Annihilation review – a poetic sci-fi thriller

Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, is an exciting, imperfect genre success. It follows four scientists and a paramedic – all female – who enter the Shimmer, a quarantined zone from which no living creature has emerged alive. With “no compass, no comms and no coordinates” to guide them, as paramedic Anya (Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez) neatly puts it, “either something kills them, or they go crazy and kill each other”.

Told through an efficient series of flashbacks, recounted by Natalie Portman’s serious, clever cell biologist Lena, we gradually learn the creepy nature of the Shimmer, itself a wobbling wall of light that looks like the prismatic rainbow swirls that might collect on top of a sudsy bowl of water, and the mutating horrors it contains.

Beginning as science-driven sci-fi, the film shifts gears into horror-thriller territory, before abandoning those narrative beats in favour of an ambitious, “conceptual” final half-hour that scrambles a little to wrap itself up.

Dumped on Netflix, due to studio anxieties about its supposedly limited box-office potential, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the film doesn’t suffer on a small screen (though it might sing on a larger one). However, to call it highbrow is both to underestimate audiences and to overstate the film’s intellectual designs. Garland seems to be going for something more poetic and mood-based, with images of Portman climbing into a scorched hole in a white, webbed room, and a burning lighthouse lingering long after the film ends.