Indisputably Paramount’s biggest crime during the release of Annihilation was the decision to limit its cinematic release to the USA only. Deeming the film “too intelligent” for mainstream audiences, they, instead, chose to cop-out and sell the film off as another of those ‘straight-to-Netflix’ pictures that are becoming more and more common. Therefore, it could easily have been digitally bargain binned alongside the likes of the hugely disappointing shoehorn of a film, The Cloverfield Paradox, and Duncan Jones’s ill-judged Blade Runner-lite, Mute. Fortunately not. The big-screen spirit of this hypnotic sound and light show is evident, and the films throbbing acid blotter of a finale, an ambitious and ambiguous ending that literally hums with mystery, is further proof of this. It is without a doubt that Garland and his hugely talented team made this digital congealment of incredibly visual ideas — a finely poised balance between sci-fi smarts and pure cosmic spectacle — with the cinematic spectacle in their sights. Though the film doesn’t exactly suffer on a smaller screen, it is operatic by design, as opposed to a more intimate, lazy-night, couch potato sort of thing. Garland captures a dreamlike mood, a poetic strangeness, that can only be conveyed via the magic lantern show that we all love, and its unique visual language. Rather than striving for highbrow, coffee-shop intellectualism for the sake of bravado — perhaps one of the biggest criticisms that is wrongfully hedged towards the film — Annihilation is a very imagist film: an atmospheric sum of its visual parts.

Would Garland have wanted us to view his film through that classically exhausted Freudian lens that is so easily applied to art? Perhaps he would, perhaps he wouldn’t. However, it is a lens that is hard to remove once it is first applied. Garland’s strange and evocative visual atmospheric parallel the mechanisms of the “dream-work” as Freud described them. Though the majority of the film’s most resounding images relate to nature — both ecological and cosmic — Annihilation is much more concerned with the phenomenon of such a giant ecological event. It is a film about consciousness, identity, and what it means to be human (or what it means to not be human), not so much a film about the world of objects external to consciousness. Like the great imagist poems of the Modernist period, or the transcendental nature writing of Thoreau and Emerson, it is as much about psychological space as the natural spaces through which we traverse.

Of course, The Shimmer is inherently alien, operating on biological and physical laws that are counterpoint to what is known and expected of the universe. Appearing like a giant bubble drawn out by a street performer for children, an oily spectrum whirls around the peculiar border. In fact, it seems quite intentional of The Shimmer’s visual design to replicate an oil slick. It is as if human’s ecological destruction of the world — think back to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010, a catastrophe also wrought upon the Gulf of Mexico — is finally being mirrored back to humanity. The polluters become the polluted. And like a giant slick of liquid, or a gargantuan bubble, The Shimmer refracts. “The Shimmer is a prism, but it refracts everything,” says Tessa Thompson’s physicist Josie. “Not just light and radio waves. Animal DNA, plant DNA … all DNA.” Josie herself appears to be transforming into something more plant-like, her torsional, throbbing veins replicating the vermiculate pattern of vines wrapping themselves around a tree trunk, before she is consumed by the environment, in a vague, dreamy moment. And what starts out as a bruise on Lena’s arm becomes a tattoo that the characters all appear to share as their varied DNA’s and physiologies combine.

Cinematographer Rob Hardy applies this theme to a cinematographic motif of refracted images throughout. Early in the film we see Lena and her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) holding hands, shot through a glass of water so that their hands appear as warped and refracted as the transformative events of The Shimmer. This cinematic motif of refraction is analogous to the manifest and latent content of the dream. Annihilation presents images of nature in order to embody an “intellectual and emotional complex”. In a sense The Shimmer seems to be refracting back to the group the images of dreams. We see intestines that writhe around within the body like a bucket of snakes, representing the natural body horror of a nightmare, and plants grow like the memories of the people that lived and died in a town consumed by The Shimmer’s growth. Like dreams, images are created and based on memories. It is said that even seemingly new people and faces that we invent in our own dreams are based on everyone we have seen before in our waking lives. Thus dreams are just photoreels or films of our own memories. Even the way that the film is edited reflects this. It’s non-linear narrative intercutting the expedition with memories and reflections of a past life. Lena’s house — the sight of her infidelity — even appears in Area X, as if The Shimmer is taunting her with reflections of her own internal psyche.