Movie review: "Annihilation"

writ. and dir. by Alex Garland

Horror and science fiction are both presently enjoying modest renaissance periods. For horror films, the likes of It Follows and The Witch provide clever twists on common horror motifs, whereas recent sci-fi marvels like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 use their imaginative worlds to tell very human stories and explore fascinating philosophical concepts. Writer-director Alex Garland was at the forefront of the latter wave with his 2015 feature Ex Machina, a nebulous yet fascinating bit of speculative fiction which placed as much weight on the personalities of its leads as on the technology of its core. That film ultimately devolved into a deranged slasher film, high-energy but bland and comically overheated, but its questions lingered in the mind.

With his new film, an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Garland has mixed the thoughtful science fiction of his prior film with foreboding tension and intelligent scares, finding synthesis between these two reemerging genres. However, this new film proves even more nebulous, and despite now having popular source material to work with, his intellectual and pulp impulses continue to be at odds with each other, and while the latter is as sharp as it's ever been, the former drowns in a cliched, expository script, where an actual human core to the story has been sacrificed in favour of imaginative digital effects. Like fellow writer-turned-director Taylor Sheridan's Wind River, Annhilation is an extremely taut demonstration of Garland's astonishing formal skill, and yet it's the thing he made his name on which falters. 

As a slow, tense genre movie with strong world building, however? It's not half bad!

When celluar biologist Lena's husband comes home from a highly classified military operation, she finds him acting strangely. However, when she tries to bring him to the hospital, the two are kidnapped by the government and taken to "Area X," where Lena (played by Natalie Portman) discovers exactly what her husband came back from: a zone of strange light distortions referred to as "The Shimmer," from which he is the only person out of several squads sent in to return. Later, she joins a group of four other scientists - psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), paramedic Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), and anthropologist Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) - to lead yet another expedition. 

The Shimmer itself is the most accomplished aspect of the film. Along their journey, the scientists find all sorts of bizarre life forms, each of which is more imaginatively rendered than the last. The environment is beautifully imagined, a dense see of trees between which dance prismatic shimmers of light. Massive flower formations overtake several prominent locations, whereas others are unnervingly dim and decrepit. The final act in particular ups the ante to increasingly abstract ends, an surreal alien tapestry made all the stranger from having sprung out of the world we know. I'm not certain if the art designers simply translated the novel's descriptions, but the aesthetic is genuinely astonishing, and it's supported by vivid sound design which, like the visuals, grows increasingly jarring and abstract in the final stretch. 

Garland also has a strong touch for maintaining tension, slowly building up anticipation for whichever dangers might be found. As the protagonists crawl through the mysterious jungle, there's a constant sense of danger, enhanced by the slow build of the narrative and the grim soundtrack drones which accompany it. It's genuinely stressful, to the extent that I wouldn't recommend the film to people who are sensitive to such things. The scares he does let loose are mostly conventional jumps, but the film certainly earns them, and a few moments of body horror are properly nightmarish. In addition, one particularly memorable scene involving a bear is as imaginatively terrifying as any number of accomplished horror films. In other scenes, his patient approach lends majesty to the peculiarities of this world, and on rare occasion he combines both to truly disorienting effect. 

Alas, when Garland attempts to ground all of his formal control in some sort of human core is where Annihilation fails. I'm not sure whether several flashback scenes to Lena's past are within the book, but they're uniformly trite, and while the film tries to incorporate them with exposition about others' pasts to say something about humans being self-destructive, it struggles to explore that any further than making its protagonists generically damaged, and whatever interiority the novel possessed is largely absent here. Several characters make decisions apparently based on having nothing left to lose, but even if this wasn't profoundly cliched, it's also revealed exclusively through exposition, to the point where Lena at one point states that theme out loud. These people aren't terribly interesting on their own either; for instance, one of them is briefly suggested to be LGBT in some manner, but from there her personality is blandly gruff at best and entirely indistinct at worst. 

Several smaller moments of drama are similarly cliched, most notably an obligatory breakdown of trust which represents the movie's nadir. There's also a bolted-on framing story based on Lena being interviewed at Area X, immediately turning the the entire story into a flashback and removing some of the narrative's mystery. According to people who've read the book, this an original addition, and is most likely meant to replace some of the internal monologue, but it's largely ineffective at much other than breaking the tension, serving at best as a distraction and at worse to spoil events still to come. And yet, despite the film bringing up fertile subject matter as regards human metamorphosis and extraterrestrial life, it fails to interrogate those concepts, and instead undercuts whatever emotion its final moments brought up with an overly tidy conclusion. 

Despite all of that, the film's world is so enigmatic and intriguing that it's still able to conjure a sense of mystery. All of the terrestrial life forms within the Shimmer are warped into unusual shapes, and while occasionally these oddities need to be explained a couple seconds after they're relevant, the majority remain visually intriguing, and the actual source of the Shimmer is allowed to lay unexplained as a potent narrative hook. The pseudoscience is easy to follow and generally bizarre enough to fascinate even viewers who usually resist such explanations, although one or two events are explained through faux-spiritual assertions which aren't even given the slightest veneer of legitimacy. 

It's the sheer fascination brought by the setting, as well as the imaginative aesthetics and Garland's tight tonal control, which keep Annihilation entertaining as genre fare. This is an incredibly tense movie with some strong horror imagery and an excitingly surreal final act, and the patient pace goes some distance to building an atmosphere which can overcome the script's cliches, if just barely. If you come here looking for bigger ideas, however, there's a lot of narrative and character issues to put up with, and finding any juicy thematic tidbits means wading through the rote exposition and extrapolating from setting's implications. If Garland were to ditch his pretenses of intelligence and make a straightforward genre film, he could truly realize his potential, but for the second time in a row, his pulp sensibility overcomes the diffuse narrative strands of his writing. 

7/10

+ Extremely tense, with a few strong horror sequences. 

+ Visuals and audio are gorgeous and imaginative. 

+ Intriguing central mystery.

- Themes and human drama are disappointingly cliched. 

- Characters aren't very well-defined. 

- If you're put off by stressful movies, this isn't for you.


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