REVIEW: Annihilation

Courtesy of Paramount

Simply put, writer-director Alex Garland’s sci-fi fever dream (very loosely based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer) is one of the best movies of 2018. I know it’s only March, but this hauntingly beautiful story hasn’t left my mind since I saw it a couple of weeks ago. It’s taken me that long to figure out how to express my thoughts on it. I have a feeling it’ll stay with me throughout the rest of the year.

The plot of Annihilation is deceptively simple. Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist and former soldier, joins three other women (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny) on a mission to research a sinister and mysterious phenomenon nicknamed The Shimmer. However, Lena harbors a secret motive: her long-missing husband (Oscar Isaac) was part of a previous team who went in and she wants to learn what happened to him. Once inside, the women discover a world of mutated landscapes and creatures – simultaneously dangerous and deadly – that threatens both their lives and their sanity.

Garland, whose Ex Machina is a legitimate masterpiece, follows up that piece of sci-fi brilliance with another look at what it means to be human. Once again, he arrives at an answer that somehow manages to be bleak and hopeful at the same time, depending on which angle you look at it. He also crafts an absolutely beautiful, albeit disturbing, world inside The Shimmer. One particular creature featured prominently in my nightmares for a while after I saw the film.

Portman leads a cast of extraordinarily talented actresses, all of whom deliver fantastic performances. I feel like she’s been so reliably great for so long that we take her for granted. As Lena, she takes a mostly internal character – a woman of few, carefully chosen words – and makes her a fully-realized person the audience has no problem understanding.

However, the biggest reason to see Annihilation is how the first 90 minutes serve as a slow burn leading up to one of the most bonkers final acts I’ve ever seen on the big screen. The last 20-30 minutes are basically a one-woman show and Portman handles it masterfully.

Unfortunately, based on Paramount’s release strategy (including dumping the film straight to Netflix in international markets), the studio apparently didn’t have faith that mainstream audiences could handle Garland’s heady mix of sci-fi, horror and allegory. True, many viewers don’t like movies that leave elements of the narrative open to interpretation instead of spelling things out with giant bold letters. But there are still quite a few of us out there who appreciate filmmakers who trust we’re smart enough to keep up.

Word-of-mouth seems to be stronger than expected, which means Annihilation has stuck around longer than I anticipated. However, if you want to see this on the big screen – which I highly recommend – you should make plans to do so quickly.

Annihilation is rated R for violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality.

Grade: A-