Annihilation is a 2018 sci-fi adventure film about a biologist who signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition where the laws of nature don’t apply.
You’ve mostly likely come here looking for answers. You’ve just watched Annihilation and are scratching your head, trying understand what it is you’ve sat through, but what you’ve probably already guessed is that a film like this is less about absolutes and more about interpretation. Still, there is a lot that is somewhat concrete, if not stable if we look at the details and consider some of the larger players and paths of this intriguing and often mind-bending story about something from somewhere that is changing everything.
For a brief recap – massive spoilers ahead – the story centers on five women of various backgrounds and educations who are sent into a mysterious colorful blob that has sealed in a small area of land along an American Southeastern marsh. It has been there for three years, growing slowly since a tiny asteroid crashed into a lighthouse on the shore, and any and all people (made up of male soldiers) that have gone in have not ever been heard from again. Except one. That would be Kane (Oscar Isaac), the husband of one of the women, Lena (Natalie Portman), she a former soldier herself turned biologist. Problem is, he is terribly ill, and acting very strange. But is he really Kane?
Inside the ‘Shimmer’ as it’s called, the women right away find a world in turmoil. On a cellular level, the very structure of life within the walls of the entity are shifting and combining DNA, where species of plants are joining and animals are becoming mutated. An alligator, for example, has rows of teeth like a shark, and a bear, well, when it attacks and kills one of the women (Tuva Novotny), it absorbs her cells and growls using the woman’s last cries for help. Disturbing.
The film is based on a book by Jeff VanderMeer, though writer/director Alex Garland‘s adaptation departs greatly from the original story, even as it retains many elements of the core themes. Most important of these is the idea of reflection, that the entity or being that has come to Earth is casting a mirror on humanity and their place in nature, yet is of course much more layered. Garland, who you might recall earned a wave of high praise for his directorial debut in 2015 with his equally ambiguous and challenging film, Ex Machina, another film about a woman who who makes a startling discovery about herself. Here though, Garland pushes his audience down a more cavernous and thorny rabbit hole and tasks us with far more to ponder.
THE LIGHTHOUSE
Let’s start with the lighthouse. It is where the being crashes on our planet and is high metaphorical. Lighthouses traditionally stand on the precipice of great unknowns and vast open seas of uncertainty, attempting to guide and warn those travelling upon it about their location, often acting as a beacon for safety and a signal that they are close to home. In this story, the same is true, the lighthouse at the center of the chaos around it, and while within it, the ‘answers’ lie, it’s symbolic light casts more shadow than illumination. All who enter try to reach it, believing it will be a haven of answers. What it does provide is harbor for evolution, especially in the end when Lena faces her double. The lighthouse literally shines with new possiblity. More on that in a bit.
THE DOUBLE
There are two doubles really in the film, with Kane the first, who we come to learn later is in fact a created doppelganger of Lena’s husband. He is not dangerous, or at least immediately, a vessel of inquiry, always learning, scanning, and considering. This is in line with many unconventional aliens in movies. Think of John Carpenter‘s Starman or Jonathan Glazer‘s brilliant Under the Skin. That film in fact is remarkably similar to Annihilation, with a vaguely human-shaped creature perhaps only looking to explore and understand, causing irreparable damage to the people they encounter (even if larger themes separate them). In Annihilation, it’s our hubris that convinces us that whatever this Shimmer is, it is even thinking of people, for to it, life on our planet is simply combinations of DNA, which to them is easy to alter. What difference does it make if it is a crocodile, a bear, a plant or a person?
When it is humans that confront it though, it manifests itself into a double, and in the process utterly wrecks the host or rather original, turning it into an unstable collection of cells, causing memories and mental functions to dissipate and organs to reanimate into slithering guts. More importantly though, and what is central to the story, is its mirroring, which allows these characters to deeply examine themselves, and in a larger sense, humanity itself. Who and what are we? Faced with this, each person is mostly unable to cope, each eventually accepting their fates, some absorbed into the Shimmer and some taking their own lives. Indeed, each of the women we meet on the final expedition have their own demons and face their ends unilaterally tied to these haunts. The Shimmer means something different to everyone. Yet while there are others, this story is really about Lena.
