Annihilation

My boyfriend and I found this movie on Hulu a few weeks ago and watched it out of admiration of Natalie Portman. Little did we know, this movie would prove to be beautiful, intense, and thought-provoking.

In the movie, Natalie Portman is an ex-military professor of science whose husband has been missing for about a year. When her husband returns under mysterious circumstances with major physical issues and seeming memory loss, she seeks answers to her husband’s disappearance. Through this search, she learns that he entered a strange zone from which few people escape. In fact, her husband is the only one who has managed to come back.

Being the brave person she is, Natalie Portman’s character decides to enter this zone and investigate the mystery that this place has been shrouded in. From there, she experiences time lapses and weird biological happenstances. I think the creepiest thing in this movie, for me, is the bear creature that echoes the dying screams of one of the crew in order to draw out more prey. It was certainly fuel for my nightmares.

There is no absolute resolve to this movie. It ends with a bit of a cliffhanger (one I won’t spoil here) that leaves the viewer questioning what really happened. Or, at least, I think that’s what they were trying to accomplish, continuing the air of mystery that envelops the whole movie.

Overall, it’s a good, creepy movie that doesn’t necessarily feel like a creepy movie until it does. Based on the beauty and interesting concepts of this movie, I would watch it again a few times purely for enjoyment. It’s very tame for a horror movie (might actually be more closely classified as sci-fi with horror elements), but certainly worth a watch from the horror film addict!

Stay spooky!