THE FILM
Annihilation. Dir. Alex Garland. Screenplay by Garland, from the novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Cinematography by Rob Hardy. Music by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury. Paramount Pictures / Skydance / DNA Films. 115 min. UK/USA, 2018. With Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny and Oscar Isaac.
Spoiler warning: this review discusses the film’s ending and its central reveal.
Annihilation is usually filed under two headings: sci-fi horror, and box-office casualty. The second heading has a paper trail. After poor test screenings, Paramount’s financier reportedly found the film too intellectual and too complicated, and wanted changes, a more sympathetic heroine, a clearer ending. Alex Garland refused, the producer’s final-cut deal held, and the studio sold the film to Netflix everywhere outside North America and China, where it streamed seventeen days after the US theatrical release. Both headings are true, and both are ways of not looking at what the film actually is: the only major alien-contact film I can name in which the alien never communicates, never shows intent, and may not be an entity in any meaningful sense at all. Nothing in this film wants anything. It only refracts.
The setup, briefly. Lena is a cell biologist at Johns Hopkins and a former soldier. Her husband Kane went into a classified operation a year ago and never came back; then one night he is simply in the house, wrong in a way she cannot name, and his organs begin to fail on the way to the hospital. The convoy is intercepted, and Lena wakes inside Southern Reach, a facility parked on the edge of the anomaly Kane walked into: the Shimmer, a slick of prismatic light that fell onto a lighthouse three years ago and has been swallowing coastline ever since. Every team sent in has vanished. Kane is the only person to come out. Lena joins the next expedition, five women, all scientists: a psychologist, a physicist, a paramedic, a geomorphologist, and her.
The first thing worth saying is that the biology is real enough to take seriously. The film opens on a cancer cell dividing under Lena’s lecture slides; the book on her nightstand is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the true story of a tumour that outlived its owner. Inside the Shimmer the science keeps that register. Different flowers blooming from a single stem, which Lena reads as one plant expressing wildly different body plans, the sort of thing Hox genes exist to prevent. An albino alligator with concentric rows of shark teeth. Eventually the physicist, Josie, works out the mechanism: the Shimmer is a prism, but it refracts everything, not only light and radio but DNA itself. Every living thing inside is being transcribed into every other. The film’s monsters are not inventions, they are transcription errors, and its true engine is the disease Lena teaches: growth without purpose, the self rewritten from inside, cell by cell, until the border between you and not-you stops meaning anything.
Here is the part that matters. Midway through, Lena asks the psychologist, Ventress, why anyone would volunteer for a mission no one returns from, and gets the film’s thesis in reply: “I think you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct.” The script deals the evidence out quietly. Lena carries the affair that sent Kane into the Shimmer. Anya, the paramedic, is in recovery. Josie hides scars on her forearms. Cass has lost a daughter, and says it cost her two people, the child and the person she herself used to be. Ventress is dying of cancer and tells no one. The Shimmer does not invent any of this; it externalises it. Cass dies in the jaws of a bear that then carries her dying scream inside its own voice. Josie, hearing it, chooses the opposite door: she stops fighting the mutation and blooms into the meadow. Every fate inside the anomaly is a self-destruction, or a self-transformation, and the film declines to tell you where the line between those two words falls.
The last act drops nearly all dialogue. Ventress dissolves into light in the chamber under the lighthouse, saying she does not know what it wants, or if it wants. A drop of Lena’s blood becomes a mirrored figure that copies her movements exactly, a duet the film built by casting a dancer, Sonoya Mizuno, and choreographing the scene like ballet. The double never attacks. Every blow Lena takes from it is her own, returned; her panic supplies all the violence in the room. She escapes it the only way you can escape a mirror, by handing it something burning and letting it copy that too. The framing device closes the loop: in quarantine afterwards, an interrogator asks the questions any other film would answer. What did it want? Was it destroying everything? Lena’s reply is the closest thing to a message anyone extracts from the entire event: “It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new.” Then the man wearing Kane’s face is brought in, and the film ends on the exchange the whole story has been walking toward. You’re not Kane, are you? “I don’t think so. Are you Lena?” She embraces him anyway, and her iris flares with the Shimmer’s colours. Contact films end with a message. This one ends with a question about who came back.
On craft, the refraction goes all the way down. Garland famously adapted VanderMeer from memory, on purpose, calling the result a dream of the book, and it plays like one: Rob Hardy shoots the Shimmer like light through a soap bubble, and Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score lets an acoustic folk figure recur until, in the lighthouse, it is bent into the alien cue, four notes distorted past the point where organic and synthetic can be told apart. The form is the theme. Everything in this film is something familiar, slightly refracted, including the film itself, which is the novel refracted through one reader’s memory.
Because honesty is the point, as ever: Annihilation is fiction about fiction. Garland has been clear that for him the film is about self-destruction, the way people quietly unmake their own lives, and VanderMeer’s novel grew out of a hike through a Florida wildlife refuge, not out of any case file. Nothing here is evidence for anything, and the film would be diminished by pretending otherwise.
And yet I think the reason its stature keeps growing is that it dramatises a grammar of encounter our culture has no shelf for. The strange-experience stories people actually tell, the ones that never resolve into clean narratives, tend not to feature messages or missions. They feature light that behaves wrongly, time that goes missing, bodies and minds that come back subtly changed, and meaning that never arrives no matter how long the witness waits for it. The teller’s problem is rarely persuading anyone else; it is understanding what happened to them. Watch Lena’s quarantine debrief again with that in mind. An institution asks the only questions institutions know how to ask: what was it, what was it made of, what did it want. A witness answers the only way an honest witness can: it changed things, I don’t know, it may not have wanted at all. The two languages pass straight through each other. Garland staged that interview as the film’s spine, and it is the truest scene in it.
Cinema has almost always tidied this material into one of two endings: invasion or benediction. The thing in the sky wants our planet, or it wants to teach us; either way it wants, and the wanting is what lets a story close. Annihilation withholds the want itself. Contact here is refraction, the visitor is a mirror, and transformation arrives with no verdict attached. That is why the film reads less like science fiction’s usual first-contact fantasy and more like the experiences that never make it into anyone’s canon: an event that changes the witness and then simply declines to mean.
It is also why the ending lands the way it does. The film quietly swaps the question every contact story trains us to ask, what is it, for the one that actually matters, what did it do to her. And it answers honestly: changed her, at the level of cell and self, in ways neither she nor the institution debriefing her will ever fully map. Whatever you make of the real-world stories that share this shape, Annihilation is honest enough to leave the question exactly where it found it, not out there at the lighthouse but in here. Watch it again, and notice how much it declines to tell you.
References and further reading
- Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland, Paramount Pictures / Skydance / DNA Films, 2018; streamed internationally by Netflix
- Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), first book of the Southern Reach trilogy
- Alex Garland on adapting the novel from memory, “a dream response to a dream book”: interviews with Nerdist and /Film, February 2018
- Contemporary trade reporting on the test screenings and the Paramount-Netflix deal, December 2017
- Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), the book on Lena’s nightstand