Annihilation

I watched “Annihilation” last night, not having any idea what to expect. When it was over I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

It wasn’t just that the storyline was riveting–why is there is an alien “shimmer” surrounding acres of land and why can’t anyone emerge alive from it?…was the main protagonist’s past life not as perfect as we’d first imagined?–it was that I wondered if there was a bunch of subtext that I’d barely given thought to as the movie was playing.

In “Annihilation,” Lena is a soldier/scholar who ends up exploring “The Shimmer ” so she can find out what happened to her presumed-dead husband, the only person who managed to escape from it.

In it, she finds a prism-colored world, where flowers and animals mutate wildly, people turn into flowers, animals internalize the and screams of the people they kill. And as she goes deeper into The Shimmer she finds everything is refracted. Things reflected  at each other, taking on the characteristics of the reflected. It’s horrifying and it’s beautiful. It’s nightmarish. It’s “dreamlike,” as Lena concedes in one of her interrogation scenes. And I couldn’t look away.

While “Annihilation” is certainly imperfect–too many long scenes of people looking at things, some pacing problems–it excelled at pulling me into The Shimmer. It did feel dreamlike, it did feel weird, it did feel claustrophobic, I did want to know what the hell was happening.

Honestly, I’m still not entirely clear on what happened and I don’t feel like sharing spoilers now, but I do know that I thought about Lena’s observations about the phenomenon where she says doesn’t think its intent was to destroy but to change. It made me think about how we first viewed her life with her “dead” husband as idilic, when it wasn’t. It made me think of how violently people react to change, even good change. How change can feel alien and scary. How people go mad sometimes. It made think of everything that is happening now and I don’t think I’ll stop thinking about it anytime soon.