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![]() She arrives to find the charred remains of a body, a hole in the floor, and a camcorder on a tripod. ![]() Lena, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed and just as single-mindedly determined for answers, is not far behind her. There is a lot of space between what rational humans recognize as fully functional, sentient existence and total destruction, and the Shimmer is basically that in-between space, making each woman unrecognizable to herself in different ways before snuffing them out.Įventually, Josie, Cass and Anya are dead, and Ventress has gone missing, having charged ahead to the lighthouse. The ecosystem of the Shimmer speeds this up, warping the women’s minds and bodies, even their own blood cells. The cancerous cervical cells Lena shows her biology students in an early scene are metaphors of a sort, but as she points out later, all human cells eventually mutate and break down in the process of aging. Garland’s film is not about anything so ego-driven as suicide it’s about self-defeat on a molecular level, an entropy of the self. And sure enough, one by one they are killed by the fearsome mutations that have sprung up in the Shimmer, or, in the case of Tessa Thompson’s Josie, willfully succumb to the genetic weirdness of the environment. (And you know what they say about the void.) Garland emphasizes that everyone is there by choice these women are not hapless suckers roped into a documentedly dangerous and insane mission. In the novel, it plays out more like the land’s reclamation of itself and its inherent chaos in the film, it’s a beckoning void that promises some kind of finality that the mundane world can’t. The Shimmer is a psychedelically manifesting cancer on the land (perhaps not accidentally, the American South) the people who are drawn to it recognize something of themselves in the phenomenon. Alex Garland’s script brings to the surface the theme of human flailing that was present but less articulated in Jeff VanderMeer’s book. The other three women on the expedition are broken in their own ways - they’ve lost loved ones or struggle with self-harm. Related Storiesĩ Ways Annihilation the Movie Differs from Annihilation the Book ![]() Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh,) a psychologist who has been overseeing all previous expeditions from the Southern Reach base camp (none of which, with the exception of Lena’s husband, have ever returned) while, it is later revealed, slowly dying of cancer. Portman’s Lena is a biologist who has volunteered for the expedition after her husband (Oscar Isaac) has come back inexplicably altered from the same mission. The face-off occurs at the end of the film’s trek into the Shimmer, a mysterious, probably paranormal zone that is spreading through the Florida swampland in which all manner of biological impossibilities are taking place. I was impressed, then, to see that Smith herself had choreographed that scene - and that perhaps the emotional wallop it delivered wasn’t just my own projection. Watching Natalie Portman stuck in a seemingly inescapable dance with her faceless, iridescent double - watching it turn violent, not out of malice, but because it can’t help but be - called to mind Smith’s controlled throwing of herself across a performance space, the internal passion and turmoil of the self made physical. The film introduced me to Bobbi Jene Smith, and her ability to turn her entire body into a lightning rod of instinct through her charged, emotionally (and sometimes physically) naked choreography, as sensual as it is self-destructive. I’m no modern dance buff, and the dancer and choreographer is not someone who would have been on the tip of my tongue if it wasn’t for last year’s ravishing documentary Bobbi Jene, by director Elvira Lind. ![]() In the feverish crescendo of Annihilation’s wordless climax, the name Bobbi Jene crept into my otherwise paralyzed brain. ![]()
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