January 2, 2018 2 min to read

Annihilation

Annihilation is hyper-symbolic and requires a lot of its audience, and for the most part the ideas are worth it.

by Zach Saul

Annihilation is a deeply ambitious movie that’s equal parts cryptic, brilliant, and frustrating. The movie explores the plight of four depressed women who decide to enter a mysterious bubble inside which people have been disappearing. It’s a familiar sounding premise about alien presence on earth but turns in much more interesting directions than you’d expect for an invasion movie. Annihilation focusses on the intricacies of a “refracted” universe that scrambles everything together. We follow four people who decide to enter the “shimmer” for different reasons but all of them are struggling with depression or feelings of sadness.

The imagined universe in this movie does two things exceptionally well; first Garland omits the perfect amount of detail and doesn’t over-explain the mutations and refractions in the shimmer. The second is a unique sense of restraint in the moments where tension is the highest. Over and over this movie opted for thematic substance over cheap thrills and despite some of it coming across as cryptic and noncontiguous I applaud its ambition.

The movie ends with a subtle suggestion that Lena and Kane may be duplicates of themselves. Having not read the source material, I have to admit I found this ending to be a bit cheap given the richness the rest of the movie contains. However, after thinking about the final sequence I have a new reading of Natalie Portman’s eyes illuminating with an incandescent glow. Early in the movie were shown a disturbing image of Kate cutting his friend open to reveal an alien moving around inside of him. This could be chalked up to a strange mutation, but I prefer to imagine “the shimmer” as a broad metaphor for restlessness - and a commentary about people’s inherent self-destructiveness. This makes much more sense in the context of Dr. Vetnress and Katie’s disappearance. When each character dies in the shimmer it’s a conscious decision that resolves their desire for self-destruction. For Lena and Kane I think the presence of the shimmer in them refers to a newfound vulnerability that accompanies each character’s masochistic streak.

The Good: The action scenes in this movie are some of the most creative and innovative sequences I’ve seen in several years - particularly the scene where Lena’s duplicate mirrors her every movement in the light-house. The artwork and imagination that went into Annihilation were both pleasant surprises and covered up some lesser aspects of the film.

The Bad: Annihilation is beautiful but incredibly difficult to follow. There’s something to be said about the dangers of overdoing the use of metaphors and omitting too much exposition in favor of a philosophical ambiguity. As a result, I left the theatre wanting to like Annihilation more than I actually did.