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(4.5 / 5)

Alex Garland’s Annihilation is a lot of seemingly contradictory things: silly and profound; grotesque and beautiful; slow and thrilling. It’s B genre horror meets heady sci-fi, carried out with clinical, near-Kubrickian patience. And though it doesn’t reach the heights of Kubrick, it’s not hard to imagine that he would have (at least quietly) respected it. In other hands, Annihilation’s juxtaposed tones could have been messy. In Garland’s, juxtaposition becomes dialectic, and dialectic becomes synthesis.

But Annihilation is more than just a synthesis of tones; it’s also about synthesis. In the movie, adapted somewhat loosely from the first novel in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, an alien cancer (for lack of a better description) arrives via meteorite at an unspecified part of the American coastal southeast, slowly spreading in a permeable, polychromatic dome the film dubs “the shimmer.” An all-female team of researchers, including cellular biologist, Lena (Natalie Portman), sets out from a government base called Area X, penetrating the shimmer to its swampland interior. Inside, they find the reason for the prismatic colors: the shimmer refracts light. But it also seems to be refracting radio waves and, strangest of all, DNA. Disparate flower species share the same vine; an alligator shows up with rows of shark teeth. Juxtaposed species are synthesizing, making something new.

Sound silly? Well, it is, kind of. When physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson) makes the huge deductive leap and tells the audience point blank that the shimmer is refracting DNA, it’s a bit of an eye-roller. But silliness can be a byproduct of vision. And when you consider that the film we got was still deemed too smart for general moviegoers, resulting in a straight-to-Netflix release everywhere but the States (more on that later), you’ll forgive the occasional spoon-feeding, and be grateful that we didn’t get another film-by-committee.

Despite the silliness, the movie handles its theme of synthesis well, and its implications are profound and terrifying. On a macro level, it points to a kind of entropy of form, where individual things cease to mean anything as they come to mean everything. But a good screenplay always brings big themes down to the human scale, and Annihilation not only gives us rich characters, it harnesses the idea of synthesis to put them in immediate peril, earning some of the year’s most unsettling scares in the process.

“Earning” is the keyword here. Annihilation’s brand of horror is the best kind, the kind that gets under your skin, and the film finds a lot of ways to do it: genuinely upsetting images (I’m looking at you, bear), sounds (that damn bear again, and later a truly haunting piece of synth work from German electronica outfit, Moderat), and dialogue all stick with you long after the credits roll. The latter might be the most impressive. In an early scene, when Lena’s husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), turns up after a year lost in the shimmer and presumed dead, she asks him how he got home. “I was outside the room,” he says. “The door was open, and I saw you. I recognized you.” It made my skin crawl. Two months later, as I write this, it still does.

But true to the movie’s dialectic nature, for all its horrors, there are beauties to match. A soldier’s corpse transmutes into a delicate fungal structure; the creepy, pulsing synths in the final act find their complement in the pastoral fingerpicking of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. And in a way, it makes the horror all the more horrific. The alien force doesn’t really want anything: it’s just making something new, something beautiful. Maybe even something immortal. The aliens might be the angels of our eternal destiny, but they’re indifferent angels. And for most of us, whether we know it or not, indifference is the most terrifying thing there is.

Is this art? If art’s job is to recast truths in a new light, then sure. Annihilation takes our deepest fear—that the universe neither loves nor hates us—and makes something pretty out of it. But art or not, there’s definite craft going on here. The performances feel natural and serve the story: this is not an actors’ showcase, nor is Garland an actor’s director. But neither of those things would have made this a better movie. Natalie Portman shows more range than usual, Oscar Isaac is convincingly creepy and dead-eyed, and a turn by Jennifer Jason Leigh, at first strangely subdued, makes more sense as things move forward.

Moving forward, it should be said, isn’t one of the film’s strong suits. Though the first act does a decent job of building dread, it lingers and leaves us wishing we could have spent more time in the shimmer. I wanted more of the beautiful strangeness. More scenes like the slow-motion meteor impact, more pretty mutations, more of the shimmer itself. I brought up Kubrick earlier. The notoriously slow 2001: A Space Odyssey earns its glacial pace with non-stop eye candy. But Annihilation has less to offer visually. There are some great shots here, but if they wanted to slow Annihilation down, they might have done it where it counted.

But overall, the structure works. We learn what the shimmer is (more or less) and meet our protagonists in act one, act two delivers visceral thrills that recall the body horror of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, and act three leaves the threads untied in a way that satisfies on an unsatisfying, existential level. Everyone’s motivations are clearly laid out (although a scene on a canoe where all the minor characters’ backstories are exposited in one go felt a little on the nose), and except for occasional transgressions like the canoe monologue, the film does a good job of using the language of cinema to communicate: Garland shows us the cracks in a relationship with two hands pulling apart, a kind of refraction, refracting the image again through a glass of water, tying it to the bigger themes. He shows us the indifference of the alien threat with a choreographed act of mimicry that is as balletic as it is disturbing.

Again, it’s all a bit silly, and for my money, that’s okay. We need more silly, more audacity, more vision. Here in the midst of #metoo, with important issues of gender disparity getting their overdue day in the sun, we have a movie with a mostly-female cast, playing smartly written, unclichéd characters, and it barely makes back its money. One of the best-looking films of the year is confined to laptop screens, while theaters around the world are packing them in for fart jokes recast as queef jokes.

Now believe me, I can appreciate a good fart (or queef) joke as much as the next guy. But do we need to be recycling them? I don’t know the answer. Maybe this is just how it has to be, our ineluctable destiny. Maybe it’s the annihilation of cinema, and the indifferent angels at Disney will keep buying up all the studios and all the poopy jokes and synthesize them into a kind of shitty singularity. An entropeepee of filmic forms. Maybe this is the way cinema ends: not with a bang, but a fart.

Annihilation is available on Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Vudu, and i-Tunes.