So Mike and I saw Annihilation four days ago and I'm still thinking about it. At first, my initial reaction right after the credits began to roll was, "Okay, that was a crazy-intense, all-round-good movie". But the more I've thought about it and all the specific aspects...I've slowly realized there's a much bigger sub-context to the film. And it absolutely shakes me to my core more than any of the creepy elements shown on the actual screen.
Now, keep in mind that obviously I don't actually know if what I'm about to explain to you is actually what the director of Annihilation was trying to subtly convey, but I for one certainly can't see any other way to look at it. Movies are not mystery boxes. There is no "answer" because art isn’t a game or a puzzle to be solved. It’s subjective, so it’s open to interpretation.
This should be obvious but I'll say it just in case: THERE ARE MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!
Annihilation is horrifying, but in a specific way. Just like last year’s mother!, this film exists largely as a metaphor—not literal terms. It’s meant to put you in the same dreamlike state of the characters, offering explanations for what’s happening...but also never announcing its themes as it tries to weave subtext into the text.
So what’s really happening in Annihilation? Well, I am completely convinced that it’s a movie about cancer.
No one in the movie says it’s about cancer, but it’s clear within the first fifteen minutes that the premise of Garland’s movie is basically: What if the Earth, the planet itself, got cancer? And then the movie moves forward completely around that premise. The "plot" may be about a biologist, Lena (Natalie Portman), who heads into The Shimmer (an unexplained phenomenon that is changing the area within) searching for answers along with four other female scientists. But it becomes clear that what this movie is about is cancer—and this idea is reinforced consistently throughout its duration.
It's made obvious right from the start in the opening scene, where Lena’s is giving a lecture at Johns Hopkins where she talks about cell division and how cells rapidly divide and mutate. We then cut back three years prior, when something struck a lighthouse in the Southern Reach. This entity consumed the lighthouse and then started expanding. The unexplained phenomenon is a great stand-in for how cancer strikes: Everything is normal...and then it’s not. In the place of the usual is something that’s mutating and, like The Shimmer, expanding. Yes, sure, we can talk about risk factors and causes...but there are also perfectly healthy people who still get cancer without any real reason at all. It’s not that cancer is inexplicable, but rather that our understanding of it is still evolving.
Once Lena and the team are inside the Shimmer, they immediately start noticing mutations. These mutations stand in for the cancer (the "tumor" at the heart of the Shimmer) affecting other cells. Garland is basically taking a biological phenomenon and staging something similar to Fantastic Voyage or that episode of the Magic School Bus where they venture inside a sickly Ralphie. Except, instead of the scientists shrinking down to go inside someone’s body, the "body" they’re investigating is the Earth. Everything in The Shimmer gets messed up because of mutations. And, as Radek (Tessa Thompson) later explains to the group, they’re basically inside of a prism. Meaning, everything is refracting—minds, bodies, everything. It all gets screwed up because, well, that’s exactly what cancer does to a healthy body.
But Garland presents this subtext in a very specific way. It’s not like in The Cloverfield Paradox, where anything can happen and nothing is explained (one dude ends up filled with worms while another dude has a severed arm that offers the team helpful messages, etc). Annihilation remains consistent. It is constantly showing mutations...but mutations as they would occur on a body. Garland wisely abstains from presenting everything as simply altogether gross or beautiful. There’s just this calculated indifference. Life grows and mutates. Sometimes you might see something beautiful, like the white, skeletal deer with branches for antlers. And sometimes you get ScreamBear, the bear mutation who eats your vocal cords and can replicate your dying moments with its own mouth.
Although Garland did loosely adapt Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, certain details bolster the cancer metaphor (which the book doesn't appear to preach as directly...or so I gather, seeing as I didn't read the book lol). For example: the expedition team is all women. From a plot perspective, this is explained by pointing out that previous teams were men and so this could change the results of the expedition. However, it’s also worth noting that the most common form of cancer is breast cancer which, you guessed it, largely affects women.
Additionally, even though all the characters are doctors of some kind, the only character actually referred to repeatedly as “Doctor” is Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). I will admit that Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez) is kind of a gray area since she’s just an EMT, not a licensed doctor...but it's close enough so the point still stands. Although Ventress a psychologist by trade, her function in the story has little to do with actual psychology and more with seeing people go inside The Shimmer and not come out. Understand her role now? This isn't too different from an oncologist who loses a lot of patients to cancer. Tired of watching teams disappear to never return, Ventress decides to take matters into her own hands and head in herself, hoping to use the knowledge she's obtained from observing the previous teams to help her be successful. But, of course, knowledge is no defense against cancer...and Ventress's character literally has cancer in the movie.
Okay, so maybe you're following me so far. But you're also probably wondering how cancer relates to any of Lena’s flashbacks. Well, quite bluntly, Lena’s self-destruction creates a "cancer" in her marriage. Lena’s story is basically the heart of the movie. If you cut out her strained relationship with her husband, her guilt over cheating on him, and her desperation to find something that might be able to save him, then you have a movie that’s still fascinating, but also very very cold. There’s no emotional center to it because you just have five people walking through a cancer. Everything in the flashbacks is the humanity that’s tied to each individual who goes through cancer: our regrets, our hopes, our dreams. For Lena, her story is about trying to find redemption. That’s why when she talks about trying to rescue Kane (Oscar Isaac) she doesn’t say "I love him"—she says, "I owe him".
