'Annihilation' conjures potent mix of sci-fi dread and wonder
“Annihilation” — ★ ★ ★
“The Shimmer” is the name given to the mysterious phenomenon that, after a meteor strike, settles along a swampy Florida coastline in Alex Garland's “Annihilation.” It's an area enclosed by a fluid, translucent wall bathed in an eerie rainbow glimmer.
Efforts to determine what's inside the steadily expanding Shimmer have proved futile. Only one person has ever entered and returned. To step inside is to step into the unknown.
The same could be said for those who see “Annihilation,” a trippy, mind-bending cinematic experience that plunges you into a disorienting and dreamlike science fiction that contorts and disintegrates much of the genre's conventions.
“Annihilation,” which is partly based on Jeff VanderMeer's novel, is not flawless. There's an often awkward distance here between Garland's grand ambitions and his mid-sized-budget visual effects, between VanderMeer's immersive imagination and the necessities of physicalizing fantasy in a movie.
But rarely has a film conjured such a thick atmosphere of dread and wonder as “Annihilation,” a movie that unfolds, grippingly, as an existential mystery.
Lena (Natalie Portman) is an ex-Army biology professor at Johns Hopkins whose soldier husband (Oscar Isaac), after being gone for a year, returns from a secret mission unable to explain where he's been. He promptly begins to spit up blood and, in the ambulance ride to the hospital, is overtaken by a swarm of police vehicles.
Lena is introduced to the Shimmer by a laconic psychologist (a miscast Jennifer Jason Leigh) in charge of fielding missions. She, herself, is going in, pulled by inescapable curiosity. Lena joins their group, an all-female squad including a paramedic (a scene-stealing Gina Rodriguez), a physicist (Tessa Thompson) and an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny).
With “Ghostbusters”-like backpacks, they enter the Shimmer where bewilderments and horrors await. They immediately wake up in their tents, unsure how they spent the last three days. In the lush, tropical forest, they marvel at the teaming mutated species while evading fantastical beasts.
It's an intoxicatingly weird fantasia, beautifully photographed by Rob Hardy. While early on the music fails to match the visuals, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury's score grows steadily more hypnotic until a sonically shattering climax.
As frightful as the surroundings are, self-destruction is the theme of “Annihilation.” Each of the five come into the Shimmer marked by their own interior afflictions — a suicide attempt, cancer, addiction, or, in Lena's case, the guilt of betrayal. “Annihilation” is filled with the science of mutating cells — “the rhythm of the dividing pair” — and the suggestion that self-destruction is natural, in molecules and in relationships.
If this sounds rather soupy, well, it is. “Annihilation” struggles to connect that insight into its entrancing psychedelia. Lena's back story is only glimpsed in brief flashbacks, and her companions' emotions are unexplored. Something doesn't quite sync, even as “Annihilation” renders those inner conflicts with cosmic grandeur.
Once “Annihilation” — which deviates greatly from the book in its third act — starts solving its enigmas, the spell begins to break. But Garland's film is seldom not something to behold. In the unexplained, unknowable world of the Shimmer, there are moments electric with possibility that anything can happen. That's a rare feeling in big-screen science fiction, and Garland's film — daring, messy, exploding with ideas — nearly lives up to the promise of its title.
• • •
Starring: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez
Directed by: Alex Garland
Other: A Paramount Pictures release. Rated R for violence, language and some sexuality. 115 minutes