In Space, Nobody Can See You Colour
Annihilation. 2018, Paramount, Netflix
Written and directed by Alex Garland
Starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac.
I was about 40 minutes into watching Annihilation and realized I was starting to feel a deep sense of dread. These days, that may be a fairly typical emotional state to be in, but I realized it had something to do with the movie. Basically, the film was doing a pretty good job of creeping me out.
So I paused the movie and considered. Yes, so far it was a good movie, well-acted and with a very good sense of pacing. It was doing a fine job of building suspense. But dread? Nothing particularly scary had happened yet. Just a strange alien shimmer that was spreading…
That’s when it hit me. When I was ten years old, I read a novella by HP Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space. Not to put too fine a point on it, the story scared the piss out of me. I haven’t been as frightened by a story since, and when I reread it some 35 years later, I still found it utterly terrifying.
Annihilation isn’t actually based on the Lovecraft story, but on a novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer.
The movie apparently harkens back to the old Lovecraft story more than the novel, but both contain some of the same elements: a mysterious shimmer out of space, that is expanding, and warps, mutates and mutilates all living things within its domain. The original didn’t have a team of scientists trying to find out what happened to all the previous teams which never returned. There are some other new elements that did nothing to defray the power of the story but which I won’t discuss because they are spoilers.
The characters tend to be distant and generally cerebral, and counter-intuitively, this adds to the empathy the viewer feels for them, and the apprehension that grows around their increasingly likely fates.
Annihilation is intelligent, intense, and avoids the gimcrackery that often ruins perfectly good films. It may be the best SF film you’ll see this year.
One suggestion, though: If you read The Colour Out of Space and it scared you too, don’t watch this movie alone, or at night. Your cat will think you’ve gone mental if you do. Mine did.