His better works - 28 Days Later, Ex Machina - nudge enthusiastically at the boundary between commercial escapism and intriguing art house, while his less successful pieces - Sunshine, Dredd - fall clumsily between the two.
I wanted to like Annihilation, Garland’s recently written-and-directed addition to the straight-to-Netflix film library, but unfortunately it was another one that was too odd for mainstream enjoyment and too simplistic as a work of art.
It is an existential sci-fi horror film starring Natalie Portman as Lena, a scientist who joins a research expedition into a mysterious zone that has arisen around a meteor crash. Within this zone strange phenomena occur, the usual rules of biology are warped, and every team that has previously entered has vanished without a trace.
A central problem for me is the similarity here with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 meditative masterpiece Stalker. Annihilation, mirroring its protagonists, wades clumsily into territory marked out by that beautiful film, and then falls back on ungainly and simplistic techniques to make it through.
It is a film exploring themes of structure and mutation in nature, of the delicate balance between order and chaos in which life on Earth exists, and the ego’s fear at being housed within impermanent and disintegrating houses of flesh. The sense of unease that it wants to develop would benefit I think from a surreal or dreamlike filmmaking technique - and Garland provides moments of this - but on the whole the film is stolid and workmanlike where it should be unnerving and otherworldly.
The script is heavy on exposition, always directly telling us what we should know rather than showing us the way to figure out ourselves. Dialogue is clunky, inelegant, forcing the characters to spell out what would be better hinted at - “We’re all damaged goods here”; “You’re saying we get out by going deeper in?” - dictating the tone rather than engendering it.
The central relationship is between Lena and her husband, a soldier, played by Oscar Isaac, who was sent into the zone on the last expedition. Portman and Isaac don’t have much chemistry, unfortunately, and the dynamic between the two of them, though it aims for a blending of the personal and cosmic, in a similar way to Interstellar, never quite ties the whole together. I didn’t like Interstellar either, by the way, but at least you knew, you felt how much Matthew McConaughey’s character loved his daughter. Like all of Nolan’s films it fitted together like an intricately carved puzzle, even if it was schmaltzy and ludicrous.
Annihilation doesn’t coalesce in the same way. It’s a prosaic sci-fi horror, most reminiscent, unfortunately, of Ridley Scott’s lacklustre Alien Covenant and Prometheus - for all the cerebral ambition it still clings limpet-like to hoary genre tropes - exposition told through video logs from previous teams, side characters picked off one by one, an ending that inexpertly visualises the protagonist’s struggle as an action scene featuring a trick with a grenade.
There are moments of tension and unease. The sound design is excellent. It looks sporadically good, with splodges of neon fungal growths and shimmering lights contrasting with verdant foliage and desolate beaches - though it often puts you in mind more of expensive television than cinema. Portman and the rest of the team of female scientists are strong.
It touches on some frightening truths, and I wouldn’t like to watch it if I was feeling particularly on-edge or isolated - the body horror successfully gives out to more existential horror as it goes on - but in essence I found the impersonal and disconcerting atmosphere undermined by the leaden plot beats and dialogue.
It isn’t bad, but for a film about mutation and chaos it is all a touch too staid. Reportedly offloaded to Netflix after test-audiences found the film too “intellectual” and “complicated”, I in fact thought it didn’t go anywhere near far enough in these directions. But maybe that’s the problem - too complicated for the mainstream, yet too simple for art house. At one pole you’ve got the schlocky unbridled joy of Aliens, at the other the contemplative meandering of Stalker. Annihilation can’t decide which direction to go in, so eventually ends up shooting for both, and scoring direct hits on neither.
Worth a watch if you're low on Netflix inspiration, but not essential viewing.
Agreed, it was a film I very much wanted to like but it didn't use its ingredients to good enough effect.
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