Film Review: Annihilation
2022/5/8 19:00
10/10
Annihilation is the best Lovecraftian film I’ve watched so far. Its plot, editing, and soundtracks worked together and perfectly moulded an alien yet surprisingly beautiful world. What I got from this film was not sole fear, but astonishment from the gorgeously and poeticly altered world.
When I began watching the film I was confused by its editing style and pace. It seemed to be fluctuating and can be confusing at times. An hour into the story, I began to understand - it was intended that way. Things are moved around between cuts, people’s actions inconsistent, and sometimes a significant part of the story could even be completely edited out. Using Lena’s words, it was like a dream - not a nightmare, but rather beautiful.
The sound plays a similar role. Sometimes a hundred sounds from different sources are layered together, other times it approaches complete silence. One might deem it the fault of the sound designer if it were in a film of a different genre, but in Annihilation, this made perfect sense. The sounds are not supposed to be what they should be; they are altered, changed, and moulded into sometime unfamiliar that we are not to understand.
Mise en scene and the tracks are combined into one when it comes to weirdness, and my did the production team do an elegant job. You can say it’s like Color Out of Space, only better. Now there’s no restrictions on where and what the color could be, and the artists were granted the complete right to make the film as otherworldly as possible. By the end of the film I felt like the tracks are a part of reality and expected to see the exotic sceneries in my surroundings. Simply put, it’s splendid.
To prevent spoilers I’ll not talk about the film’s plot, but I could say it’s masterfully paced and everything makes sense in the end. The plotline could appear loose compared to mainstream films, and (in my opinion) that’s because of the dreamlike experience the producers wanted it to give. In spite of that, the settings and canon and worldbuilding etc. was done well and I didn’t end up finding any of the parts hard to understand.
I could have written a full 10-page analysis on this film if given the time - or if I was still looking for ideas on doing the IB Film assessments. But for now, all I could do is recommend you to watch this film now. You might find it weird, but you won’t regret it.