Annihilation—Matt Taylor
Annihilation doesn’t feel like a horror film when it starts, and it certainly wasn’t advertised as one. An adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s book of the same name (part of his Southern Reach trilogy), the film follows a team of scientists entering a quarantined part of Florida to investigate the strange environmental phenomenon going on there—which may be alien in nature. Led by a former Marine turned professor (Natalie Portman) whose husband recently went insane and became physically unwell in the quarantined area, the film has all the makings of a sci-fi action film.
But then something truly terrifying happens, so quickly and so subtly that it’s not even immediately apparent. After entering the quarantined zone, the film cuts to the scientists all waking up, their camp fully set up and supplies already missing, suggesting that a few days have passed. And that’s exactly the problem: the scientists don’t remember how they got there. In their memory, they had only just entered the zone. It’s a moment so existentially horrifying and so matter-of-factly established that it communicates directly to the audience that anything can happen in this deeply troubling adventure.
What follows is no less disturbing, even if it’s more explicitly nightmarish: there’s brutal body horror involving moving entrails, animals that have disturbingly human like qualities, and an ending so surreal and upsetting that it’ll leave you questioning what you’re actually seeing. But what director Alex Garland is able to accomplish here is quite extraordinary. This film constantly upends expectations and becomes almost disorienting in the way it suddenly heads into strange places. There hasn’t been anything quite like it this decade, and some of the visuals will stick with me well into the next.
