A heady sci-fi with one of the best executions of cosmic horror that I've ever seen on film.
This mind-bending blend of cosmic horror and conceptual sci-fi has three of my absolute favorite descriptors attached to it:
1. Written and directed by
Alex Garland2.
Lovecraftian3. Surreal
Based on the first novel in
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, Garland took the confined but intricate world-building of his brilliant debut film in 2014,
Ex Machina (
my favorite film of the decade), and expanded it tenfold. The character development isn’t nearly as deep as
Ex Machina, and
Annihilation seems like it may have worked better as a television series just because it is so expansive (but impressively cohesive for its scale), so it feels like we’re just skimming the surface with not only the characters, but the environment as well.
With that being said, the atmosphere is incredibly immersive, and Garland pulls off “cosmic horror” - the submissive and inescapable fear when met with something beyond human comprehension, where if one isn’t consumed or transformed by the entity itself, the reality-shattering knowledge of its existence drives most to suicide or utter madness (it’s understandably an extremely difficult sub-genre to execute in film) - about as well as I’ve ever seen.
Annihilation is not a forgiving film though, and it doesn’t cater to audiences. The story follows a group of scientist-soldiers who are sent to investigate a meteor that struck the southern coast of the United States and is emanating an ever-expanding “Shimmer” that mutates organic life forms. The majority of the biological concepts the characters discuss while hypothesizing about The Shimmer went way over my head on my first viewing, and I still don’t have a complete grasp on it, but I absolutely respect Garland for not dumbing the film down. In movies like this where there’s still so much more to discover after the initial viewing, it’s like the film itself mutates the longer you stay with it, resulting in new and more rewarding ways to experience the world the filmmakers built.
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