Annihilation (2018)

directed by Alex Garland

Courtney Welu

Several nights before I watched Annihilation, I dreamt of a bloody battle on a savannah of animals in the dead of night. A group of smaller lions mauled their leader, a bright white lion of massive size. A crocodile launched spears at its enemy the way a porcupine might shed its needles. I escaped the violence to a house in the middle of nowhere where a baby elephant lived in the garden, but I couldn’t touch the ground the elephant walked on or he would be slaughtered as well.

When Natalie Portman’s character Lena is asked to describe the Shimmer, an expanding stretch of land in a state park where the laws of nature have been upended and genetically mutated creatures react violently to human guests, she says, “It was dreamlike.”

When she’s asked if she means nightmarish, she says “Not always. Sometimes it was beautiful.”

Based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation is often described as eco-horror, a subgenre that focuses on the terror of human interaction with the environment, and what happens when the environment bites back. Even though I know this is the intended reading of the film, my personal experience with Annihilation is not as a metaphor for climate change or ecological destruction; I think about how much it looks like my dreams, and how much it looks like my grief.

My most frequent dream visitor is my Uncle Dunk. He has—still unbelievably—been dead since New Year's Day. I thought he would live forever.

Dreams are the only place the dead come back to life, no matter how briefly. In Annihilation, a massive blind bear screams with the voice of the woman it killed. Another woman on the expedition willingly merges with plant life to avoid being destroyed by it. Lena and her husband, Kane, both encounter their doubles, mirrored versions of themselves. They are reflections and refractions of encoded genes, of space and time, that the Shimmer changes, reorders, reorients.

“It’s not destroying,” Lena says, shocked by the altered environment but not condemning it. “It’s making something new.”

Lena enters the Shimmer on an all-female expedition after her husband somehow reemerges a year out from his own team’s journey inside. He comes back wrong, suffering from multiple organ failure and with blank, dead eyes that barely recognize his surroundings. Lena needs to enter the Shimmer to learn what happened to him, and maybe find a way back to him.

I won’t find a way back to Uncle Dunk, at least not in this life; he no longer hovers in the space between life and death, waiting for the end. I am glad for it, but I dream of him all the same. Dunk—a nickname that long predated my birth—was a dedicated dreamer who believed that dreams were spiritual messages, communications from our ancestors, visions of ourselves in other worlds.

Dreaming is like a language; if you learn how to do it early, you’ll know how to dream when you grow up. I have Uncle Dunk to thank for my dreams. He would tell me to look out for animals, who always signify something greater. He instructed me not to be afraid when strange twists and turns happened, but to be curious about where they led. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that when he died he would visit me in my dreams for the rest of my life.

I’ve had dozens of dream encounters with my Uncle Dunk since he died; some of them are, as he would say, totally cosmic. I dreamt of him in an underwater afterlife where he was hard at work creating universes. I dreamt of playing cards with him in the basement of my grandmother’s house where he told me, “I’m more alive than not.” I dreamt that there was snow falling from the trees instead of the sky, and Dunk took my hand and said, “You have everything you need.”

I don’t know if my dreams are portals to other realities, but when I visit these spaces of my mind, they often look like the Shimmer. They are places where the rules of reality are suspended, where time and space bend, where the landscape is fundamentally and irrevocably changed by the grief of my uncle’s passing. Last winter, he shoveled snow in the driveway. This winter, he died.

My grief has transformed my environment; it has changed the landscape of my waking life and my dreams, and I can never return to the person I was before. Like Lena, my DNA has been altered. I may not be becoming one with the plants and animals in my world, but I am becoming a person who is not entirely myself. As Lena enters the Shimmer, I enter confusing, sometimes frightening, and often beautiful dream worlds to find proof of the continued existence of someone I love. Awake or asleep, I am always looking for Uncle Dunk.

At the climax of the film, Lena reaches the lighthouse that the Shimmer emanates from, the center of its gravity. She learns that the man who came home was not her husband at all, but a mirror image created somehow by the Shimmer’s center. She watches as the Shimmer creates a mirror of her own body; she hands her twin a grenade and watches the lighthouse burn. The Shimmer disintegrates. The being who is not her husband stabilizes and wakes.

“Are you Kane?” Lena asks Kane when she returns, to which he replies, “I don’t think so. Are you Lena?” She does not have an answer for him.

My Uncle Dunk will appear in my dreams for the rest of my life, but I will never know if he is a spiritual visitation or a refraction of myself looking back at me. Perhaps I only dream so vividly of him because he is the one who taught me to forge and foster a meaningful dream life in the first place. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy—or it could be the real him, communicating from a spiritual reality far more cosmic than my own.

Does the answer matter? In practice, no. My dreams are the only place that I can see him, and so I will always seek them out. I live, and he lives, in a liminal space, in dreams that act as reflections and refractions of his life and mine. My grief creates new worlds to explore, worlds where his spirit lives on.

“This feels so real. I know this is real,” I told him during a vivid nighttime visit. “I’m sure when I wake up, I’ll think it’s just a wonderful dream, but right now, I know that it’s real.”

Perhaps the strangest thematic choice in Annihilation is that Lena succeeds in destroying the Shimmer, in removing the threat of transformational change to human bodies, minds, and environments. But Lena and Kane, if no one else, will never again be the people they were before they entered that world. Their eyes both shimmer in the film's final shots; they will continue to live in the unknown and the in-between, a space with which I have become intimate. I am learning to live with the unfamiliar, in a world that doesn’t feel like mine anymore.

I wrote this essay unsure if Dunk, a lifelong science fiction fan and prolific collector of movies, had ever seen Annihilation. He would have loved the team of all-female scientists, and would have been tickled that it starred two Star Wars alums, Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac. When I visited my parents’ house recently, I went through the bins of DVDs that he left for me, and found Annihilation nestled in the middle.

Courtney Welu (she/her) is a writer and graduate student originally from the Black Hills of South Dakota. She currently lives in Austin, TX, where she works at a research library. Her previous work can be seen in Major 7th Magazine and The Snarkologist.