Alex Garland’s Annihilation is nominally a horror film.1 Team of scientists goes into an evil forest, gets picked off one by one with cool body horror effects, blonde final girl makes it out and is irreversibly traumatised, movie ends, many such cases.2 But i’ve never seen it that way.
Might i just be a contrarian? Certainly, the biosphere our characters enter is cruel, but i think it’s a useful exercise to consider the situation from its perspective. The government is on their Gods-know-how-manyth expedition into the Shimmer at this point, and up until now, it’s all been military men. Cripes, if i were a sentient self-regulating ecosystem and all these feds started probing around my internals because they want to kill me, i’d develop an immune response too.
The world beyond the Shimmer is beautiful beyond description. It is a place where the sky glistens in iridescent3 waves, where every sort of plant grows from every sort of bush and beast, and where death is just one step in a beautiful cycle of life and rebirth.4 It blurs the line between not just the species but kingdoms of life — flora, fauna, and funga all mingling and merging together equally under one roof. Barring the terrifying human–bear hybrids, that’s a world i’d like to live in.
Plus, it seems willing to learn. In the ending “fight” (cue the noise), allegorical for the obvious as the visuals may be, the alien throws not a single punch. It’s learning by doing, mimicking every move Lena makes, enough to turn into a rudimentary facsimile of her — and even after its destruction, the ending glimmer in her and her husband’s eyes makes clear a part of the Shimmer’s essence is here to say. I say that’s for the better.
P.S. Here’s some stuff i’ve been listening to recently (sorted from “bleep bloop” to “strum strum”):
- Jane Remover - Kodak Moment
- Caroline Polachek - Blood and Butter
- FEX - Subways of Your Mind (FKA “the most mysterious song on the internet”)
- Geordie Greep - Holy, Holy
- Munly and the Lupercalians - Ahmen