(Note: This is an essay written spur of the moment devoid of planning and without editing. I just had to get this out. It would be best to have seen ANNIHILATION before reading this)
LENA
“You disappeared for twelve months. Where were you?”
KANE
I don’t know.”
I don’t know.
Those words passed by me when I watched Alex Garland’s sci-fi masterpiece ANNIHILATION the first time. On the second viewing those words burrowed their way into my brain and wouldn’t let go. I don’t know. Delivered in a flat, emotionless and lost tone. I don’t know….
In the scene in question, which takes place early on in the film, the protagonist Lena (Natalie Portman) has just been reunited with her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) after he disappeared on a covert mission about a year ago. Lena has heard no news regarding his actions and for all intents and purposes believed he was dead. Out of the blue, while alone doing menial chores to keep up the illusion of a happy household, Kane just walks in as if nothing has happened. He looks unchanged from when he left only he’s aloof, not in the moment, and barely registers his wife’s presence when Lena grabs hold of him, kissing him, and crying as she breaks down, shocked that her husband is alive. Alive but not well.
I don’t know.
Her questions – “What was your mission? What base were you stationed at? How long have you been back?” – all only illicit that same emotionless answer from Kane. I don’t know. Until she asks:
LENA
How did you get home?
KANE
I was outside.
LENA
Outside the house?
KANE
No. Outside the room. With the bed. The door was open.
Then I saw you. I remembered you. I remembered your face.
This exchange more than most in the film stuck with me because the banality of it all – a simple scene between two actors in a kitchen – strips away the sci-fi trappings and just leaves you with the best part of movies. Two actors expressing emotions. In this case though one of the actors was devoid of emotion. Distant. Alien. Yes, his state of being does play into the surface science fiction narrative in ANNIHILATION but that’s not what made this exchange affect me so.
It’s because in that moment Kane is a complete personification of depression.
I don’t know.
ANNIHILATION is not about badass women going into a strange environment to complete a quest (though it is that on the surface) nor is it simply a loose adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s trilogy of young adult novels (a VERY loose adaptation from what I’ve heard). ANNIHILATION is about depression. It’s about self-destruction. It’s about self-destruction in all human forms right down to the microscopic level. It’s about cancer. It’s about isolation. It’s about loneliness. It’s about suicide.
But, most of all it’s a big movie about something! Which is important as genre films get taken over by never-ending cinematic universes whose main focus is to keep the status quo alive for the next movie (or like in the never-ending Avengers: Infinity War, present the illusion of shaking things up before returning everything to normal in the next film – yeah, we know you’re not REALLY killing Black Panther and Spider-Man). ANNIHILATION is a film that has stuck with me since I saw it February 24th and it’s one that I think may always stick with me because it spoke so intimately to confronting depression. Something I’ve dealt with my entire adult life and still do so to this day.
I don’t know.
Why are you depressed? It’s something people always ask once you let them in on that dark little secret you’ve kept bottled up inside. Truthfully, I’ve never had an honest answer. I can always surely come up with one in the moment. The girl I was heads over heels in love with didn’t return my affection. I’m not making the money I thought I would be making at my age. I don’t go out and party as often now at 33 as I did at 23. All are viable answers that people will buy if you give them up. But, I’ve been depressed at times when the girl I was head-over-heels in love with DID return my affections. I’ve been depressed at times when I have made the money I thought I should be making. Even when I was socializing and going out with friends almost every night at age 23 I was still often depressed and felt alone. Unloved. Unwanted.
I don’t know.
But why? Why can I sometimes be so emotionally charged that I socialize and enjoy life without care, spend time creating personal art with ease and can authentically smile no matter what the external circumstances are BUT then find I can’t do any of that despite things generally going well for me? How come I just spent the past 48 hours locked away in my room with the lights off literally doing nothing and talking to no one? It can’t just be because I had a bad cold. No. It’s just how I seem to be wired. Sometimes these feelings just happen. I can give the “I’m an INFJ personality type” as the fun excuse and also if asked I could give a couple other million reasons why – I can’t lose weight, I don’t have a romantic partner, my hunt for a new place is dragging on and that bugs me – but the more authentic response is it just IS. It’s a part of who I am. I don’t really have a reason to have such strong feelings of unworthiness (or maybe emptiness is a better word… it’s impossible to describe something so absolutely emotional when you’re just winging it…) because I know I’m loved. Even the friends who have become distant through the natural progressions of our lives I know still care for me as I do them. I’ve certainly been in worse depression spells – the current one I just went through was rather mild by all comparisons – and I can see an end to this spell in sight (maybe I just need to finish writing the script for the next short film I want to make, Coffee & Yellow Roses?). Even the process of writing this silly little essay has alleviated a lot of negative thoughts… though I’m sure those will resurface when/if I share this online for a handful of people (if any) to read. But why do I even have such feelings when everything in general seems to be going so well otherwise?
