ALIEN HORROR SUMMER - NO. 4: ANNIHILATION (2018) MOVIE REVIEW
Alex Garland’s follow-up to his breakthrough hit “Ex Machina” starts out as a generic “team on a mission” horror show…but mutates into something transcendent in its jaw dropping finale.
by Nate Lemann
In adapting the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Trilogy”, Garland moves away from the books environmental-heavy themes and overall tone to something more idiosyncratic and profound:
The story starts off the same: a comet is seen cutting its way through the stars, majestically basking the audience in its fiery afterglow. It crash lands on earth, right into a light house on the Florida Southern Reach…an odd, shimmering light beginning to emanate shortly thereafter. Cutting to some years later, we meet Natalie Portman’s Lena, a cellular scientist teaching a grad school class on the origins of life: one cell begets two, two begets four, four begets eight, eight begets sixteen, and so on and so fourth. This happens until there is nothing left of the original cell…yet it lives on in the cells it divided into, and into the cells they divide into. It begs the question is the old cell dead or just changed into something new, never really dying (don’t worry: this will all come back to be important as the film continues).
Lena returns home, where we get glimpses of her empty life. She sits mourning her army hubby Kane (Oscar Issac), who went off on a classified mission over a year ago now and there has been no word from him or the military since. As Lena begins to move on, painting her bedroom, a dazed and sickly Kane just shows up behind her. Lena runs to embrace him but Kane doesn’t really react as one would expect. Lena tries to grill Kane on where he’s been the past year but he only answers cryptically before things take a turn and Kane needs to be rushed to a ER immediately. However, their ambulance ride is hijacked by spooks in black SVUs.
Lena wakes up in a secret government facility, getting the details on where Kane was from Dr. Ventress (a perfectly chilly Jennifer Jason Leigh): after the comet made landfall years ago, a field of light that has been dubbed “The Shimmer” started to expand from the lighthouse. Any probes or people sent into it never returned; gone without so much as a peep. Kane was part of the last group of army special forces sent into investigate/rescue prior group disappearances. No one had come back…until now.
Lena then tags along with latest group to enter the ever expanding radius of the Shimmer: Ventress, Josie (a brilliant Tessa Thompson), Anya (Gina Rodriguez), and Sheppard (Tuva Novotny). This all-female team is more of a science expedition but Lena’s goal remains simple: find out what happened to Kane inside the Shimmer and what is slowly killing him now that he’s back. As they venture further in, strange things begin to happen: the group first begins losing time, coming to three days after entering, with no memories since they passed the Shimmer threshold. SatComms and compasses aren’t working. Different species of flowers can now grow from the same branch, in a state of constant mutation. They encounter a crocodile…one that has the teeth of a shark, crossbreeding that shouldn’t be possible.
What Josie starts to theorize is that this Shimmer is like a prism but doesn’t just refract light: it refracts every cell inside it. That means that not only is the environment rapidly mutating and changing…but so are the group themselves. The true horror begins to kick in as team members begin to lose their minds and undergo profound physical changes, mutating with the very environment around them. Part of the group wants to go back, but Lena and Ventress want to carry forward. This takes us only to the second act of the film. In these early sections, Garland’s film feels like a really well constructed sci-fi thriller, playing very familiar beats but with enough artistic flourishes by Garland and his team to feel fresh and of a specific vision.
All that said, the final third of this film is on a whole other level from most sci-fi: it is ethereal and mesmerizing in the most inventive ways. The film up until this point is a very well constructed thriller but it just kicks into high gear once the surviving team reaches the lighthouse. You can almost lose all of the first two acts and still fully engage with the more impressionistic style in the climax. It feels alien in a way that is so beyond normal human conception of life that it feels like Garland and his VFX team invented a whole new form life that is anything but intuitive to the standard human brain. The team that makes it to this point are marvelous in how they either give in to this “force” or engage with it, watching it learn and become its own version of human. It is the best act of any film on this list…hands down.
The best sci-fi doesn't just thrill you, though: it leaves you with existential questions to chew on and this one is Garland at his most precise: the concept of our cells consistently in a slow-paced state of division begs the question that over time, the cells that once made us who we are become no more and get replaced by newer cells. Does that mean the “old” version of ourselves died? Is the person who we were 10 years ago the same person here today? Or are we something new, something to embrace. The characters in this constantly talk about whether the version of themselves that entered the Shimmer are the same as the ones they currently are now, with the process of cell division supercharged in this alien environment; sometimes in beautiful ways, sometimes in the horribly macabre. It becomes even more important to Lena and Kane as things had seemed to hit a rough patch for them and the film asks if they are the same person that they initially fell in love with? Are they themselves even the same person…?
Portman is very reliably good here, really exceptional in the final third of the film. Leigh may be off-putting for some but she rang very true for me. Thompson is very soulful in her a performance, a role with not a lot of meat on the bone. I was really taken by Novotny, a very warm energy for a very intense film. Rodriguez didn’t really land for me, feeling more surface and not enough underneath the role. Oscar Issac gets moments to shine, especially during scenes that illuminates the expedition about what happened on his trip inside (seriously, he nails those one scene performances as only someone with a supernova level of charisma and gravitas can). Frequent-Garland muse Sonoya Mizuno shows up in a very small role but I think it is the most profound physical performance of the whole film.
As far as direction goes, Garland evolves from the more tightly wound thriller he crafted with “Ex Machina”. Here he is begins his more lyrical phase of his directing career, providing a looser, meditative tone to his visual language. The violence and tension are still there but by setting it in more subdued tones, allowing the scenes of true terror to really pop. DP Rob Hardy’s partnership with Garland really allows for that more lyrical feel, with this film being an exceptional use of light and glimmering to always make you feel the alien environment and never let you out of its unnatural grasp. The imagery in this is just so beautiful and haunting, with some of the best and most subtle digital VFX I have seen on this list. The score is also wildly inventive, with moments of acoustic guitar telling tales of woe so profoundly, but then incorporates truly foreign/alien elements as the film (and the characters) evolve into something...new.
Garland is always a filmmaker with lots on his mind but this film is the apex of his ability to mix big ideas with truly cinematic and inventive visual (and auditory) storytelling. The most under-sung masterpiece of the last ten years.
FINAL RATING: 4.5/5 Stars (Breathtaking filmmaking with an end that is beyond transcendent art)
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