Five-Legged Iguana

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018

Candidate #5

ANNIHILATION

(February 2018)

"Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?”

Alex Garland’s Annihilation (based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer) is heady, horror-tinged science fiction, the kind we need far more than the N^th iteration of some tired SF franchise.

And while some may wonder at its inclusion here, I think it’s quite clear to those who frequent the Iguana that my definition of “horror” has always been very broad, allowing for diverse moods and tastes, from quiet elegance to raucous bombast.

Think of Annihilation as the horror of science, of nature gone horribly awry.

And not in the ‘70’s “animals go wild, nature vs man” schlock cinema sense (though there are flitting shades of that sensibility here), but rather in the sense of the horror of chaos, of the terrible, maddening possibility of having everything we take for granted twisted into unnatural and terrifying shapes.

Garland captures a grotesque beauty here, the awful majesty of seeing the mundane transfigured into the bizarre and the alien, his vision helped along tremendously by the soundscape laid down by Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow (the duo also scored Garland’s Ex Machina and Black Mirror’s “Men Against Fire”).

Plus, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Natalie Portman.

Need I say more?

(Annihilation OS courtesy of impawards.com.)