Annihilation (2018)

There's a moment in Annihilation where a bear attacks, and it screams with a human voice. The voice of someone it has already killed. It's one of the most genuinely unsettling things I've seen in a sci-fi film in years, and it tells you everything you need to know about what Alex Garland is going for here: something that gets under your skin and stays there, not because it explains itself, but because it refuses to.

The premise is deceptively simple. A zone known as The Shimmer has appeared, spreading slowly across a stretch of coastline, and every expedition sent inside has failed to return. Natalie Portman plays Lena, a biologist who volunteers to go in after her husband comes back from the Zone changed beyond recognition, barely alive, barely himself. What she and her team find inside is extraordinary: mutated flora blooming in impossible colours, human forms overtaken by plant life, physics bending quietly at the edges. Garland shoots it all with an eerie, unhurried precision, and the result is a world that feels genuinely alien. Beautiful and deeply wrong at the same time.

Oscar Isaac brings a quiet, haunted intensity to his role, even if his screen time is limited. But this is really Portman's film, and she's typically excellent, carrying Lena's grief and guilt and determination without ever letting any one of them tip into melodrama. The ensemble around her is strong too, each character carrying a different kind of damage into The Shimmer, each responding to it differently.

The thing is, I admire Annihilation more than I feel it. And that gap matters. Garland is clearly swinging for something profound here, blending body horror, psychological drama and hard science fiction into a film that refuses easy categorisation. That ambition is genuinely exciting. But the film never fully commits to any one of those threads, and so it ends up caught between them. Is this a survival thriller? A meditation on self-destruction? A creature feature? It's trying to be all three, and while that's braver than most studio sci-fi would dare to be, it means the emotional core occasionally gets lost in the atmosphere.

The third act is where this tension is most pronounced. It spirals into surreal, hallucinatory imagery that's genuinely mesmerising to look at. But I found myself watching at arm's length, intellectually engaged but not quite moved. There's a coldness to it that I don't think is entirely intentional. The film wants you to feel the horror of dissolution, of identity coming apart, but it keeps aestheticising everything so beautifully that the dread struggles to land the way it should.

Garland made Ex Machina (2015) before this, and I think that film threads the needle more cleanly between idea and emotion. It's a tighter, more controlled piece of work. Annihilation is more ambitious, and probably more interesting for it, but ambition and execution don't always move in lockstep.

What the film does brilliantly is linger. I've thought about it more since watching it than I did during it, which is something. The images stick around. The bear. The crystalline trees. The lighthouse. The way The Shimmer turns out to work, once you understand it, is genuinely inspired, and it recontextualises everything that came before in ways that reward a second look. A film that makes you keep asking questions long after the credits is doing something right, even if those questions aren't always paired with the gut-punch feeling they might have been.

Flawed, then. Occasionally emotionally distant. But bold and strange and unlike most things that get a wide release. Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2018  | Watched: 2025-10-04

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Alex Garland: Ex Machina (2015)
More with Natalie Portman: Thor (2011) · Black Swan (2010) · Léon: The Professional (1994) · Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
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More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)