She’s still grieving a year after her husband Kane, a Special Forces soldier, was lost on a mysterious covert mission. Imagine Lena’s joy when, without warning, he appears in their home. Blinded by love and joy, she doesn’t see at first what is plain to the audience: something’s wrong with Kane. He barely responds—his emotions are null; his memory has lapsed. When he raises a glass of water to drink, the glass fills with blood.
Annihilation, adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s award-winning novel by the director of the science-fiction masterpiece Ex Machina, Alex Garland, includes some of the most chilling scenes recently committed to film. Something inexplicable is occurring in an obscure corner of the American South where a swampy national park is engulfed behind “The Shimmer.” The source of this weirdly fluid glow, a permeable wall of refracted light, is unknown but seems to radiate from an abandoned lighthouse. Parties of soldiers, teams of animals and drones have been sent inside the Shimmer and—until the inexplicable apparition of Kane (Oscar Isaac)—no one and nothing has ever reemerged. As troubling: the radius of the Shimmer is expanding.
Abruptly, Lena (Natalie Portman) is taken into federal custody and whisked to Area X, a base just beyond the Shimmer. The government is assembling another expedition to look inside. Lena volunteers.
The protagonist, Lena, teaches biology at Johns Hopkins. We meet her while lecturing on cells: four billion years ago, she says, a single cell appeared on Earth. It divided in two and the multiplication has continued ever since in new and various forms, linking the diversity of terrestrial life to a single origin. The science of life, touching on metaphysics, is Annihilation’s theme. Those cells convey the blueprints of DNA but the designs encoded within are subject to change.
Rather than a military foray, Lena’s expedition is heavy on science and is—for reasons not entirely clear—all female. The party includes Josie (Tessa Thompson), a physicist; Cass (Tuva Novotny), a geologist; Anya (Gina Rodriguez), a paramedic; and the group’s leader, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an emotionally dead psychologist determined to reach the lighthouse despite all dangers. The cast plays their parts with believable ease. They speak and act like people we might know.
Occasionally, Ventress and Lena venture into larger questions. We all are self-destructive in some respect, Ventress maintains. Our self-destructive decisions seldom result from thoughts but are the outcome of our impulses. “Isn’t self-destruction coded into each of our cells?” she asks Lena. Isn’t death a fault in our genes, yet the cellular life that began billions of years ago continues to reproduce and mutate.
Anxiety follows the women like a low-grade fever until the ecosystem they enter grows weirder and deadlier as they draw near the lighthouse. The plants and animals are strange—different flowers bloom from the same stem and the crocodile that attacks them has teeth like a shark. The beautifully rendered mutations continue to wax more bizarre, even grotesque, as the walls dissolve between species, even between plants and animals. Flowers blossom from a deer’s antlers and the creatures that begin to prowl in the shadows, pulling one woman after another to her death, are terrible compounds of beasts and humans.
We know from the onset that Lena survives. However, not unlike Ex Machina, Annihilation ends with an uncertain future in mind.
