Home Viewing Review: Annihilation

Annihilation

(2018. Director: Alex Garland. Starring: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Issac, Tessa Thompson)

SYNOPSIS:
Biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) finds her life put on hold when her soldier husband is listed as missing presumed dead after a particularly secretive mission. When he surprises everyone by coming back alive, but a changed man, she finds herself following his path into the mysterious and frightening world of 'The Shimmer.'

What are we?

We are nothing but a mass of cells following their programming to continue the experience we consider to be 'life'. The human body is simply a large collection of tissues replicating, mutating and dying until eventually, when they can no longer support each other effectively, the ecosystem collapses, cognitive functions cease and the remaining organic material simply decays back into the basic elements it was made from. Unless you have steadfast faith in more spiritual affairs then thoughts like this can chill the bones more than all the scary boogeymen and gory schlock that cinema has to offer us. Alex Garland's new film Annihilation has it's fair share of disquieting creatures and gruesome discoveries but it's these existential terrors which linger in your mind long after the film has finished taking you on it's strange, beautiful and often confounding journey.

We begin in a sterile white room. Our protagonist, Lena (Natalie Portman), is being interrogated by a group of scientists in biohazard suits, working for the mysterious government agency Southern Reach, and led by the humourless Lomax (Benedict Wong). They want answers but they don't get any and, therefore, neither do we. When asked what happened on her fateful mission into the mysterious region named 'Area X', she simply replies that she isn't sure. When asked what she saw while in there, she cannot say. When asked if she can describe what it was they were fighting for survival against, she only responds with a long thoughtful silence followed by a "no." We are left wondering if she is being wilfully evasive, or if there are simply some things that cannot be put into words.

Annihilation's set-up seems a natural fit for Garland who explored themes of what it means to be human in his directorial debut Ex Machina in 2014 (as well as in his lauded screenplay adaption of Kazou Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go) and whose screenplay for Sunshine and debut novel The Beach similarly featured groups of people losing their minds in beautiful but deadly surroundings. However, Annihilation seems far less interested in who will survive this perilous mission than it is in what part of the human spirit would drive someone to venture on such a potentially suicidal path.

There have been many films in science fiction and horror that involve a group of soldiers or scientists entering a mysterious world where they quickly find themselves out of their depth, being picked off one by one. It's an old trope but it seems to be one that Annihilation subverts as much as it embraces. Our introductory interrogation scene, not only reveals that our heroine returns seemingly intact from her mission, but that she is the only one to do so. (In fact she even goes on to explicitly name check the other characters whose deaths she witnessed.) Straight away we are being told that this is a film which has no intention to build tension out of who will, or won't, survive this encounter, but instead is focused the how and why and of what any of this could mean? Although the film is not entirely without visual references to the likes the Alien series (or even occasionally, humorously, Predator) it takes much more influence from the subtly unsettling atmosphere found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker being it's clearest antecedent.) There are frightening beasts running loose beyond The Shimmer but there is a strong sense that the film's real threats are the demons the characters are carrying inside themselves, even before they cross the iridescent barrier into Area X.

Annihilation, the movie, claims to be an adaptation of the identically named novel released by Jeff VanderMeer in 2014 (the first of a series known as the Southern Reach trilogy). However it is a very loose adaption and Alex Garland has even suggested in interviews that the film is more an adaption of his memories of how he felt reading it, years earlier, than an adaption of the actual novel itself. It's an odd approach but one which feels perfectly fitting with the opaque and polysemous nature of the film. As such it has led to a film whose influences seem to go back further than it's apparent source novel.

The stories of H.P Lovecraft have had a strong effect on genre fiction since their publication in at the beginning of the 20th Century. Many writers have taken influence from his malformed, otherworldly beings and worlds of non-euclidian geometry, to add a sense of creepy weirdness to their settings and monsters. However in a true Cosmic Horror story (the genre Lovecraft pioneered) these threats would merely be symptoms of the true horror at the heart of the tale, which was mankind's fragile insignificance when faced with the sheer enormity and inexplicable strangeness of the world(s?) that exist outside of our control. Where classical horror would be built around a fight against evil in it's various forms, cosmic horror suggests a far more disturbing idea: that the very concept of good and evil is merely a naive human construct which in no way resembles the vast unknowability of a universe which is unconcerned with our petty morality.  Where much of science fiction would be about man playing God and being unable to control this new unbridled power, cosmic horror goes back to a far older fear; that of a powerless mankind gazing in awe upon the face of God and going mad from the revelation. Taking all this into consideration, Annihilation may be one of the best examples of cosmic horror ever put on film, even more so than the attempts to directly adapt Lovecraft's own work (in fact, it bears some striking similarities to the author's 1927 short story 'The Colour Out of Space' if updated for our modern sensibilities and given a more emotional, human heart.)

