‘Annihilation’ review: Natalie Portman stars in a powerful, transfixing sci-fi story

Films as singularly adventurous as “Annihilation” don’t come around often. The movie follows a group of female scientists who set out on what is essentially a suicide mission to a top-secret location known as Area X, where a shimmering, energetic border has appeared, cordoning off an amorphous portion of wilderness, changing its landscape. In three years, no missions have returned.

Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a biologist, professor and former soldier. Her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), went missing in Area X for a year before he returned, changed and subdued. He falls violently ill. She joins the latest mission, hoping to search for whatever might have changed him, for the traces he left behind. She’s part of a group that includes medic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson), geothermal scientist Cass (Tuva Novotny) and a taciturn psychologist, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They’re going to enter The Shimmer, go to a lighthouse, collect data and return (though that seems unlikely, based on the track record).

What happens in The Shimmer is where director Alex Garland diverges from Jeff VanderMeer’s obtuse, mysterious book, which he also adapted for the big screen. Time and space tilts once they enter. It is stunningly beautiful, a vibrant, dripping rainforest swamp overflowing with bright flowers and fungi. But it seems to alter time, too. They lose whole days of memory, and the wildlife is increasingly threatening. The group finds remnants of old missions and harrowing videotapes. Always the question remains: Did something kill them, or did they go crazy and kill each other?

This basic question returns again and again, and it lays the foundation for the themes of existential paranoia that Garland dives into during the last act. The title refers to total destruction, but what’s happening isn’t destruction but transformation, mutation. Does a sense of self survive a mutation? Does your soul?

Garland splays these big ideas brazenly, grounding them in Portman’s performance as grieving widow, curious scientist and fierce warrior. She must confront the memory of her husband as she traces his journey. She digs and delves inside to find an answer, and discovers the only way through is within. That larger message is what Garland eventually unearths, giving a distinctly spiritual slant to this science-fiction story.