Annihilation – Beauty in Desolation

The Uroboros is an ancient symbol of Egyptian origin, famously employed by alchemists, depicting a snake eating its own tail. It signifies eternal renewal, a cycle of life, death and rebirth.

At the start of the 2018’s sci-fi horror film Annihilation, Lena (Natalie Portman), is absent-mindedly scratching a uroboros tattoo on her forearm, while being interrogated by a team of scientist in hazmat suits. They want to know what happened, to her and her team. They want to know what she found.

“Can you describe its form?” – they ask. “Was it carbon-based?”

The grammar of the scene already provides us with a lot of questions that need answer: what are the scientists protecting themselves from? What happened to Lena? What is the mysterious alien force they are talking about?

“What did it want?”

The film will occasionally get back to this framing device, a flash-forward set after the film’s climax, to explain something to the audience or simply to build tension. As the story progresses, the questions these segments raise slowly evolve: is this even the real Lena? She seems to remember the events of the film, so she probably is. But why does she act so strange? More importantly, why does she have that tattoo? - a tattoo that is nowhere to be seen on her for the rest of the film, until the very end.

To answer these questions, we must approach the film both from a literal - but, most importantly - from a thematic point of view. We need to analyse the text of the film and see what it means. Because films are not just stories, they are metaphors. And in Annihilation, more than any recent film, the metaphorical is the textual.

Annihilation was one of the worst box office bombs of 2018. Despite an acclaimed director, Alex Garland (of Ex-Machina and 28 days later fame), a marketable all-female cast and a nuance sci-fi plot, the film was considered too brainy and weird by Paramount, that gave it a limited release and then struck a distribution deal with Netflix, where the film got lost in the ocean of choice the platform offers. Still, the film managed to gain a following based on its great atmosphere, compelling themes, one-of-a-kind soundtrack and amazing sound design. Another aspect that factored in Annihilation’s quick ascent to cult status is that it’s a film that rewards deconstruction and deeper analysis: the complex themes it probes are entwined in a very classic story structure that is unquestionably blunt with what it is about. And what is it about?

A meteor crashes on Earth and into an isolated lighthouse, from which an alien force (later referred to as the Shimmer) starts propagating. Lena, former U.S. Army soldier now cellular biology teacher, is called in by the government when her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) mysteriously comes back from an expedition into the Shimmer after being presumed dead. She decides to go and explore “Area X” herself, alongside four other volunteers, to discover what is causing the Shimmer and to find out what happened to Kane.

This is the text of the film, but the story is about so much more, because in this film the metaphor - the thematic reading of the story - is an integral part of the textual interpretation of it. The reason for this is that Annihilation deals with two sub-genres of horror that, by their own definition, cannot offer a clear sense of finality or resolution: Cosmic Horror and Existential Horror. The way the film ends, with a polarizing non-explanation, suggests Garland never wanted to explain, but merely explore a world beyond our understanding, by putting a very human story at the centre of it. Seen through this lens, the film becomes about pain, identity, mutation. It’s a deconstruction of suffering and the human tendency to self-annihilation. It’s about dying and being born again in an endless cycle. Like a Uroboros.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to judge a work of fiction on a literal level and speculate about the realistic implications of its story, while also appreciating the symbolic value of its themes. It is possible to look at the story of Annihilation and like it for the trippy, often bone-chilling alien invasion movie that it is. This said, a thematic reading can help us frame the film within a much larger, much deeper narrative about trauma and how we deal with it. In other words, the plot is not always a puzzle to be solved, but the visualization of a concept, the dramatization of an idea. Just like it doesn’t matter if the spinning top in Inception falls or not, or if Colin Farrell’s character dies or lives at the end of In Bruges, we should not care if the Lena and Kane at the end of the film are real or only copies created by the Shimmer. That’s not the point. At least, not all of it.

As previously stated, Annihilation’s plot is very much in line with the classic Hero’s Journey, the Monomyth, or however you want to call it. Lena, the protagonist, is called to leave the comfort of her known world to venture into the unknown (crossing a literal threshold) and when she finally returns home, she does so deeply changed by the experience and bringing new knowledge with her. On the surface, this is as obvious as it gets, but the film uses these familiar plot-points in unexpected ways. Science Fiction often exploits its imaginative premises and settings to explore deep ideas, and Annihilation takes full advantage of what the genre can do.

Let’s start with the team. The expedition into the Shimmer is made up of a biologist, a psychologist, a physicist, a geomorphologist, and a paramedic. Five, like the five stages of grief. They have all experienced trauma that changed them (physically, mentally, or both) and are now venturing into an alien-made dome that is often called a “Prism”. Light that goes through a prism gets refracted, it changes, just like the people who enter the Shimmer. Like everything else in the story, the Shimmer has a narrative purpose (it’s a mystery to unravel, an obstacle to overcome) and a thematic one; the change it causes is literal (it messes with the genetic fabric of everything that it contains) and symbolic. So how does each character deal with the Shimmer (and therefore, their pain)?

Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the mentor of the story, has been made cynical and borderline suicidal by her terminal cancer. She wants to find out the truth about this alien force before she dies but ends up obtaining nothing. Many people deal with trauma in a similar way, by forcing themselves to find closure, something that real life rarely gives you.

Anya (Gina Rodriguez) is a drunk, a common form of self-destructive behaviour. She drinks her pain away and her spiral into insanity is representative of the danger of a coping mechanism that hurts her and everyone around her. She is the one with the Uroboros tattoo, which we see on other military personnel as well, including the soldier that gets cut open by Kane in the recording the team finds early in the story.

Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) clearly states during the film that her daughter’s death to leukemia has affected her, and she’s not the person she once was. As they travel deeper into the Shimmer by boats (in a scene admittedly burdened by blatant explanatory dialogue) she talks about how every person on that mission is broken in some way (“We are all damaged goods”). She suffers arguably the worst fate out of all the characters, devoured by a mutated bear that assimilates her voice. The death of a loved one causes a piece of us to die with them, and the grief we must endure is the worse kind of psychological pain.

Josie (Tessa Thompson)’s trauma is depression, which lead her to harm herself in the past (another form of self-destruction). She dies by quietly giving in to the Shimmer. She accepts her fate and becomes part of the nature around her.

All these characters represent different interpretations of the concept at Annihilation’s core. Each of them reacts in distinct ways to the change brought on by the Shimmer and dies a different death because of it. There is also something to be said about the team being all-female. In the story, the previous expeditions mostly led by military men have all failed miserably. There’s a chance the film is exploring the socio-psychological notion that men and women have different ways of dealing with pain. Their way of navigating the Shimmer differs greatly from the more violent approach of their male counterparts symbolizing the way women allegedly navigate emotional complexities more fluidly than men.

But still, even if they are better equipped to deal with the strangeness of Area X, they sill cannot find answers, and they all die. The Shimmer is a prodigious visual representation of Cosmic Horror. The phenomenon gets less and less intelligible the more the team learns about it. The wildlife within the Shimmer has grown in strange ways: flowers of different trees grow from the same branches, animals have gone through a perpetual hybridization that has turned them in nightmarish chimeras. All DNA touched by the Shimmer gets refracted, it mixes and changes. An inexplicable, yet terrifying notion. In the words of American Science Fiction author Donald Wandrei, “It is not so much the things we know that terrify us as it is the things we do not know, the things that break all known laws and rules, the things that come upon us unaware and shatter the pleasant dream of our little world.” (Colossus, 1989). The Shimmer is a unique visualization of something other, the answer to what alien life would look like if it came in the form of not a body, but a space, something beyond dimensionality, beyond our natural understanding of time, space and matter.

“What did it want?” – ask the scientists, perplexed.

“I don’t think it wanted anything.” – says Lena.

It is through Lena’s eyes that we experience the horror of the Shimmer: its abnormalities are filtered by her own understanding of the phenomenon. She is a biology teacher, and her lecture at the beginning of the film helps us frame the rest of the story: she is showing her class a cell performing mitosis, only to reveal it’s from a tumour. A natural, commonly understood process made alien and scary by the notion of what it does. The Shimmer is that tumour, constantly expanding, unstoppable, undecipherable, ghastly. It’s the same thing consuming Ventress, eating every character from within. Sure, not every character has a literal cancer growing inside of them, but they all have their ways of harming themselves beyond repair, a tendency that sealed their fate way before they entered Area X.

Through Lena, the film explores the Existential Horror living within any human being who commits their life to someone else’s. Her self-destructive behaviour is adultery, which has permanently altered her relationship to Kane. At the end of the film, the alien replicates Lena’s appearance and mimics her movements: Lena is literally fighting herself. She only manages to defeat the alien by accepting that it is part of her now. This allows her to return home, to her estranged husband, forever changed. In the film, this is presented to us with the very last shot: two figures, no longer themselves, coldly embracing in an aseptic room. Both Lena and Kane are born anew, their glimmering eyes foreshadowing a new kind of co-dependency caused by the trauma they shared. A sinister portrayal of the modern Adam and Eve, ready to start a new cycle.

At this point in the story, the film has dived right into the Existential Horror living in all of us and has come out the other side with the knowledge that fear is part of the journey, especially when you share that journey with someone else. Opening ourselves to others – letting our guard down and allowing them in – will cause the destruction of what we once were: an annihilation of self. When we give ourselves to someone, we change, we combine, we mutate as we are reshaped into something new. Something that is more than the sum of its parts. And that is horrifying, to sacrifice so much of what we are to be with someone else. But it's also necessary. It’s also natural. And it’s wonderful. That’s why the Shimmer is not just a metaphor for cancer, for pain and damage and grief. It’s also a mesmerizing coral-like kaleidoscope of ever-changing colours and shapes the characters get lost in. There’s beauty in its desolation. That’s why at the centre of it all, Lena doesn’t find a recognizable life form, a power-hungry, villainous alien she can fight, but an unknowable force that lacks any discernible motivation or want. It’s not evil, but it is dangerous. It’s something we cannot explain or accept. Something truly, unmistakeably alien.

Lena loses everything as she gets closer and closer to the Lighthouse. She loses her companions, one by one, she loses hope of ever making it back. And in her darkest, loneliest moment, the tattoo that once belonged to Anya appears on her arm. She has gained something of her, perpetrating the endless cycle of mutation and exchange the Shimmer causes in everything it touches. No beginning, no end. Anya has disappeared into the Shimmer, but that part of her lives within Lena.

Or perhaps that’s not what the film was trying to say at all. There are countless theories online, each exploring different implications and meanings, and they are all valid. Most importantly, they all prove how deep and fascinating the world created for Annihilation really is. The answer is that there is no answer, not a singular, all-encompassing one. We need to learn how to cope with our inability to explain everything we see and experience. We need to accept that stories are not just stories. They are windows into other worlds, concepts and themes. Annihilation asks many questions and lets us find the answers. Will humanity ever learn how to overcome its own self-destructive tendencies? Are we destined to repeat the cycle? To keep hurting each other and ourselves? To slowly kill the world around us, like a tumour does with its host?

There’s not an answer to that. Not one the film can give us. Because Annihilation seeks to tell us something that is hard to verbalize and nearly impossible to recreate. It yearns for us to witness what can barely be put into words. It wants to show us the indescribable, to give form to the unknown. And once it brought us there, in that desolate place never-before imagined, it wants us to stand in awe at both the horror and the beauty of it all.