LENA
What do we know about this stoic, often somber woman? At the start, we sense that she is deeply troubled, and soon learn that Kane, her husband, has been gone for a year on a mission so secret she has no clue what it’s about. It is presumed he is dead, and yet even after all this time, she can’t move on. They were greatly in love. She is consoled by Daniel (David Gyasi), another professor at the university where she teaches. He hopes she can find peace, but what we discover a bit later is that Lena and Daniel where actually having a torrid sexual affair before Kane was even offered the job. Here we see the first roots of guilt that propel the story, and if fact, it is in this shadow where the film becomes metaphorical of Lena’s journey. Let me explain.
The lighthouse for Lena is their marriage. It is the symbolic sanctuary for which a wedding is – for many couples – a beacon and haven for safety and security in a vast world of unknowns. The violent alien being that crashes into the structure is the affair. It’s small and initially ineffectual, a tiny blemish that many might not even see, but it ever so slowly begins to change things around it on a deeply cellular level. For Lena’s marriage, these are the first threads of destruction … or annihilation and the damage she has caused is rotting her from the inside, changing her. In truth, we suspect – as does she on the day he departs for his mission – that Kane already knows of the sexual tryst, and even with that knowledge (though he never admits it), confesses that he will always love her.
So now we have Lena venturing into the Shimmer, a place that literally tasks its explorers to reflect upon themselves, even if that comes in less than ambiguous methods. She survives to the end, to reach the lighthouse, the freestanding representation of her marriage where in it, she finds her real husband, having committed suicide by phosphorus grenade and proof that the man she met earlier is but a replica of him. The team leader of Lena’s expedition, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), has also come to this spot carrying terminal cancer, and is committing herself to the being lying in the dark bowels of the impact crater below the building. In the process, in a striking visual moment, the being takes the form of an undulating ball and annihilates Ventress, soaking her into the sphere, and in the process, a droplet of blood from Lena’s face. In essence, the cancer comes to be symbolic of the hurt and guilt nestled within Lena, and she literally gives a piece of herself to having it eradicated, but in truth, something more remarkable happens. The cancer is absorbed and the ball takes on a new form. That of a structurally accurate human, a building block that soon becomes just like Lena.
While that transformation takes place, the creature follows the real Lena about the base of the lighthouse, echoing her every move, a sort of mirrored synchronized dance. It’s oddly beautiful until the being traps her against the wall face first, and in a horrifying moment, seems to abuse her sexually, at least in physical representation, forcing Lena to seemingly give up the demons within her, to allow the alien to be fully Lena. It’s traumatizing.
READ MORE: Review of the Natalie Portman Thriller Annihilation
Now complete, Lena is still desperate to survive, and using the mirroring methods of the being, manages to use a phosphorus grenade to set the new Lena on fire, which in turns causes the lighthouse to go ablaze, and soon all of the Shimmer. Lena is burning down the house per se, admitting that her infidelities are her own mistakes and looking to start anew.
She escapes the carnage, and in the final moments, is reunited at the military facility where the new Kane is waiting, now suddenly fully recovered and completely revived. She joins him alone and asks him if he is the ‘real kane’, to which her replies, “I don’t think so.” He asks her the same, but she does not reply, instead embracing him, where the camera swings about and reveals that both their eyes are well, shimmering. They have both grown past the affair, both faced the consequences and pain of what it has done to them, their ‘home’ burned and the bodies of the man who knew it immolated and his wife’s guilt taken and set aflame. Thus, they begin again, a new light in their eyes.
Now, certainly, this final revelation could have much larger meaning. Perhaps the Shimmer has done what it always intended, and now firmly embedded with the DNA of the new Kane and changed Lena will reset the course of evolution for Man itself. It’s wonderfully open to debate. So what do you think? Let’s talk in the comments below.