A single drop of blood is subsumed by a ceaselessly shifting mass, and something unknown emerges. Cells divide, and divide, and divide. A fish, with translucent skin and rainbow innards. Annihilation, the 2018 science fiction horror film directed by Alex Garland, is filled end to end with striking moments that sink into your brain.
The central cast – biology professor Lena (Natalie Portman), psychologist Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), physicist Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), paramedic Anya Thorenson (Gina Rodriguez), and geomorphologist Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny), travel into a mysterious zone in the southern United States called “the Shimmer”. Constantly growing, encroaching further and further into the land from the coast, the Shimmer is inexplicable. It began after a meteor crashed into a lighthouse. Several teams have been sent in to investigate, but none returned.
None, until Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) reappears in their home after a year. But he doesn’t return her embrace, or her kiss. He cannot remember where he was, or how he got back. He’s bleeding from the mouth.
Soon after, Kane enters a coma. He is hospitalized at Area X, the secret facility tasked with studying the Shimmer. Dr. Ventress, the psychologist in charge of profiling and selecting members for expeditions appears at this junction of the film. She explains where Kane has been, and Lena decides to join the next expedition into the Shimmer and discover what made her husband so sick. “I owe him,” is her only explanation. Passing through a barrier that gleams in rainbow colors like a soap bubble, the team encounters changes in the flowers, changes in the sunlight, and changes in the passing of time. Every scene brings a new striking visual that vexes the viewer.
But there is one image that encapsulates the film perfectly.
The five women reach a dilapidated house, half sunken in swamp water and enveloped in mutated flowers. Josie, soft spoken and sweet, comments that it looks like someone is about to have a wedding. Lena and Ventress, cold and methodical, discuss the flowers as a “pathology.” Josie wanders into the boathouse and tells the others that it has been long abandoned, possibly since before the area was evacuated to move people away from the Shimmer. Suddenly, an unseen force pulls Josie back inside the flooded house.
After much screaming and thrashing, the team members manage to rescue Josie from whatever grabbed her by the backpack. Outside of the house, Lena grabs her rifle and watches the water. The side of the house rattles as planks of wood break apart and an alligator emerges, enormous and white. It makes a beeline for the women. It unhinges its huge jaws and roars, and Lena shoots straight into the alligator’s cavernous mouth. The creature slumps down and dies, the Shimmer’s iridescent sunlight glowing on its albino skin.
Anya uses both hands to pry the animal’s jaws back open. Lena, peering into the mouth, marvels at its strangeness. The teeth inside grow in concentric rows, like a shark, Cass points out. Taking a scalpel, Lena scrapes at the red meat of the alligator’s mouth and stares, amazement clear on her face. She has no idea she is looking at herself.
Annihilation is as much about the effects of trauma on the psyche and body as it is about still finding viability in it. Describing what she saw inside of the Shimmer, Lena says, “It was dreamlike.” Her interviewer, Lomax (Benedict Wong) answers, “Nightmarish.”
She pauses, and replies “Not always. Sometimes, it was beautiful.”
Long abandoned, the land inside the Shimmer has gone wild. Vegetation creeps along, blossoming with gaudy flowers. Twin deer move in sync, one made of glimmering white flesh, the other of plant life. It is so unsettling its near stomach churning, but at the same time completely entrancing. Annihilation asks of its viewers, what happens when we self-destruct and still survive? What happens when trauma impacts us and nearly consumes us? Cancer, self-destruction, and trauma work like a triple helix of meaning throughout the film. Mutation is always the end result. Fungus creeps and blooms over a concrete wall. Even after death, a corpse mushrooms into masses of soft, colorful tissue.
In her first scene, Lena shows her class footage of cancerous cells, taken from the cervix of a female patient in her early thirties. In an idyllic flashback, she reads The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the immortal HeLa cell line, taken from Henrietta Lacks’ body without consent in 1951. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer that year, aged thirty one, but the cells biopsied from her tumor live on, dividing endlessly.
The layers of metaphor and allusion melt into each other – trauma is like cancer is like self-destruction. All three mutate a person, the way the Shimmer mutates a flower. The Shimmer is cancer, and it is trauma, and it is self-destruction.
When Cass reveals that her daughter died of leukemia, she describes it as a dual-death. “In a way, it was two bereavements: my beautiful girl, and the person I once was.” Ventress, the expedition leader, has terminal cancer. Anya is sober, and therefore an addict. Josie self harms. Lena has an affair and sabotages her marriage for reasons she doesn’t understand, and in response, Kane agrees to join an expedition into the Shimmer, knowing no one has ever returned from before. Lena interprets this as her husband attempting suicide, but Ventress argues that she has confused suicide with self-destruction.
Along the way, each team member meets their fate in the Shimmer, one way or another. They die, or lose themselves, or give in to the Shimmer. All except Lena, who reaches the lighthouse only to find a video camera with footage of Kane, who was also the only one from his team to reach the epicenter. Horrified, Lena watches as Kane admits the Shimmer has destroyed his sanity. He urges the person behind the camera to leave the Shimmer and find his wife, and commits suicide. The camera turns and reveals a doppelganger, the man who appeared without explanation at the start of the film.
Annihilation climaxes with Lena meeting her own doppelganger. A faceless, humanoid thing with skin like an oil slick that slowly takes her form and mimics her every movement. She kills it with a phosphorous grenade, the same way her husband killed himself. She walks out of the burning lighthouse, the intangible Shimmer itself burning up with it, and makes it back to the facility. Back to Kane’s Shimmer counterpart, who is now awake and healthy.
“One by one, all gone. Except you. How do you explain that?” Lomax asks.
“I had to come back. I’m not sure any of them did.” This is the only explanation Lena can provide.
Who comes out on the other side? Are we still the same person we were before self-destruction, or are we a completely different person?
The answer seems to be neither. When we survive, we come out a hybrid, strange to those who knew us before. Like the twin deer. Like the alligator with a mouth full of shark teeth growing in concentric rows. Like Lena and Kane with their irises lighting up in rainbow colors in the film’s final scene.
“You aren’t Kane, are you?” Lena asks.
“I don’t think so.” says Kane. “Are you Lena?”
She doesn’t answer, because she can’t. She killed her alien doppelganger in the lighthouse, but the Shimmer has changed her. She is both herself and not herself. Trauma refracts us like sunlight through rain. The argument made by the film is not that trauma is beautiful, but rather that it can be survived. Kane and Lena embrace at the end of the film, comforting each other in their new subtle strangeness, consoled by their shared experience of walking into the Shimmer and walking back out. Annihilation argues for survival, argues that living another day is worth it, or at least possible, even when the world seems to want to grind you down into a fine powder.
In the end, it all comes back to that alligator – its skin drained of color, its jaw and throat lined with shark teeth. An impossible crossbreed that the women of the expedition wonder at. The incredible ways it has been changed by the Shimmer distilling what becomes of us when we are transformed by pain. Lurching, huge, strange, but surviving. Eating with teeth that belong to something else.
