‘Annihilation’ Is the Best Movie of 2018, and You Should Watch It Immediately

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MOVIE: Annihilation
DIRECTOR: Alex Garland
CAST: Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny
AVAILABLE ON: Amazon Prime and iTunes

There is one scene in Annihilation that you will not be able to get out of your head for weeks afterward.

There’s another scene in Annihilation that you will not be able to get out of your head for weeks afterward.

There’s also a sound in Annihilation that will rattle around your brain and surface at random haunting times.

Oh! That’s not even the sound I’m talking about but YES! There’s that other sound too!

Oh and that other scene!

Was the above one-act play annoyingly showy? Sure. But it’s also incredibly true. Even if Alex Garland’s Annihilation, based on (though freely adapted from) the novels by Jeff VanderMeer, didn’t manage to wrap up its story into a convincing, compelling whole, he’s still have produced 4 or 5 of the most indelible moments of cinema in all of 2018. Lucky for the rest of us, the whole holds together quite well, delivering an unsettling and often malevolent sci-fi vision that will have people talking about it for years. If 2015’s Ex Machina showed the promise of a longtime screenwriter — Garland wrote the scripts for 28 Days Later and Sunshine, among others — coming into his own with a visually striking tale of a near-future where leaps forward in technology blur the lines around what we define as human, then Annihilation delivers on that promise. And then some.

The film is anchored by a confident and compelling Natalie Portman, playing Lena, an Army veteran/biologist whose special-forces husband goes missing on a secret assignment. Portman has long been Hollywood’s preternatural grown-up kid star, who was possessed of so much star power at such a young age (watch The Professional or Beautiful Girls again and marvel at how effortlessly she becomes the center of the universe in every single scene). But even as she transitioned into grown-up roles in films like Closer (for which she was Oscar-nominated) and Black Swan (for which she won Best Actress), the films still played on her relative youth and used that kind of child-out-of-time quality of hers to their — and her — advantage. With Annihilation, Portman steps forward, perhaps for the first time, and carries a big, grandiose Hollywood movie on her capable shoulders, and it is something to see.

Also something to see? The insane, gorgeous, sinister, mind-breaking visuals that Garland produces on the regular in this movie. The story goes like this: Lena’s husband, Kane, having been missing for a year, returns suddenly one night, remembering nothing and is almost immediately, violently ill. En route to the hospital, Lena and Kane are taken by government forces, where Lena is told by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that Kane’s mission had taken him into an area somewhere in the Florida panhandle known as Area X. Some three years earlier, an environmental phenomena that they’re calling the Shimmer appeared, presenting as a vertical oil slick bordering some marshlands. There’s no communication from inside, nobody who they send in ever comes out (save Kane), and it’s spreading. Seeking answers for what happened to her now-dying husband, Lena decides to join the next expedition into the Shimmer, along with EMT Anya (Gina Rodriguez), scientists Josie and Cass (Tessa Thompson and Tuva Novotny) and Dr. Ventress herself.

It’s a great group of actresses playing an endlessly fascinating team of women, who relate to each other in a few interesting ways, and then see those relationships tested by the Shimmer. Jennifer Jason Leigh is perfectly cast as a woman who’s weaponized not only her intelligence but her witholding nature. Ventress is a locked fortress, and that gives her authority (until it doesn’t). We’ve already been sold on Tessa Thompson as a star, but here she underplays that charisma as a wallflower whose delicacy is an easy portal into the more benign and beautiful ways the Shimmer has manifested itself. Her fate, ambiguous as it is, is Annihilation at its most generous and beautiful. Tuva Novotny is a real find, and her conversational highlight opposite Portman could have gone on for another 10 minutes, as far as I was concerned.

Immediately inside the Shimmer, reality begins to distort. Their instruments, as expected, don’t work. The group loses all sense of time. They begin to encounter vegetative and biologic anomalies: white deer with flowered antlers who move in unison; blooming plants which seem to be impossible hybrids; an alligator with shark teeth. Garland, having seen a movie before, knows that the scariest possibilities are the ones you want to investigate, so the threat of these hybrid predator creatures make for a handful of wildly tense and terrifying scenes at the middle of the film.

But Garland is also after something much more unsettling and threatening to the human sense of self. So the team delves deeper into Area X. They find clues as to what happened to Kane’s team. They figure out what the Shimmer is doing to the plants and animals around them. They start to poke around the edges of what this entity (if it’s an entity) wants (if it wants anything at all). It’s not until the final 25 minutes of the film that we get a good look at the answers to that, and it’s nothing less than the most mind-breaking sequence in sci-fi since … it would be over-dramatic if I said “since the monolith in 2001,” right? But I want to.

The final scenes of Annihilation will be pored over by sci-fi and cinema fans for a long time, and not just in an attempt to figure them out. Much of what happens is what we clearly see. It’s just insane that we’re seeing it at all. But more than just a twist or a turn, Garland presents an ending that pulls the rug out from under the very ideas of self, biology, and autonomy that we’ve held forever. Also the soundtrack will make you wonder if that’s the sound of a brain melting. It’s phenomenal.

Garland wisely re-jiggered the events of the books, which allowed him to create a much more closed-loop of an ending. Not that a sequel would be impossible, but after the film failed to make any kind of impact at the box-office (America, you idiots), further films seem like a long shot anyway. Which is just as well, because as a complete sci-fi notion, Annihilation is all Annihilation needs.

Where to stream Annihilation