So, let’s talk about H.P. Lovecraft for a bit.
I mean, yeah, it’s not like his work is going begging for consideration, but in my opinion, discussion of H.P. Lovecraft currently tends to be reduced to either glib, cutesy pop culture signifiers, slotting it neatly next to other science fiction and fantasy properties as part of what is sometimes called “nerd culture,” (which, yikes), or to critique of his frankly abhorrent beliefs about race, gender, and social class.
Neither of these modes of discussion are about his writing. The former operates less on the actual writing, or even the mood it evokes, and more narrowly on the idea of “tentacles” and “madness” as something whimsical. The latter predicates the value of the writing on the character of its creator and its congruence with contemporary values.
(As an aside, bad people sometimes create great art, and at the end of the day, none of us are without flaw. And for that matter, culture continues to evolve past our current reference for what is considered appropriate. On a long enough timeline, damn near everyone and damn near every creative work is going to be considered problematic. The idea that art and entertainment are only as good as they are aligned with the zeitgeist strikes me as deeply revisionist and suggests things about the audience that are paternalistic as fuck.)
Any way you look at it, these approaches are reductive. It’s also entirely possible that Lovecraft has been over-discussed. That we don’t need to talk about Lovecraft’s work anymore, because it’s all been said. That’s entirely possible. But I think the broader contribution his writing makes to horror’s vocabulary is a valuable one - an overwhelming feeling of dread at the idea of a largely unknowable cosmos, filled with the utterly alien - alien life, alien cultures, alien technology, alien thoughts, alien purpose. “Alien” not just in the sense of extraterrestrial, but also in the sense of the impenetrably incomprehensible. We fear the unknown, and Lovecraft’s writing has power in the way it communicates that there is far, far more unknown than known out there.
So these are the Scylla and Charybdis of Lovecraft in the modern day - how to communicate and preserve that sense of cosmic horror outside of a body of work which is, at least at this point in Western culture, pretty thoroughly tainted by its creator? How to be Lovecraftian without Lovecraft himself? Well, I’ve already covered a few films that I think fit the bill - Cthulhu, The Thing, and Honeymoon come to mind right off the top of my head - but I think I’ve found another one.
So now that I’ve gone on entirely too long about Lovecraft and modern cultural discourse, let’s talk about Annihilation.
We open on a woman, in a room, seated, surrounded by men and women in hazmat suits. She looks tired. A man is asking her questions, observes that she only had enough rations for four days, but was “out there” for two weeks. How did she survive? The woman doesn’t know.
The woman’s name is Lena, and we learn about her, and what brought her to this point, through a series of sharply cut, elliptical sequences that jump backwards and forwards in time. She’s a biologist, ex-military, her husband a soldier still on active duty. He’s gone for long stretches on classified missions. He can’t talk about his work, and one day, he is deployed someplace he’s not allowed to talk about, and he doesn’t come back.
Until he does. Or, at least, most of him does. One day he’s gone, the next he’s home, wandering in his own house, lost, unsure of how he got there. He’s distant, reserved, forgetful, and soon shows signs of being gravely ill. Mysterious figures in tactical gear intervene. The next thing she knows, Lena wakes up in a facility - part military base, part lab, part hospital. Here, Lena learns from the facility’s director where her husband had been. There’s an anomaly out there, just outside the facility walls, and her husband was part of a detachment sent into the anomaly to explore it. Not the first detachment by any means, but Lena’s husband was the first person to ever come out again, and now he’s dying, and dying quickly.
And so Lena joins the next expedition into the anomaly.
Annihilation is not one of those films about people - apart from Lena and facility director Dr. Ventress (who comes for reasons of her own, revealed gradually), the rest of the expedition are pretty much ciphers. Everything about them - dialogue, appearance, affect - matches the tones of periodic flashbacks to Lena’s life before the present moment, clipped and terse, conveying what is necessary. In terms of emotion and human interaction, this is, for lack of a better phrase, a cold and colorless film. But this seems to be a deliberate choice, to contrast the people exploring the anomaly with the anomaly itself. Because where the people are colorless, the anomaly is not.The anomaly itself is a patch of land on the coast, enveloped in something called “the Shimmer,” a sort of enormous bubble refracting the light that enters it into a rainbow haze, and within that bubble, the environment has…changed. New forms of life, familiar forms recombined into something alien, possessed of what Lena refers to as “corruptions of form.” And this is really where I see the connections to Lovecraft, or maybe just to a larger tradition of cosmic horror for which he is the most familiar referent. The world looks different inside the Shimmer - colors are brighter, more saturated, and a profusion of plant life has overtaken the ruins of buildings that once stood there. Some of the new life inside the Shimmer is beautiful, something you might see in a fantasy film. Some of it is less beautiful, and quite dangerous. But throughout, riotous color predominates. As the expedition presses further into the Shimmer, determined to find answers where previous expeditions did not, the land becomes stranger, the beautiful and lethal increasingly commingling, best emblematized by a corpse plastered to a wall by a variety of fungi found nowhere in nature. There are detours into predatory violence, body horror and the paranoia expected of any group of people held in extremis in a hostile environment (much like The Thing) before the film plunges into the heart of the anomaly, and juxtaposition gives way to surrealism, to a tableau that could as easily be an art installation as the center of biological and environmental derangement.
Unfortunately, it’s here that I think the film pulls up short. Some of it is down to pacing, with a confrontation sequence that is drawn out far too long, and which suffers from very obvious digital effects compared to what came before. The Shimmer is explained a little too thoroughly - well, it’s explained at all, which I think was a bad choice, given how much of this film relies on the idea of the alien and unknowable, and it concludes very much in the “The End…OR IS IT?” mold in a way that’s not especially subtle. Given how much these missteps stand out, I wonder how much of it is due to studio interference, to poor test screenings and the subsequent underestimation of a larger audience’s intelligence and tolerance for ambiguity. The whole thrust of the film is classically cosmic horror - we don’t know what is happening here, or why it’s happening, or what will happen next - that to reduce it to simple explanations and cliché does what was otherwise a skillful updating of the horrors of the beyond a serious disservice. There’s value and power in presenting us with things we can’t explain and then not explaining them. Lovecraft, for all of his failures, at least understood that much.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Hulu
