The review embargo for Natalie Portman‘s newie Annihilation has lifted, and critics are already saying the forward-thinking sci-fi flick is a career highlight.
From Ex-Machina director Alex Garland, the film throws biologist Lena into a bizarre, abandoned and curiously wrong environmental disaster zone. On the search for her missing husband, portrayed by fellow Ex Machina alum Oscar Isaac, Lena and her crew encounter a realm not entirely our own.
The film’s unique pacing, vision, and excursions into body horror have already drawn favourable comparisons to the work of Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Darren Aronofsky, and undefeated king of critters David Cronenberg.
For Variety, Peter DeBruge makes a commendable link to the work of Alien visionary H.R. Giger, before likening the film to another cerebral sci-fi classic.
“Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker with a strong no-nonsense heroine and pulse-racing creature attacks,” DeBruge writes, “and suddenly, such an excursion starts to sound enticing for those who otherwise can’t abide slow cinema.”
The monster mash doesn’t end there. In Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson states “Garland introduces one arresting visual after another, gradually building something almost Lovecraftian in its fantastical horror and awe.”
Over in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers claims “not since James Cameron‘s underrated 1989 gem The Abyss has a failed marriage become a microcosm of psychological terror in which each character’s capacity for good and evil is tested. The effect is relentlessly unnerving.”
Vogue’s Taylor Antrim goes as far to say Annihilation stacks up to Kubrick’s greatest work. “Annihilation is terrifying, enthralling, and, in its crazy last act, a head trip worthy of 2001: A Space Odyssey,“ he states.
But reviewers claim the film doesn’t merely ape the classics, instead building a compelling and original piece of sci-fi cinema that capably stands among those canon works. The Daily Beast‘s Nick Schager offers his take by saying “big-budget sci-fi doesn’t come much more incisive, exhilarating and mind-blowing than this.”
Luckily for us, Annihilation is set to arrive on Netflix (!!!) early next month.
