Transformative, ambiguous, horror/sci-fi isn’t exactly it’s own sub genre yet, but that hasn’t stopped Alex Garland from trying to make it happen ever since he settled himself into a director’s chair for the robo-centric Ex Machina back in 2014 and just under a decade later he took rural horror to strange new places with Men with both of them having provocative and up-in-the-air climaxs that stubbornly refused to speak down to its audience and offer up any easy answers to events that transpired onscreen.
However, in 2018, Garland delivered arguably his most flummoxing, evocative and trippy film to date with Annihilation, a dream-like, science fiction chiller that played very much like a very special episode of Animal Planet that has been brought to you by H.P. Lovecraft.
Mutation-born existentialism and weird, fucked-up lifeforms are present and correct, but while any other director may have tried to simply turn the movie into a body horror bug hunt, Garland instead turns the film into a spellbinding expedition into oblivion. Keep a tight hold of your DNA, puny earthlings, evolution is about to pull a major whitey.
After her soldier husband vanishes after following a highly clandestine mission, cellular biology professor and former army soldier Lena spends the next year in something of a funk where she worries, grieves and ultimately has an affair with a work colleague – but a year after his disappearance, Kane suddenly returns in a noticably confused state. Matters get even more alarming when his health takes a sudden bad turn and it seems that his organs are starting to break down for some unknown reason. However, on the way to the hospital, their ambulance is stopped by some highly suspicious black vehicles and before you know it, Lena and an ailing Kane are whisked away to a secret facility where the events of the last twelve months are finally laid out.
After a meteor strike in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, the surrounding area has since been covered by a swirling, unnatural and permeable barrier now known as the Shimmer and everything within this freaky zone – plants, animals and even people – seems to be having its DNA rewritten. Kane was a member of a team that went in to explore, but never came out and the head of the facility, Dr. Ventress, not only debriefs Lena on all of this, but also mentions that the Shimmer is constantly expanding which could cause some sizable issues in the near future.
Desperate to fund out what occured, Lena volunteers to join the next expedition which is being led by Ventress herself and also contains Cass, a geomorphologist; Anya, a paramedic and Josie, a physicist. However not long after breaching the Shimmer, the five woman start to be bombarded by the anomaly’s body warping mojo, which doesn’t exactly help the mindset of a group of individuals who have their own personal, self destructive issue going on. Will they manage to reach the place where the meteor fell, or will their entire DNA fail them before their frazzled minds do?
Right from the word go, Garland proves that he’s not a director good give a flying toss about explanations, reasons or tying up his plot in a beat little bow and Annihilation in particular is set up to defy conventional expectations of people who only want to understand the why of things. To counteract this, Garland has given us a movie that – despite the best efforts of its scientist characters – insists the why is utterly inconsequential; there is only what is. For a start, this is going to piss off some viewers who like their sci-fi to come complete with easy to process endings and broad concepts, but what it lacks in self explanation, it more than makes up for it with a sense of melancholy dread that’s endowed with great amounts of terrible beauty.
While the title may very well describe the fate that awaits humanity if the Shimmer keeps expanding, it actually describes the mental state of its main characters as the stresses of their mission starts to highlight and prey upon the issue plaguing them. As mankind is unique when it comes to exhibiting self destructive tendencies, the very fact that these people are willing to enter an alien landscape to get to the bottom of this cosmic mystery on top of dealing with cancer, depression, guilt, addiction and self harm just shows that there is no end to what we do to ourselves when we’re vulnerable. This is showcased effectively by a cluster of low key, mournful performances by the film’s near all-woman cast as their other worldly experiences bounce them from horrific wonder to out and out terror. Natalie Portman’s Lena manages to balance the guilt of cheating on her missing husband (hello Oscar Issac) with the morbid fascination of continuing to explore a phenomenon that could very well rewrite her entire genetic code and she’s ably propped up by the likes of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez.
However, the real stand out here is the work of the Shimmer itself that provides a bizarre refraction of a world we know as the fauna and wildlife take on the characteristics of each other with stunning and often chilling results.
The Shimmer itself glistens and shines like sunlight through a bubble and gives everything a dreamlike haze which inly gets worse when the team realise they’ve lost whole days from their memory. Elsewhere, trees start to grow in the shape of people and a pair of deer, moving in near-perfect synch, sport antlers made of branches, but the further we get to the source of the Shimmer, the more Garland delights in showing us some stuff straight from the playbook of H.P. Lovecraft. A video filmed by the previous team shows them cutting open one of their still living members to reveal that his intestines have taken to writhing around inside his body like they’ve got a mind of their own; later we find that the man’s mutation has fused him to the side of an empty swimming pool like some horrific form of coral as the effects of the Shimmer doodled with his form at will. However, the films crown jewel is an insanely creepy sequence that sees the team at major loggerheads with one another only to find themselves stalked by a skull faced bear that roars in the screams of its previous victims. While a large, fucked-up bear mutant is unnerving enough the fact that you can clearly hear the words “help me” whenever it roars is magnificently chilling.
In fact, it’s a real shame that Annihilation premiered on Netflix way back then because watching it in a pitch black cinema with a proper sound system would have greatly benefited the whole sensory overload of the bonkers final act that somehow is both poignant, spine chilling and unrepentantly confounding all at the same time and it’s all better for it?
Do I actually know what the ending truly means? No, but nor should I. After all, how can you place a pithy explanation or motive on evolution simply gone haywire; and the weirdly soothing feeling that arises from knowing that the world as we know it could end simply with everything slowly turning into something else is both utterly terrifying and worryingly comforting. And that’s the meat of Annihilation. How broken must you already be to willingly allow an alien anomaly to rearrange your cells like the way a croupier shuffles cards? Utterly dazzling, yet relentlessly elusive, Annihilation will consume you.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 