Warning! This article contains major spoilers for the 2018 film Annihilation.
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I once saw someone on Twitter say Carly Rae Jepsen is only popular because her songs are musical rorschach blots. It’s a theory that explains why a movie like Inception is so popular, and why Hamlet has sustained through the years. But if projection equals popularity, why aren’t more people talking about Annihilation?
(A bad release date. A relatively niche subgenre — cerebral sci-fi — with a limiting R rating. A studio unwilling to invest the deserved resources.)
Annihilation is a film with one of the best sequences in a long lineage of sci-fi, and one that allows the narrative to evolve into an ending so ambiguous moviegoers cannot avoid taking a microscope to it.
The film follows Lena, played by Natalie Portman, a former member of the military and now a professor at Johns Hopkins, whose husband Kane, played by Oscar Isaac, returns home after going missing following a mysterious deployment. It turns out Kane is sick, however, and in order to help save him, Lena partners with a government agency to serve on an expedition into the very place Kane disappeared: the Shimmer, a pristine wilderness in the southern United States annexed by a disarmingly beautiful alien force.
Lena enters the shimmer with four other women; despite the team of Cass, a geologist, Anya, a paramedic, Josie, a physicist, and Dr. Ventress, a psychologist and leader of the expedition, Lena is the only one to return from their expedition to the Shimmer. (The women are perfectly cast, played by Tuva Novotny, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, respectively, all of whom are phenomenal in their roles. Rodriguez in particular is a notable standout.)
The film at large is an incredible one — I can only hope it eventually gets its due — but its most momentous block comes towards the end, when Lena reaches the nucleus of the Shimmer, the Lighthouse. Viewers learn early on that the Lighthouse is the site of impact for the interstellar object that created the Shimmer and that the biological mutations the expedition encounters in the Shimmer become more extreme the closer to the Lighthouse they travel. These biological mutations, Josie explains to Lena, occur because just as prisms refract light, the prismatic nature of the Shimmer refracts the DNA inside it, scrambling it both within and between the organisms inside it.
Upon Lena’s arrival to the Lighthouse, she finds a burnt skeleton sitting against the wall, hands to its center as if holding something. Facing the skeleton, she finds a video camera, whose contents reveal her husband, Kane, sitting against the wall of the Lighthouse, holding a grenade and speaking to the unseen person holding the camera about how the Shimmer has changed everything he knows about himself and the world around him. Lena watches as Kane asks the other to take care of Lena, look away because the explosion may be bright, and detonates a grenade in his hand. Kane has become the annihilated, the skeleton against the wall, and Lena watches in horror as the figure behind the camera steps in front of it.
It’s a mirror image of Kane. Lena’s husband never returned to her after all.
Instead of running from Lighthouse, however, Lena turns to its other side, where lies the crater from the impact that created the Shimmer years ago. She does what none of us would do, but what can’t be avoided now that she’s there: she crawls inside.
Inside the crater, Lena finds Dr. Ventress — before Ventress explodes into multitudinous tiny pieces, reforming as a prismatic primordial cell. As Lena approaches, a drop of blood from her skin merges with the cell, which begins to transform into a shimmering, equally prismatic humanoid. Lena runs from crater, but the humanoid follows her, waiting for her at the bottom of the Lighthouse.
What ensues is a ballet, beautifully choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith, in which we see the humanoid mirror Lena’s every movement, seemingly less and less innocuously as the two first circle each other, and Lena tries multiple times, unsuccessfully, to escape. Lena is knocked unconscious twice during the fight, and we see her mirror next to her as she wakes up each time. The second time, we see the two rise, look each other up and down as if marveling at the reflection they’re seeing, before, ultimately, we see Lena pick up a second grenade from Kane’s backpack. Lena’s mirror takes her hands as she holds it, its shimmering skin ripple into a reflection of Lena’s own self, and we see Lena pull out the pin, leaving it in the mirror’s hands as she walks slowly towards the door of the Lighthouse.
The mirror stares at the grenade, holding is at it explodes, and as it burns, painstakingly crosses first to Kane’s body, caressing the face, before crawling down into the crater, spreading the flames, and destroying the Shimmer from its very nucleus. Lena, on the beach, looks back at the burning lighthouse as the rest of the Shimmer burns around her, its walls falling into nothing.
The film ends when we see Lena reunited with what we now know to be Kane’s mirror. “You’re not Kane, are you?” she asks. “I don’t think so,” he replies, “are you Lena?” Lena doesn’t respond; instead, the two embrace, and we see the Shimmer in Kane’s eyes, before it cuts to Lena, whose eyes reflect the same Shimmer before the screen goes black.