It's this humanity that is maybe the strangest aspect of Annihilation. Many Sci-Fi Horror films would make it's protagonists simple grunts, forced into a dangerous mission either against their will, or without their knowledge, by a faceless corporation as a commentary on the heartless nature of capitalism (I'm looking at you, Weyland-Yutani!). In contrast, Southern Reach, although initially frightening, appears to be pretty transparent in its intentions, while instead it's the volunteers venturing into the unknown whose motivations are questionable. At first these explorers appear noble, soldiers and scientists risking their lives to do their duty for the greater good. However, the knowledge that only one person has ever returned from the many previous expeditions, and that they were possibly mentally and physically destroyed by the experience, leads us us change our image of these venturers from stoic action heroes to broken souls seeking redemption through martyrdom.

Cancer is a recurring motif throughout the film. The first image we get of Lena, once her flashback begins, is of her hosting a lecture on oncology. Later on, her teammates are revealed to include a woman who is grieving her young daughter, lost to leukaemia, and another who is herself dealing with a unspecified terminal diagnosis. Even The Shimmer appears almost like a malignant version of reality, mindlessly growing and spreading and corrupting all that it touches (one strange growth of technicolor organic material infesting the walls of a building is directly described as 'tumour-like.') However even this interpretation feels merely metaphorical of the mental sickness infecting our characters. Self-destruction is the central theme tying everything together. It's this inexplicable drive towards self-annihilation that the film's title, and tagline ('Fear What's Inside') ultimately refers to. Every single character is dealing with their own internal traumas and they are choosing to do so in deeply unhealthy ways. From addictions to drugs or cigarettes, to the thrill of choosing a dangerous career or the desire to subconsciously destroy the very relationships that hold our lives together, Annihilation seems preoccupied with the 'L'appel du vide' (or 'call of the void') that consumes the human soul. All the animals and plants inside Area X are mutated and deformed but it is only the humans who are possessed by this spiritual cancer and they appear to be so even before travelling into the unknown.

Fascinatingly, where most physical representations of mental illness in art appear as an ugly black hole sucking the light out of life, The Shimmer, by contrast, is beautiful. Refracting light and sound back into itself, the world inside Area X bursts with oversaturated colour and personality. The production design on this film is exceptional and this dangerous world appears like a damaged paradise. Compared to the often dark and washed out look of the 'real world' scenes, The Shimmer is packed with life and character and even our cast appear more alive as they veer ever closer to death. (Fittingly, as the dangers we pose to ourselves do not tend to hunt us down like an ogre leaping out from the shadows. Instead they more often come in the form of a captivating siren, luring us with its song, to dash ourselves against the rocks.) This becomes especially apparent in the film's climax which directly references 2001: A Space Odyssey in a near wordless sequence of abstract oddness and psychedelic grandeur. (In fact, at times, Annihilation feels like some bastard offspring of 2001 and its monstrous sister film, The Shining). 

The end leaves us with nothing but a mystery. Is Annihilation telling us that we must fight ourselves to escape our darker impulses? Is it saying that you must burn down the home you know in order to build anew? Is it our very self-destructiveness that is the key to our salvation? Or is it maybe instead our evolutionary desire to create and reproduce that will redeem us? (It may not be a coincidence that the film centres itself on distinctly feminine power?) All of this is open to interpretation. As the credits roll it becomes clear that the audience's avatar on screen was not Lena, who we followed through this journey. Instead it is Lomax, the man barking questions at her that she cannot answer, desperate for an explanation which never comes, and who is only puzzled more by the responses he does receive. "What did it want?" he asks. "I'm not sure if it wanted anything" Lena replies. Well Annihilation definitely wants us to feel something. But what you take out of this cinematic experience may depend entirely on what you already carry inside you as you enter.

Review by The Mogul.