In trying to collect my thoughts on Annihilation, my mind kept returning to that earlier scifi/horror “humans are overrun by a new order” classic Jurassic Park, and that film’s own relative optimism. Putting aside one-liners like “must go faster” and “clever girl,” I feel like that film’s soul was captured in the line “life finds a way.” It’s unsurprising that a heart-on-sleeve director like Spielberg would make a movie about dinosaurs eating people into something life-affirming, and I can’t help but shiver at the contrast between that and Alex Garland’s comparatively soul-destroying Annihilation. Life might find a way in Annihilation, but it’s highly doubtful that we’ll be finding a way along with it.

Annihilation is a film about death. Wait, no, that’s insufficient – Annihilation really is a film about annihilation, about the utter erasing of the self. Death implies a physical self, a past, and the potential existence of lingering emotional threads, echoes of personhood that still tether us to the world. The “heroes” of Annihilation want to walk into a murky, effervescent void and cease entirely, to have no past, present, or future at all.

Annihilation centers on Lena, a cellular biologist and former soldier whose husband Kane was assumed lost on a mysterious military expedition. Seemingly hollowed by his absence, Lena sleepwalks through life, teaching classes without enthusiasm and pushing away friends who reach out to her. Eventually, her husband reappears – but it’s clear something terrible has happened to him. His eyes are distant, thoughts scattered, and when she tries to take him to a hospital, the two are quickly swarmed and captured by the military.

As we soon learn, Kane wasn’t really “discharged” in the traditional sense – he’d gone through the Shimmer, Annihilation’s great conceit. The Shimmer is a strange, mercurial boundary line somewhere in the Florida panhandle, an alien wall beyond which reality tends to warp. As the Shimmer researcher Dr. Ventress explains, humanity’s understanding of the Shimmer is limited, because no one who’s gone through has ever come back out. All we know is that it’s alien in origin, presumably hostile, and slowly growing.

The base setup of Annihilation’s narrative offers a magnificently alluring hook for a classic science fiction journey of discovery. The world of the Shimmer itself is one of this film’s greatest triumphs, a place where the familiar is altered just enough to seem utterly unnatural, and the truly unimaginable lurks around every turn. Standing at the fertile crossroads of science fiction and horror, Annihilation knows that implication is far more terrifying than revelation, and also that it can be far more horrifying to see the mundane made strange than to see something utterly foreign. Images like an old soldier slowly growing into a gymnasium pool, or a field of humanoid flowers, rest at a comfortable median point of horrifying implication and clinical explanation. This is the vein the SCP foundation mines so successfully – “scientists clinically addressing the inconceivably horrible, the wholly fantastical, the utterly foreign yet far too close to home.”

This sense of familiar unrightness is further bolstered by the physical experience of living within the Shimmer. Time seems to move sideways in this place, or perhaps bloom in all directions at once. It’s easy to lose your bearings both physically and temporally, leading to a sense of stasis and confusion, and even the idea that you’re basically losing track of yourself. This is evocative in a dramatic sense, but also seems crucial in a thematic sense – this is a very, very dark narrative, and though it certainly torments our heroes with external threats like mutated bears and malicious vegetation, the true threat always comes from within.

“We’re all damaged goods,” as one of Lena’s Shimmer-crossing companions Cass puts it. But “damaged goods” seems like a vast understatement for what she’s really implying. Cass’s lost daughter, Lena’s husband, Ventress’ approaching death by cancer – all of these motivations go far beyond “scars,” because the bare fact of these women entering the Shimmer means they were all actively planning to die. You don’t go to the Shimmer to heal – after years and years of failed, no-survivors military expeditions, you only join a planned scientific expedition because you are prepared to erase yourself. Lena and her companions enter the Shimmer to annihilate themselves, and in their own ways, all of them succeed.

It might seem strange to say Lena entered the Shimmer to erase herself, given she herself frames this journey as a quest to save her husband. But in a reversal of traditional dramatic structure, as the film continues, Lena’s original motivation only becomes less and less convincing. It’s clear from early on that their marriage wasn’t a perfect one, but as flashback arguments and infidelities spool out, it becomes uncertain whether there was truly anything there to save. The scene of Lena cheating on her husband with a coworker seems most crucial here, largely due to its lack of emotional affect. Lena expresses essentially no feelings towards the man she cheats on her husband with either before or after the event. Though her journey into the Shimmer clarifies her intentions, it seems clear that due to depression or fatigue or a simple lack of desire for the alternative, Lena had been trying to erase her identity, her marriage, and her existence since long before her husband disappeared.

The fatalism of Annihilation’s leads make it uniquely suited to promote some sort of optimistic “we’re giving way to the next stage of evolution” message, but Annihilation denies us even the hope of someone else’s future. Though it’s quite dangerous and certainly untameable, the fundamental nature of the Shimmer feels like that of a child – ignorant, curious, entranced with all that is new. Our heroes describe the Shimmer’s effect on the landscape as like that of a prism refracting light, iterating on our own world’s landscape and creatures, fusing with the old and creating something original. There is nothing malicious in the Shimmer’s intent; it is creation for its own sake, life as its own reward. But it encroaches on our land and we must kill it, and ultimately, our fundamental nature is too poisonous for the Shimmer to consume and live.

Lena and her companions’ journey through the Shimmer eventually leads them to the lighthouse, the point where its alien seed first landed. Of course, at that point, there’s not much left of her companions – all but Lena and Ventress have succumbed to nothingness, and as Lena reaches Ventress, she too merges with the Shimmer. Rushing to escape, Lena is pursued by the Shimmers’ perpetual promise, a reflection of herself refracted through its strange biology. And Lena offers this new child of evolution her most precious gift: the burning, all-swallowing emptiness within her, a phosphorous grenade whose chemistry ripples through the Shimmer itself, swallowing all of its beautiful disarray.

I don’t see hope in Annihilation’s conclusion, but I don’t see bitterness, either. The film itself seems to sympathize with its characters, and almost applaud them for succeeding in their journey towards nothingness. Though humanity strikes at the Shimmer because it fears destruction, it is ultimately humanity’s instinct towards self-destruction that prompts the Shimmer’s collapse; Lena offers her fire to the seed, and through doing so makes humanity’s contribution to the next generation her instinct towards oblivion. In return, the Shimmer replaces both Lena and Kane, ensuring its own survival while granting their desired annihilation. No one will remember Lena, because Lena is gone. Though the film seems almost obligated to frame this as a last-second twist, it also seems like Lena’s eyes reflecting the gasoline rainbow of a doppelganger was her own happy ending.

Ultimately, the beauty and desolation of this film reminds me of one other similarly titled, similarly themed production – Apocalypse Now. There too, an old soldier traveled deep into the heart of an untamed wilderness, and in those reaches found a darkness both unknowable and strangely familiar. Here in Annihilation, there is no comforting shadow between us and the darkness, no obscuring fog or distance of age to console us. Here in these sighs of desperation and encroaching bayous, the glass reflects clearly, and the vision it contains feels too familiar to bear.

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