As the movie goes on and our characters get closer to The Shimmer, we lose Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) and Thorensen. But Garland very wisely doesn’t make that surprising—he tells us right in the opening minutes that Lena's team doesn't make it, leaving us to wonder what exactly happened to Radek and Ventress. The ending for all four characters is basically death of some kind. Radek notes that Ventress "wants to face it", while Lena "wants to fight it". Though, in the end, she chooses to just accept it. This truly mimics the different ways people deal with their cancer—sometimes people go violently while others just slip away. There is not a single type of "death by cancer".
The reason why Annihilation doesn’t stand in for all deaths goes back to the imagery Garland hits us with throughout the movie. Everything in the movie metastasizes and changes. We get plenty of shots of cells diving. When we see the dead soldier in the swimming pool, his body has basically broken apart and expanded the way a cancer cell would destroy a healthy cell. The lighthouse itself has a growth highly reminiscent of a tumor. If Garland simply wanted to show "death" in all its forms he would have used different imagery, like blood or ashes. It’s also telling that Ventress, the only character who literally has cancer, goes through the literal definition of "annihilation" as it relates to physics: "the conversion of matter into energy, especially the mutual conversion of a particle and an antiparticle into electromagnetic radiation".
Alright, so why doesn’t the same thing that happens to Ventress happen to Lena? For the same reason cancer doesn’t kill everyone who gets it. When we see Lena face off with her alien mirror—wow, that is such a powerful visual representation for cancer. Cancer is both alien and it is in our own cells. It’s not an infection or a virus. It’s our own bodies turned against us, which is what happens to Lena in the lighthouse. The only way she’s able to destroy it is with a phosphorous grenade, which may as well stand in for chemotherapy. It’s a destructive force meant to snuff out the alien being that’s also a part of us.
In an interview I read, Garland said the movie is about "self-destruction". On a metaphysical level, Annihilation certainly has that. Ventress and Lena even have a conversation saying how self-destruction and suicide aren’t the same thing. But if you look at Annihilation as a movie about cancer, like I believe it is, then that self-destruction becomes, in a sense, literal. Cancer is a destruction of the self by biological means. And Annihilation certainly shows that self-destruction reflected in the environment. When we think "self-destruction", we usually think of someone trashing their home or doing something to harm themselves (like drinking heavily). In Annihilation, we see self-destruction on a biological level.
The last scene of the movie is definitely the most cryptic. We see Kane, who has recovered, and Lena back together. She recognizes that this Kane is not her Kane, but likely the copy that was created inside the lighthouse. They’re both"“survivors", but he is permanently changed by his experience. When we see The Shimmer in both of their eyes, it’s a reminder that cancer is really never truly exterminated. Because truly, cancer is always kind of with you no matter what—even if you’re "cancer-free". It also ties back into the nature of their marriage, because the basis of it has mutated. They’re different people now. Even if you removed all the sci-fi stuff, and simply had a wife reuniting with her husband after cheating on him (and he knew about said infidelity, which is what caused him to leave in the first place), they would be forever changed. You can't just "forget" about something so major like that and just completely "move on". It is something that changes your marriage forever.
So, now for the question Mike asked me when I was explaining my analysis to him: Why not just make a movie literally about cancer? And also: why go so broad with the whole "self-destruction" thing? I think this is because we tend to get only one kind of cancer movie, which is about the individual cancer patient. And that makes sense, because it’s dramatic and its tear-jerking and relatable to many people who have seen friends and family stricken with the disease. But what makes Annihilation special is that it wants to confront the cold, uncaring horror of it all. ScreamBear isn’t just a horrifying creation that can rip you apart—he also stands in for the fear of how people will remember your dying moments. The fear that a cancer patient has: that they’ll be remembered not for who they were, but for their final moments of agony. Yes, there’s a sense of "self-destruction" in that one’s identity is destroyed...but it’s also a specific form of death.
That’s why when Lomax (Benedict Wong), the scientist debriefing Lena, says, "So it was alien" the line lands with such a thud. I for one sat there confused, for I had already begun putting the pieces of this cancer metaphor together throughout the film's progression. But then, wait, it literally was just aliens? Well...yes—on a literal level the whole thing is "aliens". But I believe that the term is so broad as to be rendered meaningless—Garland did not make a movie about extraterrestrials. He made a movie about us and the most alien horror many of us will confront in some way during our lifetimes.
So, that's my two cents. Of course, this isn’t the only way to read Annihilation—I've read a ton of reviews where some people felt it was about self-destruction alone, while others thought it was about marriage. My interpretation of Annihilation isn’t to shut out other interpretations, though I find that mine holds the most ground in a broad sense. But, truly the movie is in the eye of the one who perceives it. That's what makes it such a great sci-fi film—there’s not a single definite answer. It’s a movie that worms its way into your brain and will continue to haunt you long after The Shimmer fades.
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