Review: In ‘Annihilation,’ a Heroic Journey into the Alien Shimmer

A science-fiction fantasy spiked with baroque horror, “Annihilation” tells an enigmatic tale of love and death and alien invasion. Set in a future that looks pretty much like today, it centers on a biologist, Lena (Natalie Portman), who shortly after the movie opens reunites with her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), whom she thought was dead. As he sits in their kitchen, the camera slinking about, Lena’s surprise gives way to happiness and then to mounting wariness that, like some kind of contagion, soon slithers under your skin. To understand what has happened and why, Lena sets off on a heroic journey, one that — like most such adventures — inevitably leads inward with each searching step.

The setup turns on one of those alien mysteries (an extraterrestrial or a monolith or floating spaceships) that have come to Earth to wreak havoc or hatch conspiracies and force humans to make bad choices. The foreign body here takes the form of what’s called the shimmer: a glistening, ever-growing force field that has descended on a swath of Florida marshland like an opalescent shower curtain. The shimmer’s whirling pinky purples and blues evoke the rainbow colors you see in oily patches on a road after it rains, which suggests there’s something toxic about its beauty. The rainbow can’t help but also evoke the adventurous Dorothy, another traveler to a strange land.

Lena heads off on her own far-out trip soon after arriving at a government bunker at the edge of the shimmer. There, anonymous types scurry around or stare into computers; some carry guns, others clipboards; still others wear hazmat suits. After a banging start — an inquisition, a homecoming — writer-director Alex Garland fumbles putting these pieces in place. He rolls out the introductions, drops a little mumbo jumbo and some data points (mostly from Dr. Ventress, a shrink played by the perfectly chilled Jennifer Jason Leigh); he also engages in too much narrative throat clearing. Finally, Lena and four other armed women pass into the shimmer, which is where the story gets its weird on. Garland has a talent for unnerving you with quietly dissonant notes and an occasional grotesque flourish. A novelist and screenwriter, he made a terrific directorial debut with “Ex Machina” (2015), a creep-out set at the intersection of human hubris and artificial intelligence. An intuitive filmmaker, Garland created that movie’s wholly believable world as much through the visual and sound design as through the scripted beats and lines. He’s a genre guy, and while he enjoys unleashing blunt horror-film scares, he’s especially good at creating a sense of intimate menace, the kind that can brusquely change vibes and temperatures, and just as quickly turn characters into antagonists.

The world Garland has created in “Annihilation” is larger than that of “Ex-Machina,” more complex and intricately detailed. Working once more with production designer Mark Digby, Garland again turns interior spaces into emblems of isolation and desolation. (Here, rooms often seem emptiest when they’re inhabited, partly because of how Garland visually isolates characters in the frame.) The greater, more richly suggestive realm in “Annihilation,” though, is the natural world inside the shimmer, a dense, verdant biosphere filled with animals and plants that are at once familiar and — with their extra bits and trippy hues — pleasurably, at times spookily, foreign.

“Annihilation” is based on the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Trilogy,” but it also seems to owe a considered debt to the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Virgil’s telling, Orpheus journeys to the underworld in an attempt to retrieve his adored wife, Eurydice, who has died from a snake bite. Ovid revisited the myth in “Metamorphoses” and centuries later Jean Cocteau put a modern spin on it in “Orpheus” (1950), a hypnotically lovely film in which death’s emissary is a striking woman who rides around in a black Rolls-Royce flanked by motorcyclists. “A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,” the narrator in Cocteau’s film says. “Interpret it as you wish …”

In “Annihilation” it’s Lena who assumes the role of Orpheus, descending into a transfigured world filled with terrors, death, eccentric beauty and room for interpretive leeway. She and the other women have been tasked with understanding both the shimmer and why earlier expeditions failed so profoundly. With Dr. Ventress riding herd, Lena and the others — a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez), a physicist (Tessa Thompson) and an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny) — survey the terrain, take samples and fight off threats, including, in time, one another. They also discover a horrific video made by an earlier expedition, a scene that abruptly shifts the movie into a Grand Guignol freakout.

Garland likes to play with tones, mixing deadpan in with the frights, and later “Annihilation” becomes something of a head movie, swirling with cosmic and menacingly lysergic visions. He keeps the tension torqued throughout this phantasmagoric interlude, sustaining the shivery unease that is one of this movie’s deeper satisfactions. Something is troubling Lena, whose personal life comes into focus over a series of flashbacks that are entirely too banal. Portman does her part with presence and persuasive stern looks, yet there’s something missing from Garland’s conception of Lena, whose mythic story bristles with dread but lacks the soul that might make you care.

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Production notes:

“Annihilation”

Rated R for intense violence, including a gruesome operation. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.