‘Annihilation’ Ending Explained: Is Natalie Portman An Alien?

Annihilation is once again streaming on Netflix, which means once again viewers want to know: What the hell did I just watch?!

This is not meant as a slight. This 2018 movie—written and directed by Alex Garland, who adapted the novel by Jeff VanderMeer—is arguably one of the best sci-fi films of the 2010s. The cast is impeccable: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny star as a team of soldier-scientists, while Oscar Isaac plays Portman’s on-screen husband. The vibes are also impeccable: Luscious green forests full of terrifying monsters, delicate flowers that can literally kill you, and that jarring soundtrack.

The plot, however, might leave viewers scratching their heads, especially when it comes to the Annihilation ending. That said, even though it’s confusing, the Annihilation ending does make sense. Let’s get into a breakdown of the Annihilation plot summary and the Annihilation ending explained. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Annihilation plot summary:

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) being interrogated by the U.S. Army about a mysterious mission, in which she was the only one to return home. She is told she was gone for four months, though she feels like she was only gone for a few days. Throughout the film, we periodically cut back to Lena narrating her story.

Three years earlier, we meet Lena as a cellular biology professor and former U.S. soldier whose fellow U.S. soldier husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) has been missing in action for over a year. Then, one day, Kane suddenly shows up at home, with no memory of his mission or how he got there. He barely seems to know who Lena is, and says only that he “recognized” her face. Then he starts spitting up blood.

Lena calls an ambulance, but the ambulance is intercepted by the military. Lena and Kane are taken to “Area X,” where Lena meets psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Dr. Ventress explains Kane was on a mission to investigate “The Shimmer,” a strange, distorted cloud of light that appeared after a meteor from space crashed into a lighthouse in Blackwater National Park in Florida, and is rapidly spreading. Soon, it will threaten to encapsulate entire cities, states, and the entire planet. Dr. Ventress and her team have sent drones, robots, animals, and teams of people into The Shimmer, but nothing ever comes back… except for Kane.

Unfortunately, Kane is out of commission in a coma, and his condition is getting worse. Lena volunteers to join Ventress, along with a team of three other qualified women (Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny) to venture into The Shimmer, with the goal of reaching the lighthouse. Unsurprisingly, things are weird in The Shimmer, and only get weirder the further the women go. The plants and animals are all mutated, from giant scary crocodiles to a deer with a clone that moves together as one.

The women come to an abandoned structure that the previous military used as a base. The men have left behind a memory card, which contains a video that shows Kane—clearly unstable— cutting open the stomach of another man, and revealing slime-y, snake-like tentacles slithering on the man’s insides. The women stop watching the video, but discover what appears to be the mutated remains of the man, whose body has been horribly deformed and torn apart. The working theory is that The Shimmer operates as a prism for DNA, and it distorts and changes the DNA of anything inside of it, including all of the women.

Everyone starts to die via animal attacks and mutations one by one. One of the women who is killed by a mutated bear, can be heard screaming for help long after she is dead via the mouth of the bear that killed her. Tessa Thompson theorizes that happened because part her mind became part of the creature that was killing her. In other words, a very small part of her lived on—in this mutated creature. After sharing this theory, Tessa Thompson mutates into a flower person, joining a meadow of other people who mutated into flowers before her.

Lena follows Ventress to the lighthouse, where she finds a burnt, human skeleton sitting crossed-legged, a video camera, and a deep hole. Lena watches the playback on the camera and sees a video of Kane. Kane filmed himself going into the hole, where he captured a shot of a strange, face-less humanoid. Then he sat down—in the exact same position of the skeleton—and had a conversation with a doppelganger that looks exactly like him. The human Kane kills himself with a grenade, and instructs his doppelganger to “find Lena.” The doppelganger replies that he will. Aha! The Kane that returned home to Lena was actually an alien doppleganger this entire time!

How did Ventress die in Annihilation?

Lena goes into the mysterious hole, where she finds Ventress, who says The Shimmer, or the alien entity, is inside her now, and will eventually encompass everything. “Our bodies and our bodies will be fragmented into their smallest parts, until not one part remains. Annihilation.”

Then Ventress screams. Shimmering light shoots out of her mouth, then her entire body disintegrates into light. What’s left is a dark, pulsing cloud of light, shapes, and color, that Lena stares into.

While it is not shown in the movie, we can also speculate that the Ventress we saw die was actually a clone of Ventress. After all, we saw that same cloud of light in Kane’s video, and it disappeared after he was cloned. The cloud went “in him,” as it did with Ventress, and as it’s about to do with Lena. Then, like Tessa Thompson was saying, an echo of that person’s consciousness was put into the clone. That’s why Kane recognized Lena but was not himself. And that’s why Ventress recognized Lena but was also not herself.

Annihilation ending explained:

A drop of Lena’s blood flies into the cloud, and The Shimmer creates a clone of her body. The doppelganger is able to move in ways that Lena is not: It appears above ground before Lena can scramble out of the hole, and then mimics her movements. Lena escapes her doppelganger by handing the alien clone a grenade, lighting it, and fleeing. It appears the human Lena is able to kill her clone and escape the shimmer. The burning clone stumbles down the hole, and lights the entire lighthouse on fire.

Back in the present-day, the man interrogating Lena corroborates her story: The lighthouse has burned down and they believe the entity is now dead. But wait! In the last scene of the movie, Lena confronts Kane.

“You aren’t Kane, are you?” Lena asks.

“I don’t think so,” Kane replies, before asking, “Are you Lena?”

Lena doesn’t respond. They embrace, and we see both Kane and Lena’s eyes shimmer, indicating that they are both alien doppelgangers.

Wait, what? How did that happen? Well, don’t forget that the entire movie is being told by Lena, who could very well be an unreliable narrator. Yes, in Lena’s version of events to the military, the human killed the alien and won the day. But if that were really true, why would the alien burn down the lighthouse? Wouldn’t it want to continue its spread of world domination?

It makes much more sense that Lena the human was the one trapped in the lighthouse, and who burned it down, in a last-ditch effort to save humanity. The alien clone simply switched the roles of who escaped and who burned to death in the retelling. The alien is getting more sophisticated, and getting better at imitating humans. So even though the lighthouse is gone, the threat is still alive.

Phew! How’s that for a twist ending?