I don’t know.
That’s where ANNIHILATION comes back into this rambling word purge. I can’t think of a modern film that so eloquently expresses such internalized feelings and I can’t fathom how it got made today. Alex Garland has gloriously found a way to translate all his literary skills to the screen when he transitioned from being a novel author to a director. Despite having some of the most astonishing visual images on film in 2018, ANNIHILATION is like a great novel in that the story presented can either be experienced as a simply good yarn or every line can be read in multiple ways by the viewer to get to a deeper meaning. It’s a movie that takes you on a journey but doesn’t give you any easy answers. There are no bad guys. The catalyst for the movie isn’t an alien invasion. It just is something that happens.
Whatever is causing “The Shimmer” – and I have seen the movie three times and still can’t really tell you what exactly is causing all this – is forcing it’s will onto everything around it. It’s changing the natural landscape, warping people’s minds and otherwise mutating the natural world. Right there is the microscopic version of self-destruction: whatever is causing The Shimmer is a cancer. While this force may be able to create some things of beauty – the Plant Deers or “Plantleers” as I saw someone jokingly call them online – it can also create monstrosities that shouldn’t exist – The Bear, oh I could write a whole essay about how perfectly terrifying the screeching human-voiced Bear is! – and is something that needs to be confronted or it will spread and destroy everything. But, why do Lena and the four other women in her group need to be the ones who go in there? The movie confronts the idea that almost all other stories of this type avoid: that these five women have all willingly signed onto a suicide mission. Most movies just have a charming Chris Pratt type carelessly throw out some dumb one-liner about “We’re on a crazy suicide mission, aren’t we?” and never give a second of thought with the repercussions of the mindset it takes to go there. What does it take for someone to sign up for a mission that most likely will end in their death?
I don’t know.
Through excellent character work we’re given reasons why all of these five women go into the Shimmer to face certain death. Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has incurable cancer, Anya (Gina Rodriguez) is a recovering addict who masks her issues with an outgoing personality, Josie (Tessa Thompson) has gone through life with a very-relatable feeling of emptiness and her coping mechanism of cutting herself to feel something doesn’t work anymore, Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) can never return to her old life and self after her child died of leukemia and Lena (Natalie Portman) hates herself for cheating on her husband (Oscar Isaac) which she knows is the reason why he accepted the prior mission to go into The Shimmer in the first place. All of these characters are given strong practical and self-destructive driven reasons for going on this mission and each one of these play out as the narrative continues. Sheppard tries to be the peaceful mediator like a mother would, Anya gives into anger when things go to shit, Josie quietly stays in the background before allowing her own self-hatred to envelope her entirely, and Ventress just doesn’t give a fuck because her ailment is physical and can’t be bargained with. Character mixed with theme drives everything!
For 85 minutes, ANNIHILATION plays like a gangbusters sci-fi thriller that’s like a mesh of John Carpenter’s THE THING, Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s original SOLARIS. And then we get to the lighthouse. By the third act, all of Lena’s teammates have either left her or have been killed off by the many horrors in The Shimmer and she alone has reached their missions objective. The lighthouse on the beach. The source where all this chaos is emanating. From this point on the movie enters into a new arena where logic is tossed aside and the movie becomes a pure allegory about overcoming depression. Lena arrives at the lighthouse to find three things – a dark hole in the floor leading to future horrors, the burnt husk of a soldier from a previous mission, and a handheld camera setup on a tripod facing the corpse. She turns on the camera and watches the final images it recorded to see her husband, Kane, saying his last words to an offscreen presence before committing suicide with a phosphorus grenade. While her husband burns to death another figure enters the frame and turns to camera…. Kane. How? The man in her kitchen at the start of the movie wasn’t the man she married but something that could mimic him up to a point. Her Kane ultimately gave in to the darkest of feelings and committed suicide. What came home was something Kane and not so much Kane….
I don’t know.
Lena, genuinely distressed but not giving up, hears a sound coming from the hole and heads down into the lowest reaches of the lighthouse to find Ventress blind and talking to herself. Ventress greets her warmly before announcing :
DR. VENTRESS
It’s inside me now. It’s not like us. It’s unlike us. I don’t know what it wants.
Or if it wants. But it will grow until it encompasses everything. Our
bodies and our minds will be fragmented until not the smallest
parts of us remains…Annihilation.
