Moldy phoenix

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2018)

When it comes to cinematic alien invasions, our poor planet has been bombarded with onslaughts ranging from ET adorable to War of the Worlds sinister, and everything in between. And yet, in the face of 'take me to your leader' overexposure, we've never seen anything quite like Annihilation. Appropriately building from what is known into something fundamentally new, director Alex Garland fuses equal parts Big Questions science-fiction (the film's closest spiritual sibling is 2016's Arrival and its rendition of a sentient consciousness that is fundamentally non-human) with inventively disturbing body horror, and intertwining, fatalistic environmental and psychological allegories, all stitched together through a slow, Kubrickian creep into the metaphysical. And if all of that hasn't deterred you, you're probably ready for the deep dive into the Shimmer, and to press the pause button on reliable sensory intake and reality for a feverishly engrossing two hours.
Those familiar with Jeff VanderMeer's novel - the first of his 'Southern Reach' trilogy - are right to be suspicious: it's hard to picture a more medium-specific text relying more on surreal, dreamlike ambiguity, unreliable narration, and the unseen to convey its sense of infectious terror. Thankfully, director Alex Garland shows a knack for cinematically transmuting the dreamlike dizziness of VanderMeer's prose, with atmosphere and mise-en-scene so evocative the theatre air feels damp, and sticky, and our skin begins to itch. Garland's 'Area X' is as innocently beautiful as it is almost imperceptibly grotesque, with gorgeously unobtrusive FX lending the lush foliage a subtle sense of unease. As cameras airily drift through with a disconcerting innocence and sickening sense of dread, we begin to doubt our senses: is that nauseatingly fluorescent lichen speckling the trees moving, or was it just a trick of the light? Surely that wasn't an almost inaudible cry of terror in the peaceful breeze...? That flower assuredly didn't have a human face. That woman had all of her facial features intact... Right? The discomfort is woven uneasily together with Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury's unexpectedly zen musical score - an almost folksy guitar strum - that feeds into the film's tone of beautiful tranquility feeling nauseatingly 'off,' before showing its hand and imperceptibly morphing into a dread-inducing, spine-tingling drone that will haunt your conscious mind for hours to come.
Naturally, some things are lost in translation. Although Garland impressively avoids caving to easy Hollywood closure (though he does throw us a couple of bones of clarity to anchor the plot on - probably more nuggets of certainty than VanderMeer sprinkles through his entire trilogy), there's a distinct skeleton of conventional structure and contrivance that makes proceedings feel just a whit overly familiar (particularly in the climax) - especially in the face of the freshness of the unrepentant, unhinged ambiguity of VanderMeer's Southern Reach. It's tantalizing to imagine what cinematic boundaries might have been pushed by a slightly more daring auteur - a Tarkovsky, Jodorowski, or even Kubrick himself, all of who imperceptibly flavour the film - let loose in VanderMeer's wacky, macabre playpen. Regardless, Garland is a master of the inventively harrowing set piece, and his film's horrors are sparse but chillingly memorable, and just as effective in their anticipating as their execution. Garland's sensibilities are anything but cheap: each jump scares, gory dismemberment, and horrific mutation feels appropriate and strangely elegant in their grotesquery. Ultimately, however, Annihilation is less preoccupied with fright than destruction and rebirth (individual and collective), digging into a mature, existential examination of change, not as an ultimatum, but as an ongoing, morally transcendent process.
Natalie Portman's propensity to infuse dead-eyed flatness with such churning intensity makes for the perfect (un)emotional anchor amidst the throbbing madness that ensues, her unyielding, flinty making it her strongest work in years. Supporting her, Oscar Isaac* adeptly subverts his customary charisma with a queasily 'off' emotional disconnect, while Jennifer Jason Leigh commands the screen with an alarmingly coy sphinxlike grimness. Tessa Thompson, conversely, offsets the creeping nihilism of her surroundings with a soft-spoken, brittle sweetness, perfectly counterbalanced by the volcanic, combustive emotion of the scene-stealing Gina Rodriguez, cathartically the only character who seems properly perturbed by the encroaching wrongness of Area X.
Don't be thrown by the film's tepid marketing and the insinuated lack of studio confidence in a simultaneous Netflix release. Annihilation is bold, clear-headed, and unmissable for all science-fiction stalwarts, even if its chilling warp into brain-bending surreality may be anchored on just a couple too many nuggets of accessibility to fully capitalize on VanderMeer's feverish tone. Regardless, Garland has crafted one of the most atmospheric, inventively creepy, and existentially haunting movie romps of the past several years, sure to itch and nibble at viewer's brains with images and ideas long after the jarring reversion to normalcy once the credits roll.
-9/10

*Yes, I know - Poe slept with Kylo Ren's grandmother! Have fun untangling that, intertextual Star Wars continuity nuts!