Phantasmagoric Organisms

‘I thought I was a man’ says Kane to his doppelgänger. He speaks from the epicentre of a mysterious zone of transformation called ‘the shimmer’ that has erupted from the site of a meteorite impact. It would be quite understandable if Kane was speaking of an identity crisis brought on by his extraordinary experiences inside the shimmer, but perhaps it is something more mundane: the emasculation he feels as a result of discovering his wife’s affair with another man. Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018) is a study of the human soul in distress. Kane returns from the shimmer to be reunited with his wife, but he is somehow transformed by his time in the zone.

Kane’s wife, Lena, is taken to the shimmer and she joins the next expeditionary party to go inside it. She brings the guilt of an adulteress and the other party members bring their grief, paranoia, anxiety, and hopelessness. The party considers why most of the previous expeditions have disappeared without trace. They theorise that some unknown influence within the shimmer is killing those who enter or causing them to kill one another once inside. The maladjustment of the party members reveals that the normal world outside the shimmer is also a zone that destroys minds and bodies, only more slowly and in ways that we do not consider extraordinary.

Inside the shimmer the air is iridescent, flowers bloom impossibly and funguses grow in riots of pastel colour. Lena calls this behaviour a pathology; a deviation from the norm to be rejected and feared. It will affect the party too if they stay in the zone for long enough. Aggressive random mutation is rarely a welcome development at the cellular level, but at the emotional level the zone attracts those in need of transformation. Its phantasmagoric organisms are the spasms of a great impetus to change. The shimmer remakes, or at least fully and finally unmakes.

The shimmer’s mutant wildlife picks off the party one by one. Ego strength appears to be the factor that determines whether these annihilations are sublime or traumatic. Radek is ready to surrender; she sees an opportunity to be released from her disorder, and she fears being reduced only to the part of herself that suffers much more than she fears losing her identity. Ventress is terminally ill, resigned to the imminence of non-being and clearly prepared to die for an answer to the question that has beaten her blunt. Lena maintains an attitude of egocentric opposition to the shimmer – and yet she follows Ventress deeper into the zone.

At the epicentre of the zone she finds a lighthouse that was hit by the falling meteorite. The beach outside is alive with a prismatic glow and the land approaching the coast is burgeoning with the shimmer’s bizarre works. Inside the lighthouse Lena discovers the source of the phenomena, an alien entity that duplicates and devours everything with which it comes into contact. It seems to act automatically without intelligent purpose. Staring into its slithering hollow core is like witnessing the birth of a miniature galaxy.

The entity offers a gift to Lena: her new self. Her doppelgänger is Lena minus the pain of being human and the knowledge of having made terrible mistakes. The doppelgänger could return home in her place, if she wanted it to. Lena realises the true nature of Kane’s transformation: her husband came to the lighthouse and accepted the gift offered to him. He annihilated himself there. All she need do to be healed is accept this grace and destroy her old self, as did Kane when he burned away the pain of his wife’s adultery in the fire of a phosphorous grenade.

Lena rejects her doppelgänger. She immolates the entity and flees the lighthouse. Kane’s annihilation has deprived her of the catharsis she had hoped to achieve by confessing to him and begging forgiveness. Even for him to reject her would be conclusive. Instead she is stranded with her emotional baggage and an ego too strong to accept death even as it yearns for closure. Lena returns to the normal world to be reunited with the thing that is not Kane, not the man she has betrayed. As she embraces not-Kane, Lena’s eyes become iridescent. She carries a splinter of the shimmer inside her, but not enough to remake her. Not-Kane asks if she is Lena. For her sins, she is.