Directed by: Alex Garland
Starring: Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez
Rated R, 115 minutes
Dreams have been cinematic fodder since the earliest days of the medium, and still we can’t seem to get enough of the dream-film. In the last decade alone, movies like “Arrival” and “Gravity” and “Black Swan” have used dreams and dream sequences to reveal characters and twist plots; and of course, there was 2010’s “Inception,” whose methodical, bombastic exploration of the subject was to cinematic depictions of dreams what the first skyscraper must have been to the buildings around it. We can’t get enough of these surreal, otherworldly projects, and now, with Alex Garland’s (“Ex Machina”) “Annihilation,” we have a strong addition to the catalog, a film that truly feels like a dream to behold.
Fittingly, the movie’s storyline is both logical and nonsensical. On the surface, it’s simple enough science fiction. Biology professor and Army veteran Lena (Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”) is sent reeling when her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac, “Inside Llewyn Davis”), comes back barely alive from a covert mission into a mysterious zone along the Florida coast called the Shimmer. Desperate to know what’s happened to her husband, and now sequestered at a small military base home to the only people who even know of the Shimmer’s existence, Lena agrees to go into the Shimmer herself to investigate.
Once inside, Lena and the small team of military scientists with her find that life inside the Shimmer is baffling, like a dream: Time flows differently, passing much slower than it does on the outside; transitions from one place to another are altogether forgotten, leaving them to wonder how they got from point A to point B; and most significantly, the genetic structures of every living thing in the Shimmer are liquid, mixing freely with one another in beautiful and horrifying ways. Things are themselves, but also somehow not themselves: An alligator sports the teeth of a shark; plants grow in the shapes of human bodies; a bear with blood dripping from its teeth has the voice of a woman.
From there, the movie takes the form of a sonic and visual playground, rather than a course. Yes, there is a destination for Lena and her team, but it’s not entirely clear what they’re supposed to do when they reach it, and they never get satisfying answers to the questions that the Shimmer raises along the way. Even the explanations of the Shimmer’s capacity for genetic mutation—the ever-important “rules of the game” that you find in any world-building sci-fi movie—are never more than perfunctory, as though intended not to be taken seriously. The truer purpose of “Annihilation,” it seems, is to bewilder.
It does so in spades, largely thanks to wildly inventive visuals, set pieces, sound effects, and music. Many moments are grotesque, even revolting, but in the way that’s impossible to look away from. And that’s to say nothing of the movie’s climax, a wordless fight scene choreographed like a dance, in which Garland synthesizes all the beautiful and terrifying images that have preceded it, but still without giving us any concrete resolution. It’s a climax to a plot whose details we were never truly given, and so the moment forces us to interpret it for ourselves. Have we just seen a story of betrayal and forgiveness? Of despair and hope? Of oppression and rebellion? All of the above? It’s a climax intended to leave us at a loss for words, and it succeeds.
Typically such vagueness of purpose is nothing but exasperating, but the mystifying and the ineffable are so central to the atmosphere of “Annihilation” that it would feel wrong to have it any other way. Alex Garland trusts that his viewers will make their own meaning out of the film, and backs up that decision with two hours’ worth of indelible storytelling. That he succeeds in making a film that both demands and rewards active viewer participation is a welcome rarity, and one that should put “Annihilation” up there in the same ranks with movies like “Alien” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” movies that redefined what science fiction can elicit from its audience. Where most dreams flit away from us while we’re blinking ourselves awake, “Annihilation” lingers.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/16/18.