It’s a beautiful ending to a beautiful movie, and one that has proven as divisive as the cells that make so much of its symbolism. Despite having the same building blocks, it’s a film that immediately splits, becoming one of two depending on your interpretation of its ending: did Lena escape, or is it her mirror?
Despite the two drastically different interpretations of Annihilation, only one of the two endings has been heavily dissected, breakdowns and thinkpieces all reliant on a singular interpretation of the ending: that it is Lena, the real Lena, who escapes the Shimmer. Most notable are Josephine Livingstone and Angelica Jade Bastién’s analyses, which have broken down an Annihilation in which Lena escapes the Shimmer beautifully. (For interested readers, please note Bastién’s piece includes frank discussions about mental health, including suicide.)
Their Annihilation is one rooted in trauma, in which individuals’ grief and traumas are so refracted, embodied in the Shimmer’s inhabitants. Lena’s ultimate victory over her mirror – her own self-destructive tendencies and her own trauma – is a narrative of survival and triumph. In our discussion of our interpretations of the ending, even my own father capped it off with a beautiful flourish: we see the Shimmer in Lena’s eyes, he explained, because even when we survive, even when we overcome our traumas, trauma fundamentally changes people. We our forever changed by it – emotionally, spiritually, and, honoring the film’s scientific basis, even biologically.
It’s a very human interpretation of the ending, and one that I want to believe, but one that I’ve struggled to reconcile with what I see when I watch Annihilation. For me, Lena doesn’t escape, her mirror does, but that also doesn’t invalidate her strength or her triumph over trauma. Sometimes, as with Lena and Kane’s mirrors, the inhuman can be very human after all.
Breaking it down in an interview with GQ, Oscar Isaac shared writer-director Alex Garland’s motivations for making Annihilation as “with Annihilation, [it’s] the idea that we self-destruct, we are doomed, and we do it to ourselves. That it’s actually in our genes to self-destruct. That’s the reason he did the whole movie.” The ending is coded in Garland’s motivation itself: if the reason Garland made Annihilation is to explore the idea that we all self-destruct, the imperative is that Lena must destruct. She cannot make it out of the Shimmer. Knowing that, seeing that, and accepting that, how can her destruction be worthwhile?
Annihilation does not reach its ending with Lena alone, however. There are four other expedition members, they must self-destruct too, and so they do throughout the film. As Annihilation progresses, however, their respective destructions follow a pattern: they become less random and more intentional the longer the film goes on… And the closer they get to the Lighthouse.
Venturing into the Shimmer is certainly a first step towards self-destruction, but what then? Cass is the first to go, taken in the blink of an eye by a bear; Anya is next, taken by the same bear, but only after sacrificing herself to save the others following a downward spiral of Shimmer-induced instability. Josie marks a true shift: rather than wholly destructing, Josie accepts what has begun to happen to them in the Shimmer, and only Josie’s self as we know her destructs, her body changed into a human-shaped flowering vine. Dr. Ventress presses on to the Lighthouse, actively seeking what lies in the nucleus of Shimmer, where mutations are the strongest, and from where we know she does not intend to return. While we do not see what Dr. Ventress finds upon her arrival, we ultimately see her too destroyed and then changed, this time into the single cell from which life – in this case, Lena’s mirror – is created.
Lena says herself at Annihilation’s start that senescence is programmed into our cells: just as cellular self-destruction, or death, becomes less random with age, self-destruction becomes less random as the film ages. It also becomes less random the closer one gets to the Lighthouse. Not only must Lena destruct, but the film also dictates it must be an intentional one. Finally, she must destruct, yes, but she must also change.
Lena is no stranger to self-destruction; the film, as it unspools, is injected with increasingly clarifying instances of her own, active self-destruction. If that Lena is having an affair isn’t enough, as is revealed in flashbacks throughout the film, consider that her affair was with a colleague. She is not only destroying her own marriage, but also coming dangerously close to doing so to her career as well. (Annihilation may not reduce its characters to their gender, but the potential consequences for Lena here, having navigated her way through the US military to academia and a professorship at Johns Hopkins, are not so gracious.) She makes a call for the group to push on towards the Lighthouse after Cass’ death, even after her compatriots ask to turn back. Not only is Lena a tangle of self-destructive tendencies, but those impetuses are also selfish ones: they serve no greater purpose.