Sure that can be about a strange Alien Other. It also sounds me to a lot like what depression does to me on occasion. How every moment in your life no matter the context is a validation of whatever negative thoughts you have about yourself….
Dr. Ventress then lights up as if being set ablaze from the inside and she fades away in a spectacle of light to be replaced by… SomeThing. Is it an Alien? Is it even sentient? Lena transfixed by this sight gets too close and a drop of her blood is pulled into the SomeThing and a faceless Humanoid appears in its place. Lena quickly tries to escape but the Humanoid won’t let her. It constantly prevents and blocks her from using the one door leading out of the lighthouse. It mimics her every move. Always present. Always looming. When she does make it to the door and tries to open it the Humanoid literally presses its entire weight down upon her until she finally gives in and falls unconscious to the floor. It forces itself on her and won’t let her go. It starts to become her. While one can read this as just a unique way of presenting an Alien life form I read this as Depression personified. Lena wants to leave the room and it won’t let her. She wants to get away from this unsettling presence (feelings of Suicide, being unwanted, unhappy, ugly, etc) but no matter what she does it’s still there with her. Depression always shadowing her.
Then in a cathartic moment that can only be found in a well told story, she’s uses the Humanoid’s act of mimicry to make it take hold of a phosphorous grenade from her dead husband’s backpack. Lena pulls the pin…. and sets that fucker on fire. She escapes the lighthouse and gives one final glance back as the Humanoid – now with her face – catches on fire in a white blaze. It’s a haunting moment. It’s also a beautiful moment. That’s what you need to do with truly hateful feelings of self-doubt when they start to take you over. You gotta burn the fuckers down.
Here’s the Humanoid scene in case you want to revisit (which you should):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeD_-d0M28
…. But does Lena truly escape? In the films coda, having destroyed the cause of it all, the Shimmer evaporates. It’s mutating effects on the environment presumably will die off over time. The government agents interrogating her ultimately buy her story and allow her to reunite with her “husband” Kane (she must not have told them THAT part of the story). Pseudo-Kane, his face an empty mask – Oscar Isaac does phenomenal work with what little he’s given in the film – asks her “Are you Lena?”. She doesn’t answer. Then in an awkward mimicry of one, Pseudo-Kane stands up and pulls her in for a hug. She slowly accepts the embrace. He may not be her husband but maybe there’s some of the real Kane left inside of him and the possibility of recapturing a real life still exists…
Except the movie has one final reveal with the closing image. Lena’s eyes illuminating the hypnotic inhuman colors of The Shimmer. Did the real Lena give in and die in the lighthouse allowing this doppelganger to take over for her? Or, as I read it, is this the real Lena ready to move forward in her life but still haunted with those same feelings of doubt and depression only now they are personified physically by her encounter with the source of The Shimmer? What’s the real answer?
I don’t know.
Because that’s what feelings of depression, suicide, self-worthlessness, etc truly are. They’re an endless cycle. A recurring phantom. They aren’t feelings you ever truly get rid of. As much as you want to they aren’t tangible things you can just set on fire and be gone with. They’re complex yet simple feelings that take hold of you when you’re young and vulnerable and clamp on to you like parasites. They evolve with you and find new ways to burrow under your happiness. You are always changing and no amount of success in sex, love, career or wealth truly removes them. Even people who on the surface have the greatest of lives with strong charisma, endless wealth and the ability to go anywhere in the world carefree are stricken down by those negative emotions that shimmer behind their otherwise confident personalities.
ANNIHILATION is one of the few movies I’ve ever seen truly get to the heart of the matter about this sensitive issue. Even more astoundingly it does so in a tight thrilling genre film. It’s the true rare gem of a movie that succeeds as both a piece of pop cinema AND a mindful serious essay about something! My love of movies started with thrilling pop adventures but it’s the stories that can do both – thrill and insight – that keep my love of the art form alive! I don’t know if it’s a perfect movie but it is for me. Watch ANNIHILATION!
OTHER MOVIES LIKE ANNIHILATION I RECOMMEND:
1. Ex Machina – Alex Garland’s first movie is a stunner!
2. Arrival – Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi movie deals wonderfully with life choices.
3. First Reformed – The other (at the moment) masterpiece of 2018! Though Paul Schrader’s film eschews genre tropes for a colder but still nakedly emotional transcendent experience.
4. Evangelion – The original Neon Genesis Evangelion + closing movie The End of Evangelion are the pinnacles of art that can both entertain + nakedly confront depression and has long been my favorite work of visual fiction. Also, the three (of a planned four) remake movies loosely titled Rebuild of Evangelion are great examples of an artist confronting the cyclical nature of depression with misunderstood Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo acting as a powerful in-your-face thesis.