‘Annihilation’: Alex Garland Creates A Spellbinding Sci-Fi Masterpiece [Review]

Screenwriter turned writer/director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina“) pulls off a phenomenal, biochemical magic trick in the luminescent “Annihilation.” In his lab, the ingenious filmmaker trickles eyedropper notions of the molecular, the psychological, the metaphysical and the celestial into a dish, swirls his finger into this ribonucleic soup and produces a dazzling and disorienting mindbender of the highest order. Garland’s latest — a measured, but mesmerizing dramatic sci-fi thriller about self-imposed devastation — cements his status as a modern auteur and a virtuoso of forming vivid, visceral and out-of-body experiences. Sweating with an ethereal pulse and a looming corporeal dread, if Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg teamed up to make a cerebral “weird nature” horror movie, it might look a little bit like “Annihilation.”

Unnervingly dream-like and unknowable, with a sinister undertow at its essence, “Annihilation” is some haunting, next level shit and a thoughtful meditation on the objective and subjective qualities of self-destruction. No disrespect to Danny Boyle, who directed the Garland-penned, modern sci-fi classics like “Sunshine” and “28 Days Later” — those efforts seem pedestrian in comparison.

Based on the acclaimed novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a biologist and former soldier who joins a covert all-female expedition into the affected region known as “Area X” — an otherworldly, biomorphically contaminated twilight zone — to uncover what happened to her mysteriously afflicted husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac). A special-forces operative, Kane’s the first-ever survivor to return from this tainted and inexplicable realm, and upon his shocking reappearance one year later, he’s dying. Scores of teams have disappeared inside the radiant biomass, also known as “The Shimmer”— fenced in by a translucent electro-magnetic field — but the groups have been all-male commando forces thus far. Trying to contain the story, as the shadowy government becomes more anxious about the existence of “Area X” going public, they opt for a more scientific, data-gathering excursion into the bizarre and transformative landscape.

Joined by a group of doctors and scientists — a quartet of disaffected women played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Tuva Novotny — the clock is ticking away for both Lena and civilization. Area 54 has nothing on The Shimmer which keeps, growing, expanding and engulfing the terrain around it inch by inch. The fear is, as The Shimmer continues to swell, it will soon take over cities, states and more. As the women delve deeper into the swamps of the sphere, they encounter strange and dangerous metamorphosed beasts, inexplicable mutations and succumb to fear, paranoia and mental disintegration.

Featuring troubled characters — one with critical survival instincts, a second fuelled by scientific curiosity, another dangerously depressed — these women are all traumatized to one degree or another which is why they all agree to enter in what many think is yet another suicide mission into the abyss. They’re all “damaged goods” as one character says.

Playing with time and memory, literally and figuratively — a flashback structure moves fluidly between a refracted past, present and future — Garland toys with linearity to craft superb tension with compounds of suspense and mystery. A loss of equilibrium manifests for both the characters and viewers as time distortion, a side-effect of The Shimmer, produces a hallucinatory impression.

As fascinated as the movie is with our DNA, body horror-esque anatomy and bionomic aberration, Garland also tracks ideas of perception, reality-altering fiction and even self-delusion. Portman’s character is fixated on discovering the truth of what’s causing this potential catastrophe and illness killing her husband. But as she tunnels deeper into the unfathomable territory, and the emotional core of the story reveals itself, she begins to come to some crushing self-realizations about the ways she’s sabotaged her relationship. And the manner in which Garland makes a composite of these ideas — self-destructive behavior, self-harm and the illusory truths that we tell ourselves in order to survive — is an absorbing sublayer underneath the entrancing biopsychological narrative and subtext about invading species and environmental retribution.

Featuring a hypnotic score courtesy of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury that complements the film’s unearthly temperature, mood is crucial to the movie which is at times, freakish, disturbing and outright terrifying. Garland sets the viewer into an unsettling feeling that never recedes and the crippling anxiety only grows worse. The likening to drugs and lysergic acid is a bit of a tired cliché in reviews of feverish movies, but damn, if that’s not accurate here. “Annihilation” is gradually, creepingly discombobulating and its perception-altering slant has the quality of liquid; the haze of what passes for reality and time feels porous and free-flowing.

“Annihilation” plays with similar ideas of bacterias and adulterated organisms seen in Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” and “Alien Covenant.” But while Scott tries to sneak in heady philosophies into mainstream horror franchises, Garland doesn’t have time for that kind of compromising nonsense and simply operates on a much higher astral plane. Visually, the abstract movie is stunning, with its beautiful and hallucinatory VFX landing somewhere in between the cosmic Rorschach blots of “The Tree Of Life,” the eerie profiles of “Under The Skin” and a unique paroxysm of H.R. Giger and phosphorescent atoms.

A hypnogogic nightmare, a trippy biolab you wouldn’t want to study in, and a masterful achievement about the terrors and ecstasies of the microbial, if “Annihilation is Garland’s shot at his own psychedelic space odyssey, he’s not far off the mark. At the very least, one cannot deny how ambitious the picture is. “Annihilation” is spellbinding and its awe-inspiring conclusion will leave your mind blown and splattered against the wall. In its final, surreal biopsychological moments the movie goes into an astonishing interstellar gear. A visionary experience with monumental dimension, Kubrick, his Starchild and his lasting sci-fi legacy would be proud. [A]