Alex Garland’s Annihilation is a film about transformation, self-destruction, and the kind of science fiction that’s supposed to be “deep,” but mostly feels like being stuck in a philosophy major’s fever dream after they’ve watched Stalker, The Tree of Life, and an episode of Planet Earth—all while microdosing mushrooms. It wants to be cerebral, mysterious, and terrifying. What it ends up being is a mood board with a fog machine and a PhD in vague whispering.
Let’s start with the plot—what little there is. Natalie Portman plays Lena, a biologist and former soldier with the personality of a wet blanket on Ambien. Her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac, mostly sleepwalking until he actually gets to sleep in a coma) returns from a mysterious mission in “The Shimmer,” a supernatural zone that appeared on Earth for no reason except that Garland needed a metaphor for emotional repression. Kane’s dying. Lena wants answers. So naturally, she joins an all-female squad of scientists and emotionally unstable professionals to march into the glowing wall of rainbow nonsense and… do science? Look for clues? Get slowly digested by kaleidoscopic CGI?
The rest of the team includes a psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who speaks like she’s doing bad ASMR, a paramedic with rage issues (Gina Rodriguez), a physicist who’s mostly there to explain plot points (Tessa Thompson), and a geologist or anthropologist or something (Tuva Novotny), who, spoiler alert, gets eaten by a bear before we learn anything else about her. Character development is mostly optional here. What matters is that they all look serious and wear cargo pants.
Inside The Shimmer, reality warps. DNA scrambles. Trees grow like crystals. Crocodiles sprout shark teeth. Bears scream like tortured humans. Plants grow into human shapes because… trauma? Grief? The prop department needed something to photograph between scenes of Natalie Portman staring into the middle distance?
This is Annihilation in a nutshell: weird things happen, people die in disturbingly aesthetic ways, and the survivors talk about it with the emotional range of a parking meter. The film thinks it’s profound because no one reacts like a normal human being. When a mutant bear rips out someone’s throat and later mimics their dying screams like a demonic parrot, the characters mostly respond with quiet contemplation and an intense need to journal. In a normal horror movie, people would be screaming, crying, maybe trying to build a makeshift weapon. Here? They just sit down and emotionally process it like a very sad book club.
And that’s the thing—Annihilation is allergic to urgency. Every scene moves like it’s been dipped in syrup. Every line of dialogue is delivered like the speaker just remembered it was laundry day. You could swap out half the cast with mannequins in lab coats and no one would notice. When the characters aren’t dying, they’re monologuing about self-destruction and cell replication like TED Talk dropouts.
And let’s talk about that third act. Oh boy.
After two hours of shimmering weirdness and slow, existential dread, we finally arrive at the lighthouse—the heart of The Shimmer and, supposedly, the answers to all our questions. Instead, we get Natalie Portman confronting a glowing, faceless alien double who mimics her every move like a mime with access to Adobe After Effects. They twirl. They dance. They mirror each other like it’s Black Swan: The Sci-Fi Cut. It’s meant to be symbolic, powerful, maybe even transcendent. What it feels like is a really bad interpretive dance routine in an arthouse club that forgot to pay its lighting bill.
Garland clearly wants this scene to be the climax of a journey—not just through the alien terrain, but through grief, guilt, and identity. But the symbolism is so vague and the visuals so indulgently slow that any emotional payoff is swallowed by a black hole of “What the hell is happening?” By the time Portman blows everything up with a phosphorous grenade (don’t ask), you’re not moved. You’re just relieved.
The performances are serviceable but muted. Portman tries her best with a script that gives her more monologues than emotions. Leigh is hypnotic in that “please don’t sit next to her on the train” way. Rodriguez injects some much-needed energy into the first half but is quickly shoved aside like the rest of the supporting cast. Isaac, God love him, is mostly a plot device in cargo pants who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. Maybe in a timeline where this movie had a pulse.
Visually, the movie is stunning—if you like watching screensavers with anxiety. The Shimmer is full of vibrant colors, refracted light, and eerily beautiful landscapes. But it’s all surface. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a luxury skincare ad: all gloss, no grit. The world is strange, yes, but it never feels dangerous. Not in the way good sci-fi horror should. It’s as if Garland is too polite to really terrify you. He just wants to haunt your dreams gently, like a moody ghost that leaves behind flower petals and ambiguous metaphors.
The score, by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, veers between moody acoustic guitars and blaring synths that sound like a broken fax machine screaming into a void. It wants to build tension, but mostly just reminds you that your ears still work while your brain tries to stay awake.
Now, some folks will argue that Annihilation is misunderstood. That it’s brilliant. That it’s a metaphor for depression, cancer, entropy, evolution, marriage, climate change, and Ikea furniture that assembles itself into your emotional baggage. And maybe it is. But that doesn’t make it good. It just makes it vague and open to Reddit threads.
Rating: 2 out of 5 screaming bears.
Watch it if you enjoy watching smart people die slowly while whispering about biology in pastel fog. Skip it if you’d prefer your sci-fi with some actual stakes, characters who emote, or literally anything happening before minute 87. Annihilation wants to blow your mind. It ends up gently numbing it, like anesthesia delivered through a lava lamp.