Sci-Fi Gets Psychedelic in Uncanny Annihilation
Annihilation / directed by Alex Garland
Annihilation starts off grand and cosmic: a meteor flies through space and crashes into Earth. Then we stay cosmic but more grounded - we’re in the biology class of Lena (Nathalie Portman), teaching med students about the basic cellular nature of life. We gather that Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) is a soldier, and is presumed dead after being missing for a year. But as she moves about her bedroom back at home, repainting the walls, he appears silently in the doorway. He has returned, but also not: Kane can’t remember where he’s been, or how he got home, and then proceeds to begin coughing up blood. Their ambulance is intercepted by armed soldiers, and Lena is sedated; when she awakens, a woman named Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) informs her of double horrors - her husband is seriously ill, and was involved in a mission to explore an uncanny irruption in a sparsely populated, swampy region of the U.S. that’s being termed “the shimmer.”
Lena is able to look at this phenomenon herself, as she’s been brought to the base of operations just outside its border. We know it’s related to the meteor we saw at the beginning, and that its expansion will soon start gobbling up cities -- but that’s really all we know. A languorous apocalyptic fatalism seems to have taken hold of both Dr. Ventress and the other people she meets. All previous attempts to send in people to explore the shimmer have resulted in failure: no transmissions have come out of the area, and none of the people have returned, save for Lena’s husband.
From a distance, the shimmer is just that, a sort of wavy distortion in the air; but closer up, it assumes the rainbowy quiver of bubbles that might have been extruded from the hookah smoked by that caterpillar in Alice’s wonderland fever dream. And inside --which is where Lena and four other women are soon sent -- it’s a psychedelic kandy-kolored fever dream. Bright fungus and flowers adorn the vegetation, and the light itself seems tinted with off-kilter hues. Our sense of disorientation is heightened by Lena’s; one moment she’s walking through the shivery border into the shimmer, the next she’s lost in memories, and the next she’s waking up in a tent, emerging to learn that the team has been in this eerie zone for three or four days already, but that none of them can remember anything up to that point.
It very quickly becomes clear that various life forms in the shimmer are mutating like mad, flowers and animal jumping species in an impossible rush. It’s a vortex of ordered chaos. Danger arises from mutant creatures that lurk in the water and in the dark; and also from the explorers’ own psyches, as their brains turn to paranoid jello under the pressure of this gene-splicing microwave cooker of a shimmer. And yet, once this basic concept is understood, the film sometimes feels stuck simply re-playing the same idea in various iterations. Whether it’s a dead man whose body has been sundered and splattered across a pool like an ancient totem, or video of previous visitors to this region slicing open the belly of one of their own to reveal what look to be intestines transformed into living worms, or a grotesque bear that takes on the distorted voice of the person it killed, we behold body horror of many shades. The boundaries of what it means to be alive are unsettled; meaning is destroyed.
The psyches of Lena and Kane seem to mysteriously inform aspects of what’s happening within the shimmer. After all, Lena seems to be the only one of the expedition not physically affected by the region; and the push and pull of alienation and attraction that we learn through economical flashbacks to her life with Kane seem echoed in her encounter with this unknown other. The climax, a psychedelic encounter with doppelgangers and fountains of light and primordial tunnels, is Annihilation’s boldest attempt to join the unknowable with more familiar human emotions. Indeed, its attempts to show how humans relate to a profound otherness, and how a profound otherness might attempt to relate (or not!) to us, is an interest it shares wish other recent-ish sci-fi films like Under the Skin and Arrival. And its attempts to connect this to how humans connect or don’t to each other are ambitious and complex.
Annihilation displays the strains of cool reserve and underplayed dread that were so striking in Alex Garland’s previous, first film, Ex Machina. Annihilation doesn’t necessarily feel as coherent, perhaps an inevitable result of a world where there are in some ways no rules, and where the eerie otherness on display jostles uneasily with genre conventions like the doomed expedition and shocks of animal-inflicted violence that can’t help but feel at odds with the grand disorienting panorama that fills the screen. And this is one of those films that reminds you of the amazing things that can be done with creative set design and contemporary special effects: it’s often queasy-beautiful, garish and wild like a forbidden planet you’d do well not to eat the fruit of, a film of searing imagery and transcendental aspirations.
