Film review · Science-fiction horror / psychological

Annihilation

Carita Hännikäinen

Annihilation (2018) is a visual and philosophical journey to the outer limits of humanity. Director Alex Garland abandons the clichés of traditional science-fiction horror and the safe harbours of rational thought. The film plunges straight into an in-between space where everyday reality crumbles and the human being confronts cosmic mysteries. It depicts a spiritual and biological transformation in which the ego dies to make room for an entirely new form of existence.

The film’s mysterious zone, ”the Shimmer”, serves as a stage on which the inner structure of the human being breaks apart. When the expedition steps inside it, the experience resembles a powerful psychedelic journey: linear time shatters and perception changes radically. The Shimmer does not merely alter the physical environment; it strips away social masks and forces one to face the darkest sides of the psyche. It is an in-between space where the inner and outer worlds merge, and there is no return to the former self.

The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe regarded consciousness as a tragic overshoot of evolution. The human being is a species in which too much consciousness has developed: the capacity to see our own insignificance and mortality gives rise to constant existential anguish. Annihilation sets human and animal against each other through this anguish. The animals of the Shimmer, such as the mutant bear and the deer, live without spiritual crisis. Although the bear carries its victim’s death scream within its own cry, it merely fulfils its blind nature, free of moral anxiety.

According to Zapffe, we shield ourselves from this anguish with artificial mental structures and illusions. In the extreme state of the Shimmer these protective walls crumble, and the human being must face the raw core of existence completely naked.

The film dismantles the illusion of humanity as the crown of creation. In everyday reality evolution proceeds invisibly slowly, but in the Shimmer the process takes on a lightning-fast and radical form. The zone thus acts as a mirror of a real-world place, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where modern humanity’s illusion of control melted away before the rawness of existence. Just as invisible radioactive radiation tears apart the DNA of cells at Chernobyl, the prismatic force of the Shimmer works as an invisible yet all-transforming field. It reflects, refracts and mixes the genes of living organisms, breaking down the absolute boundaries between species.

Like Chernobyl, where humans were forced to flee and leave room for an ecosystem gone wild, the Shimmer shows that the protective walls of the Anthropocene, the age of humans, are fragile. The radiation-born anomalies of Chernobyl’s ”Red Forest” find their counterparts in the Shimmer’s prismatic deer and human-shaped plants. In both environments the conventional human conception of time shatters: they are at once frozen monuments to the past and laboratories of radical biological change.

The film’s alien is not a traditional, conscious conqueror; it acts rather as a vast hive mind. A hive mind has no individual ego, morality or personal will: it is a collective continuity that absorbs everything into itself. For the individualistic human being, encountering this networked intelligence is terrifying, because it reveals the human body to be merely malleable biological material within a greater cosmic flow.

Thematically, the film forms an intriguing mirror image of John Carpenter’s science-fiction horror classic The Thing (1982). Both films deal with cellular-level biological horror, the unpredictable mutation of the human body and disintegration in an isolated space, yet their philosophical undercurrents are entirely opposed. The alien of The Thing is a hostile parasite consciously striving to survive, which sets off a paranoid struggle for survival among the characters. In Annihilation, by contrast, the alien stands not for conscious evil or hatred but for blind reflection and the creation of the new. Where Carpenter’s film is a fight to preserve one’s identity, Garland’s is a surrender to the process. In the end this turns biological horror into spiritual freedom, in which the boundaries of humanity dissolve into a larger whole.

The journey to the heart of the Shimmer ultimately demands the dissolution of the material self. The film’s climax in the lighthouse is the purest depiction of ego death. When Lena, played by Natalie Portman, faces her mirror being, this is no traditional battle against a monster. It is the collapse of her own psychological structure, memories and self-image: the final loss of the illusion of control. Beyond all that is transient awaits a new kind of unity and free flow. In a distorted way, the process answers humanity’s age-old hope of life after death and the longing to merge with God. In the Shimmer, the heaven of the hereafter has simply been replaced at the biological level: the individual is not saved spiritually into paradise, but their consciousness and material form live on as part of an all-devouring whole.

This, too, invites comparison with the iconic ending of The Thing, in which two survivors sit amid burning ruins, not knowing which of them is still human. Annihilation, however, takes its resolution further. When Lena and Kane meet, the shimmer flickering in their eyes reveals that neither of them is who they once were. Their human identity has died, and they have become part of the universe’s greater, networked whole.

Annihilation is a visual study of what happens when the human being is stripped of modern defence mechanisms and thrown into the midst of an incomprehensible cosmic mystery. The film depicts not mere destruction, but a new beginning and an inevitable transformation.

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