pool, the squad finds the corpse of a soldier that has suffered a colorful fungal explosion like something out of The Last of Us.
The surreal and haunting atmosphere of the Shimmer begins to act on the team which erupts in paranoia. This is not unlike the claustrophobia and anxiety in John Carpenter's The Thing. Much as in Carpenter's movie, members of the team are restrained and tied to chairs to assess their allegiance.
In an abandoned home (an identical one to Lena’s) the team encounters arguably the film’s most disturbing creature. On the surface the design is not that interesting. It is essentially a large bear with patches of skin missing, particularly on its face, which also subtly has elements of a human skull fused into it. The design of the mutant bear monster is unique among the creatures that live in the Shimmer as it emphasizes decay. Most of the other living animals that we encounter feature seemingly wild uncontrollable growth.
A mutant bear is not unprecedented in horror, perhaps most famously in 1979's Prophecy (the creature in that movie went on to inspire South Park's Manbearpig) but in this case there are audio and behavioral elements that push this monster over the top. This creature had already murdered one member of the team and Lena had previously discovered the body with its throat ripped out. As we encounter the bear in the flesh, we hear that slain character's cries because this monster has apparently incorporated her vocal cords and is using voice to lure other characters to it.
Lena eventually makes her way to the mysterious lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer, where she finds an incinerated body and a video camera mounted on a tripod. She watches the recording to find that it is that of her husband, Kane who had recorded his self-immolation with a flash grenade. As we may have suspected, the man at the beginning of the movie is likely not her husband Kane. Interestingly, Kane speaks in with a distinctly southern American accent in this recorded scene only. He does not have it when he shows up at the house nor in any of the various Lena/Kane flashbacks we see throughout the movie. Is it due to the tendency of the Shimmer to remix various animals and people and perhaps Kane had been merged with one or more of his teammates. A similar phenomenon is observable in a mysterious ouroboros tattoo that seems to jump from person-to-person in Lena's group.
Exploring deeper into the lighthouse, Lena discovers both Ventress and the core of the alien infestation which manifests itself as...a.fancy screensaver. Some of Lena's blood gets sucked into the vortex and begins generating a doppelganger. Lena escapes but encounters the hybrid which is another standout creature.
Again, on the surface, the creature is not all that interesting. It is a humanoid with an almost oily, iridescent sheen. It's behavior, however, creepy and fascinating as it mirrors and mimics Lena's movements, eventually pinning her to a door as she tries to escape the lighthouse. Behavior is an underutilized element of monster design. I go back to Alien and its iconic Xenomorph, which is the greatest design in the history monsters but after so many movies and shows I find myself desperate to see new behavior other than hissing and killing. How scary would the Alien be if we saw more of its behavior and if that behavior were as creepy and unsettling as the design?
This final Annihilation climax is an incredibly strange and unsettling sequence, heightened by the movie's hair-raising and discordant score, The creature is performed by Sonoya Mizuno who appears early in the movie as one of Lena's students and who is best known for her recurring role as Mysaria on House of the Dragon.
Lena eventually uses the creature's MO of mirroring her to get it to accept a flash grenade and it burns itself and the lighthouse just as it begins to more fully transform into her. Lena escapes to the base to find that her husband has now recovered. Like The Thing, Annihilation ends on an uncertain note as to whether or not these characters are actually human. Really, the movie is clear on the fact that they are no longer fully human, but the question remains, how much of themselves remains.
SEE ALSO
The Thing (1982), The Color Out of Space (2019)
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