But trauma changes people.
Lena is adamant from the beginning of the film that she enters the Shimmer because she’s one of the only people who can save her husband – she’s a biologist-doctor who also has the military experience to aid survival in the Shimmer – and because he’s done something for her, she must do something for him. Her moral compass is a wavering one, entering the Shimmer to save Kane after having an affair and leading the expedition onwards with the knowledge there’s no way out, and Lena is weighed down with the trauma of her actions by the time she reaches the Lighthouse. The film’s final third is presented with a title card bearing “the Lighthouse,” and begins with Lena alone in the woods, sobbing after the death of a third expedition member, and remembering a moment with Kane, their relationship decaying from her affair.
It’s after this breakdown that Lena reaches the Lighthouse and finds out that her husband hasn’t returned at all, and that she cannot save him, because he is dead. Kane is dead, having left abruptly for Shimmer in the midst of his wife having an affair; Cass is dead, with Lena having been the one to discover her body; Anya is dead, after confronting Lena for not sharing with the group that her husband had been on a previous expedition; and Josie is dead, Lena having been the last person she talked to, and the last person who saw her alive. Lena cannot save any of them.
But the Shimmer is expanding, Dr. Ventress has told her at the beginning of the film, and soon cities and land masses would be at risk for being swallowed up, entire populations dying in the same ways that her husband and expedition members have.
And so Lena pushes forward into the crater and meets her mirror. Remember that the chain the film has built dictates that Lena must not only self-destruct, but also change, just as Josie and Dr. Ventress have before her. It’s in her confrontation with her mirror that she does; just as the Shimmer refracts DNA and even cosmetic features between organisms, sometime during their fight, Lena and her mirror switch expression, and also ability.
(After multiple enraptured viewings of the movie, I’ve concluded it happens the second time Lena is knocked unconscious. Awakening from a longer blackout – Lena was in the Shimmer for months, we learn at the beginning – the organisms we think are Lena and the mirror stand and circle and look each other up and down à la Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday, but that’s a technical conversation for another day.)
When Lena picks up the grenade, then, it is not Lena doing so, but the mirror, and it is Lena taking it – her appearance rippling over the prismatic skin of the mirror a mechanism both of the mirror’s DNA and allowing the film to establish that the mirror can take and perhaps has already taken Lena’s appearance – and embracing her own destruction. Lena lets the mirror leave, and embraces the grenade, because she knows that her own destruction is inevitable, has always known, and knows now what she must do.
She may not have been able to save Kane, or Cass, or Anya, or Josie, or Dr. Ventress, but she may be able to save the cities and land masses and entire populations at risk of being devoured, their DNA colonized by the Shimmer. Why try to fight her mirror, maybe escape, and have to live with the continued trauma not only of the deaths behind her, but also of those ahead of her, the knowledge that she had the power to stop the Shimmer and didn’t burning forever in her mind?
Lena is a molecular biologist: she knows that if you destroy a cell’s nucleus, the site of genetic replication, it will no longer replicate, and the organism will die. As the grenade explodes and Lena is engulfed in the flames, she first caresses Kane’s face – a direct parallel to his caress of hers before leaving for the Shimmer and his death, as seen in a flashback – and then crawls back into the crater, the site of the first replication that created her mirror. The chamber, too, is engulfed in flames, and we see the entire cell that is the Shimmer — including its membrane of a border — burn, destroyed.
It’s also a macroscopic parallel to the film’s very first scene, the microscopic destruction Lena shows her students in a video, occurring as cervical cancer cells begin to multiply inside a patient’s womb. Not only is the Shimmer’s impact crater a nucleus, but it acts too as a womb, Lena destroying it just as she dictated at the start of the film.
That it is Lena’s mirror, then, that escapes is a given, but what is meaningful is not the identity of Annihilation’s ultimate survivor. Instead, it is that Lena has been changed by her trauma, that she has embraced it, and has triumphed over it… Even if it means that she, like the others before her, never left the Shimmer.
Just as the Shimmer’s refraction produces genetic (and dermic, in the case of one beautifully anachronistic ouroboros) mimicry, Garland’s crafted an ending that mimics genetics, too. A phenotype alone – what we’re seeing, in this case onscreen – does not a clear genotype – what’s actually happening – make. The interpretation of Lena surviving is human, a triumph over trauma that expresses not only human survival but also the human success to which we aspire. But, Garland says, we all self-destruct. We all must self-destruct. In the end, when it comes, what matters is the meaning we give it.
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[coffee]
