Annihilation (2018)
- Before Natalie Portman was cast, several major A-list stars turned down the lead role because they felt the script was too risky.
- Alex Garland originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
- Eagle-eyed viewers have noticed a hidden easter egg referencing Alex Garland's previous film in the background of the opening scene.
Annihilation is a 2018 science fiction horror film written and directed by Alex Garland, based on Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel. Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a cellular biology professor and former Army soldier whose husband Kane, played by Oscar Isaac, returns from a mysterious military expedition into "the Shimmer" β an ever-expanding zone of iridescent energy surrounding a crashed meteorite on the Florida coast β in a state of severe physical deterioration with no memory of what happened. Lena joins an all-female scientific expedition into the Shimmer, where they discover that the zone is refracting and recombining all biological matter, creating hybrid organisms that are simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
Alex Garland created one of the most genuinely unsettling science fiction films of the decade, using the Shimmer as a metaphor for self-destruction, depression, and the ways trauma mutates identity. The bear scene β in which a mutated creature produces the dying screams of its human victim through its own mouth β was one of the most disturbing sequences in modern horror. The film's climactic lighthouse sequence, featuring an alien entity that mirrors and absorbs Lena's movements in a hypnotic, wordless dance, was a piece of abstract horror filmmaking unlike anything in mainstream cinema.
Annihilation earned only $43 million worldwide theatrically, as Paramount sold international distribution rights to Netflix, but it has been widely reassessed as a modern science fiction masterpiece.
