Annihilation is unlike anything you’ve ever seen!
Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina is a cerebral, twisting film about our genetic flaws as human beings bathed in a beautiful nightmare.
Audiences are unprepared for what’s to come with Alex Garland’s latest sci-fi opus, Annihilation. Adapting the first in author Jeff VanderMeer’s dense Southern Reach trilogy was always going to be a tall order, and behind-the-scenes stories of failed test screenings and an international sell-off to Netflix only added fuel to the belief that Annihilation wasn’t going to work. And, for many audiences, the film won’t work.
Annihilation is a thing of immense beauty and intoxicating complexity, with a cast of performers who never drop their stone faces to let audiences’ in to what they’re truly feeling. The film hearkens to works like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, two titles that will immediately tell you whether Annihilation is right for you or not. Yet this inaccessibility only heightens why Annihilation is so important: it’s unlike anything you’ve seen on-screen in decades. Its lush locations and shimmering colors draw audiences in to a dark and twisted tale of guilt and destruction that doesn’t provide clear answers so much as make you question the very nature of our DNA.
Like his 2014 directorial debut, Ex Machina, Garland’s Annihilation focuses on characters in isolation. Natalie Portman’s biologist character Lena is coping with the disappearance of her husband, Kane (played by Oscar Isaac), and has found herself cut off from the world at large. When Kane returns, with no memory of how he got there and a propensity for coughing up blood, Lena learns about Area X, an increasingly growing piece of land overcome by an unknown entity called the Shimmer. What is the Shimmer? That only comes from Lena and a group of other female investigators going in and finding out for themselves.
Annihilation forsakes clear-cut answers and explanations because life itself is devoid of explanations. Much of what makes the Shimmer fascinating ties into the building blocks of life. Why is it here? What does it want? At times it refracts human existence in ways that are frightening yet familiar, and at others it has the ability to create new species that are unlike anything the team experiences. It is a lens, through which the group must purge or be consumed by their own fears and inadequacies. “What do you know” may be asked of Lena at the beginning of the film, but it remains embedded in the audience till the end.
As with Ex Machina, Garland focuses on a very finite cast of characters, isolated and put in situations where they have to rely on people they know are unstable. Although there have been accusations of whitewashing which have been detailed on this site, the performances still stand out.
Natalie Portman’s unreachable Lena is our narrator, detailing the story of what happened in Area X for government doctors as well as the audience. Nearly everyone has a cold affect, but Portman’s performance is tinged with guilt, regret and anger. Guilt and regret at the decisions she’s made in her life, and hostility at her husband, whose own closed-off nature has colored their marriage. Flashbacks to Lena and Kane’s relationship portray the two as cute yet distant. When Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) alludes to Lena’s self-destruction as a means of crippling a “happy marriage,” it’s hard to see that as the truth although there just aren’t enough moments that can prove this either way.
And as solid as Oscar Isaac is — after being the standout of Ex Machina — he’s a character with not enough to impact you emotionally and too much screentime to distract from the more compelling narrative of the women in Area X. In all honesty his character, who had very minor time in the novel, seems there to heighten the stakes for Lena, to give a “reason to come back” where the other women apparently don’t.
The “damaged women go to other worlds” conceit is a regular trope in sci-fi, and it is frustrating that this is the dominant motivation for Lena. She “owes” her husband for her failures as a wife. She bonds with another member of the team, Cass Shepard (Tuva Novotny), who reveals she’s lost a child. It would have been far more unique to just make them flawed, like Gina Rodriguez’s Anya, who is a recovering addict or Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson) who has a history of self-harm.
Thankfully all the actresses are more than able to transcend their histories. Natalie Portman guides the film, but Gina Rodriguez runs away with the entire show as the no-nonsense Anya Thorensen. She has no problem vocally sharing her distaste with the increasingly tense situation everyone is in. As things become stranger she’s the one reiterating how certain things aren’t possible. Her inability to make sense of what happened to the team before — “either something killed them or they went crazy and killed each other” — leads her down a deranged rabbit hole. Make no mistake, Gina Rodriguez has graduated from the small screen to the big leagues and needs to make more movies, stat!
Tessa Thompson’s meek Josie Radek is fabulous, but her character seems the least interesting in the grand scheme of things, with her demise registering nothing more than a passing glance. Jennifer Jason Leigh also creates a slithery and mysterious character with Dr. Ventress. She is the God of the group who picks the teams, sends them out, and then says of her duties, “I watch.”
With the audience forced to sit down and let things unfold, it helps that Rob Hardy’s cinematography is just as spellbinding. There’s an emphasis on how light is refracted through glass even before the group passes through the Shimmer. Hands magnified through a glass are one of several reminders by the film that the cell is the single most important organism in the movie.
When the team actually enters Area X, it’s an Edenic paradise of bizarre beauty and grotesqueries compounded by the discovery they’re being followed by a bear that has be to seen to be believed. When the middle section embraces horror, it’s taut and utterly terrifying. The film’s third act also champions beauty and science, but in a way that will divide audiences. It’s nearly wordless and balletic third act, and is where the 2001 comparisons will pop up. However, the finale is a quiet, moody denouement that will leave you talking.
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In this world of movies that are one and done, Annihilation demands multiple viewings to uncover its heart. Its frustrating and opaque story structure requires active viewing. The cast is stellar, especially Gina Rodriguez. No one will be able to forget Annihilation.