The Shimmer Out of Space

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2018)

Annihilation, the most recent film written and directed by Alex Garland of Ex-Machina fame, is a genre-bending and mind-bending trip of a movie that defy all of my expectations going on and proved to be an incredibly thought-provoking experience. Like the "Shimmer" zone which is the main focus point of the movie, it's incredibly beautiful to look at, but there's a LOT going on just beneath the surface. I recently saw it at my local theater and I still haven't completely been able to work it out, at least not completely in my mind.
It basically follows an ex-military woman turned biologist named Lena, played by Natalie Portman, who has not yet fully gotten over the apparent "death" of her husband Kane, who went out on a mission about a year prior to the main event of the film and never returned. However, one day, completely out of nowhere, he returns, walking right into their bedroom, with an empty cold look in his eyes that immediately alerts the viewer that something isn't quite right. Lena, understandably is very overjoyed and emotional about his return but unnerved when he can't give any sort of answer about what happened to him, where's he been, or how he came back.
He then begins coughing up blood and while en route to the hospital in an ambulance it is intercepted by an envoy of military and police squadrons who take him out of the ambulance and with the paramedic and Lena viewing everything with both confusion and horror and suddenly Lena passes out, seeming to have "caught" whatever illness/radiation? her husband has been exposed to. She then finally learns the truth about what happened to him and that he was the only person so far who has returned from a mysterious alien zone of sorts dubbed "The Shimmer" by the scientists studying it since it "landed" on Earth near a lighthouse about three years ago. Wanting to find out more about what happened to him and what the shimmer is exactly she volunteers for the next mission into it despite knowing fully well the risks involved and that she and the four other women going in might very well not make it out.
Despite the rich alien beauty and richness of the shimmer, the film, from start to finish is very dark and gloomy, with the first act slowly taking it's time to build up an uneasy atmosphere of suspense and dread. For viewers with shorter attention spans it might come off as a little too depressing or even boring, but once the team goes into the shimmer, the film finally starts to pick up pace and remains visually and emotionally satisfying all the way up too the film's climax. There is plenty of eye-candy to be had, but don't let the visuals fool you, there are still terrifying things to be experienced in the shimmer and if you let your guard down too much, you might end up regretting it when you least expect it.
Not strictly a "horror" movie, at least in the traditional sense, as there are no jump-scares or "ooga-booga" moments that you might expect from the trailer, it very strongly reminded me of Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, and the film, as well as I suppose the book it's based on (I've never read it), clearly took a lot of their inspiration from stories like "The Colour out of Space" with it's mysterious, surreal, alien landscape with mutated flora and fauna that are as deadly as any creature from movies like Alien or The Thing. I definitely enjoyed it, and I think viewers who are into films that aren't afraid to be intelligent, creepy, thought-provoking, and weird all at the same time, will enjoy it as well. Eight stars, minus two for some very vague, but minor and "incomplete" plot points which I wish would have been resolved in the movie, but never really were.