Alex Garland’s Annihilation walks into the Shimmer with five women, a lot of questions, and no intention of answering most of them. That is the deal the film offers, and it mostly earns it.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
A Biologist Named Lena
Natalie Portman plays Lena, a cellular biology professor and former US Army soldier. She is under interrogation when the film opens, recounting an expedition into the Shimmer, a quarantined zone where the laws of nature don’t apply.
The Shimmer started expanding three years earlier from a meteor that hit the St. Marks Light lighthouse in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. Expeditions into it end the same way: the crews disappear.
Lena’s husband Kane, played by Oscar Isaac, vanishes on one of those expeditions. A year later he appears inside their home. He is not right. His condition deteriorates fast, Lena calls an ambulance, and security forces intercept them and take them both to a secret facility.
Kane goes into intensive care. Psychologist Dr. Ventress, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, invites Lena to join a new scientific expedition into the Shimmer.
The team is Ventress, Lena, and three others: Cassie, a geomorphologist (Tuva Novotny); Anya, a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez); and Josie, a physicist (Tessa Thompson).
Once inside, they lose several days with no memory of them. Their communication equipment fails. They meet wildlife with bizarre mutations. Josie is attacked by an albino alligator with concentric rows of teeth.
The group takes refuge at an abandoned military base, where they find a video message from Kane’s earlier expedition. In it, Kane cuts open another soldier’s abdomen to reveal slithering intestines. They find the soldier’s corpse, now an overgrown colony of lichens.
The Bear and the Village
A mutant bear attacks the base and drags Cassie away. Lena finds her mutilated corpse. The survivors reach an abandoned village full of plants shaped like human beings.
At night, Lena and Ventress talk about humanity’s strange instinct to destabilize itself. That conversation is the film’s thesis, and it is the one scene where Annihilation says out loud what the rest of it shows.
The cast is deep for a film this strange. Benedict Wong plays Lomax. David Gyasi plays Daniel. Sonoya Mizuno plays a humanoid and a med student named Katie. The tagline is “Fear what’s inside.”
A Production That Took Its Time
Portman was the first to join, entering negotiations with Paramount in May 2015, on the condition that production not start until 2016. Rodriguez came next, entering talks in November 2015.
By then the plan was to shoot in early 2016, which fit Portman’s schedule and also landed during Rodriguez’s break from Jane the Virgin. Isaac, who had worked with Garland on Ex Machina, joined in March 2016 as Lena’s husband. By the end of April, Thompson, Leigh, and Gyasi were attached.
In the Southern Reach novels, the biologist is described as Asian and the psychologist as mixed-race and half-Indigenous. Portman and Leigh were cast anyway.
In 2018, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans and the American Indians in Film and Television accused Garland of whitewashing. Garland said “nothing [was] cynical or conspiratorial” about the casting, adding that Authority, the book that reveals the characters’ races, had not been released when Annihilation was written and cast. Portman said she did not know her character had a specific ethnicity until the concerns were raised, and that Garland had deliberately not spoken to author Jeff VanderMeer about the other two Southern Reach novels because he wanted to focus on adapting Annihilation.
Where the Movie Actually Goes
Annihilation is loosely based on VanderMeer’s 2014 novel, and Garland wrote the script as well as directing. The film runs 115 minutes. It is a UK-US co-production, released theatrically in the United States by Paramount Pictures on February 23, 2018, and released digitally by Netflix in a number of other countries on March 12, 2018.
It grossed $43 million worldwide. Empire magazine said the film addresses “depression, grief, and the human propensity for self-destruction.”
That is a fair read of the material. The Shimmer is not a monster. It is a mirror that keeps changing what it reflects.
What the Shimmer Costs
The best thing Annihilation does is refuse to make the zone a puzzle with a solution. The alligator, the bear, the lichen soldier, the plant people — these are not a test to pass. They are what happens when biology stops agreeing to the rules, and the film treats them with a flat, unhurried gaze that is far more disturbing than a jump scare would be.
Portman carries the interrogation frame well. The film hands her the emotional load — a missing husband, a returned stranger, a body that will not hold — and she plays it without asking for sympathy. Leigh’s Ventress is the opposite: cold, curious, and clearly closer to the edge than she lets on. The scene where the two of them sit and talk about self-destruction is the spine of the picture.
Rodriguez gets the least to do of the three supporting scientists, and Anya’s arc is the thinnest. Thompson’s Josie has one quiet moment that lands harder than most of the action. Novotny’s Cassie is gone before she registers.
The Limits of the Mystery
Here is where the film loses ground. Garland is a strong director of tension and a weaker one of explanation, and Annihilation ends by choosing atmosphere over answer. That is a legitimate choice. It is also a choice that leaves the last act doing a lot of visual work and very little narrative work.
The Shimmer’s rules never firm up. Why some creatures mutate one way and some another is not established. The film is comfortable with that. A viewer looking for a mechanism will not find one.
The whitewashing controversy is not a footnote to the film’s quality, but it is a real part of its record. Two advocacy groups raised it in 2018, and Garland’s defense — that Authority had not been released when he wrote and cast the film — is a specific claim about timing, not a rebuttal of the criticism. The source novels describe the biologist as Asian and the psychologist as mixed-race and half-Indigenous. The film did not cast those roles that way.
Why the Middle Holds
What keeps Annihilation above the usual science-fiction expedition movie is the middle section. The lost days. The failed comms. The alligator with its concentric teeth. The video of Kane opening a man’s abdomen. The base, the village, the plants standing in for people.
These are concrete images, and they accumulate. The film does not explain them, and it does not need to. It needs you to keep walking, and it gives you enough to keep walking.
The interrogation frame does real work too. Knowing Lena survives — or at least knowing she is being questioned — does not spoil the expedition. It makes the question of what she brought back more interesting than the question of whether she makes it out.
What This Film Is Worth
Annihilation is a smart, cold, well-made cosmic horror film that trusts its audience more than most studio releases do. It has a genuine point of view about self-destruction, and it puts that point of view in the mouth of a psychologist standing in a mutating swamp. That is not nothing.
It is also a film that gets less interesting the closer it gets to its own ending, and one whose casting decisions remain a legitimate criticism rather than a settled matter.
The film’s reputation has held up because the images hold up. The bear. The lighthouse. The alligator. The lichen man. Those stay.
The plot does not. That is the trade Annihilation makes, and it is mostly a good one.
Hard Numbers
- Title: Annihilation
- Year: 2018
- Director and writer: Alex Garland
- Based on: the 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer
- Runtime: 115 minutes
- Genres: Science Fiction, Horror
- Tagline: “Fear what’s inside.”
- US theatrical release: February 23, 2018 (Paramount Pictures)
- Netflix digital release: March 12, 2018 (select countries)
- Worldwide gross: $43 million
- Metacritic: 79/100
- Score: 7.9 of 10
- Cast: Natalie Portman (Lena), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Dr. Ventress), Gina Rodriguez (Anya Thorensen), Tessa Thompson (Josie Radek), Tuva Novotny (Cass Sheppard), Oscar Isaac (Kane), Benedict Wong (Lomax), Sonoya Mizuno (Humanoid / Katie), David Gyasi (Daniel)
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