This is science fiction at its very best. Like Arrival and Ex Machina, Annihilation takes what is already a fascinating premise and relies on smart storytelling to creep under your skin and mess with your mind. It's a work of visionary genius, an immersive experience beyond what I imagined, thrilling and horrifying but beautiful and wondrous. It's the kind of movie that comes out when least expected, hits you where it counts, and haunts you afterward.
Natalie Portman plays biologist Lena, whose missing husband shows up at home but seems different somehow. He falls ill, and en route to the hospital they are abducted by a government organization called Southern Reach. Taken to a remote location, called "Area X" in what must be Florida or Louisiana, the Southern Reach has been studying a mysterious region cut off from the world by "The Shimmer". Before you get totally turned off by the silly sci-fi proper nouns, just know that's about where it ends.
The Shimmer, an oily boundary stretching from ground to sky, is expanding slowly, and no research teams who entered have returned (save the husband, played by Oscar Isaac). Dr. Ventress (a chilly Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist in charge of the facility, assembles a team of women to go in and learn what the men could not, and Lena joins them. Weird shit happens immediately, as the women wake up apparently four days later with no memory of their actions during that time. Not long after, monsters beset the team and claim victims. As they get closer to the lighthouse, the epicenter of this dreamlike landscape, reality is warped and matter is in a constant state of cellular mutation. Alien biology? Multiple dimensions? Spiritual manifestations? Who knows what the hell is happening here. That's why it's great science fiction.
There are almost no answers in this movie. Its beauty is in its ambiguity and mystery. It forces you to think and pulls no punches, even during its scenes of visceral body horror (I will forever see those swirling tentacles in my belly). Each shot is an artistic masterpiece, from kaleidoscopic lichens and mold to trees made of sand-turned-glass. The rainbow gleams in every other shot remind us of where we are and of the oily slick that makes the Shimmer beautiful but distinctly toxic. Writer and director Alex Garland is a master of visual beauty as well as tonal complexity: His movie changes temperature and volume seemingly without effort, and he assaults you with so many arresting visuals you don't always have time to check yourself and remind your brain that you're okay.
Garland and his characters mix deadpan with melodrama, spectacle with mind fuckery so much that the film quickly becomes a cerebral jungle. Its cosmic horror isn't just in the human body or biology at large, but in the very mode of storytelling. Flashbacks and flashforwards interrupt the narrative while the mythic strength of a quest into a heart of darkness / into hell / for a beloved potently invites a wide range of speculation and interpretation. Which, really, is what science fiction is all about.
IMDb; Annihilation
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