‘Annihilation’ Dares You to Question What You’re Seeing
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Elliott Cuff
Not every question needs to have an answer. It sounds antithetical, but it’s true. Such is the case with art, which can solely exist as emotional or symbolic expression, leaving few threads to follow and very little to unpack. Movies are art, and while most are commonly defined, occasionally one appears to demonstrate that art can color outside the margins and that not all art is an equation to be solved.
Alex Garland’s Annihilation prompts at least a dozen questions, and that’s before it even arrives at the final act, but it doesn’t show any interest in filling in the gaps. Written by Garland and adapted from the novel of the same name from Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation is a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of genres and influences. It blends horror, sci-fi, drama, and fantasy while drawing inspiration from the work of Joseph Conrad and H.R. Giger, to name just a few.
Garland has never been one for conventional storytelling: Ex Machina was a cerebral techno exploration of AI, Men was a trippy folk surrealism piece, and Civil War, his most recent film, was a blunt-force allegory of a divided America where violence hangs ominously in the air. Annihilation, though, was and remains his most ambitious movie yet.
Damaged goods and deep ambiguity
Built around hypnotic visuals and deeply ambiguous thematic subtext, Annihilation was designed to be a movie that takes time to digest. Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a cellular biologist and former soldier who joins a five-woman team to journey into the Shimmer, a mysterious anomalous zone marked by a distinctive iridescent boundary. The Shimmer is a constantly expanding electromagnetic field that appears to warp the DNA of all biological creatures it encompasses, and of all previous expeditions into the prismatic “Area X”, Lena’s husband, Kane, is the only person to have returned.
Critics and general audiences have observed a variety of prevalent themes that are present throughout Annihilation, and each can be seen as valid, be it cancer motifs or recurring introspective examinations of humanity’s tendency for self-destruction. Annihilation doesn’t initially present itself as horror from the outset—it’s more akin to a cerebral sci-fi drama with twisted elements, though terror exists both through the distorted creatures that exist in the Shimmer and through how the film can be interpreted.
Garland makes it clear from the beginning that Lena is a complex character with emotional baggage, and the same description applies to each of the other four women. Psychologist Ventress is a cancer-stricken loner, isolated by her lack of friends or family; physicist Josie is a quiet introvert with a history of self-harm, born not from suicidal tendencies but out of a desire to feel alive; paramedic Anya is a recovering addict, only recently sober; and geomorphologist Sheppard previously lost her daughter to Leukemia, describing herself as having suffered the bereavement of who she once was.
Sheppard characterizes each of the women as “damaged goods”, and it’s that very nature that saw each of them commit to journeying into the Shimmer in what many would consider a suicide mission. Beyond this minor character development though, Annihilation doesn’t attempt to hold our hand and tells us directly what each of the women hope to achieve by entering the Shimmer. Josie hints at the mindset of Lena and Ventress later in the movie, but we’re otherwise left to read between the lines to determine what each woman wants and needs from their individual experience with this unnatural entity.
This character-based ambiguity pairs well with the tonal divergence we witness in the final act, when Garland fully embraces the power of visual storytelling by neglecting digestible narrative coherence entirely. Annihilation dares us to question what we’re seeing. It asks that we theorize about what the Shimmer biome, the lighthouse, and the physical manifestation of the Shimmer represent, but it doesn’t have any answers or explanations to offer. Interestingly, when Garland elected to adapt VanderMeer’s novel he chose to translate it from memory, as opposed to directly adapting it from paper to picture, so even his approach throughout filming was through interpretation and not with an answer sheet on hand.
A spine-chilling Shimmer
Annihilation is an intriguing title because it suggests destruction, but what is annihilation if not a form of destructive change? Everyone takes something different from the movie. Some come away fixated on the horrifying imagery—the albino alligator with shark teeth, the leaves protruding from Josie’s skin as she becomes a biological hybrid, the demon bear who shrieks with the voice of its victims. These are the more obvious indicators that what we’re watching is something twisted and disturbing.
But why are these biological changes considered horrifying and not, in some darker way, miraculous adaptations? Annihilation, to me, has always been a film about change, and how we as people are only able to interpret change from our singular viewpoint. What separates the mutant deer with flowers growing from their antlers and the crystalline structures on the beach from the mutant bear with an exposed skull? We perceive one as beautiful and the other as terrifying, but who is to say that we can pass judgment on which changes are acceptable and which aren't?
Annihilation establishes the Shimmer as a prism, one that refracts molecular data and alters it, but at no point does the film explicitly reveal that the Shimmer is malevolent. Ventress confirms as such, mentioning during the climax that she “[doesn’t] know what it wants, or if it wants”. Composed by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, the ominous and eerie musical score fortifies the perception that the Shimmer is evil, but every event proves that not to be the case. The Shimmer exists without motive, and it’s on us to put meaning to its actions.
One can delve deeper into the many moments and nondescript sequences that reveal hidden subtext, but it’s perhaps easier to see Annihilation as a horror drama—a movie with spine-chilling imagery, fear-induced paranoia, and an ambiguous crescendo that leaves us feeling more perturbed than enlightened. All the pieces are there, but simply labeling a movie like this as such feels demeaning, like we’re missing half the picture.
Either way, there is no right or wrong way to view Annihilation, or to read into what Garland intended for it to say. It’s a cosmic alien panorama with more questions than answers, and it’s all the more richly compelling for it.
Elliott Cuff is a writer, journalist, and film enthusiast. Follow him on Instagram @elliottlovesmovies.