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Horror

Sometimes It Was Beautiful

On Self-Destruction, Mutations, and Grief

Tom Humberstone

• 4 min read
Sometimes It Was Beautiful

Annihilation (2018) Dir. Alex Garland

Lena, a biologist seeking answers for what happened to her husband Kane, joins an expedition into “The Shimmer”. A slowly expanding quarantined zone of mutating wildlife.

“In a way, it was two bereavements. My beautiful girl, and the person I once was.” - Cass Sheppard

When my dad died in 2019, I thought I was prepared for how grief might impact me. When he first got ill, I found myself listening to Griefcast - a podcast where famous comedians talk about their own experiences with grief. I don’t really know why. Part of me was trying to brace for what was to come I suppose. But I wasn’t prepared. Grief hits you in disorientating waves and it never really leaves. It just gets easier to deal with/manage as time passes. It changes you.

I found it hard to talk to people about it. Friends were understandably reticent to ask questions for fear of upsetting me. I wanted to talk about it but I worried my grief would infect my friends - a problem shared, a problem doubled.

There are hours upon hours of pop culture devoted to the experience of love. But grief is something we don’t talk about publicly. Everyone will experience it, and yet when it happens, we’re all largely unprepared for it. This is where my love of horror comes in. Horror is where we get to be vulgar and lurid and talk loudly about taboo subjects. Grief is a common one.

To the extent that it’s almost become a joke to dismissively say about a modern horror: “I get it, it’s a metaphor for grief right?”

Anyway. Alex Garland’s Annihilation is a metaphor for grief.

Or at least, a metaphor for trauma, pain, self-destruction and grief.

“It wasn't destroying. It was making something new.” - Lena

Ostensibly an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s first book of his Southern Reach trilogy, Garland started writing the screenplay before the second and third books had come out. The themes of the books ranged widely - nodding towards the end of the anthropocene, colonialism, exponential growth, and the nature of control. Garland lets his film gesture towards some of these but keeps his focus tightly aimed towards the ways in which pain changes and shapes us. In some ways his film feels much more like an adaptation, to me, of JG Ballard’s The Crystal World (tell me that cover wasn’t on a mood board somewhere in pre-production) by way of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Each of the protagonists sent into “The Shimmer” are dealing with grief in one form or another. Not always a death. But all of them are grieving some form of irrevocable change in their lives. Lena’s grief over Kane isn’t just that he disappeared for a year, or that the man who returned may not be the man she once knew, it’s about the end of a relationship. When we break up, we grieve the version of that person we knew once and won’t ever get to know in the same way. But we also grieve who we were with them.

These themes of change, mutation, adaptation, destruction and rebirth are constant in Annihilation. It’s a sensitive, thoughtful and bewitching horror film that was, sadly, unceremoniously dumped on Netflix here in the UK. Which I think has led to it slipping under the radar for some people. I would have loved to see this projected in a cinema.

One choice that I find increasingly interesting on repeated viewings is the guitar led, gentle soundtrack that feels completely at odds with a horror/sci-fi like this. But it works. It grounds it. Reminds us in the more cerebral and challenging moments that this is still a story about universal human experiences. Until the score (by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury) eventually morphs and glitches and completely disorientates in the climatic finale.

There’s a great Folding Ideas video (see below) about that finale. About how being willfully ambiguous forces the viewer to stop thinking of things literally and to start thinking about what it personally means to them.

I think I get it.

It’s a metaphor for grief right?

Where can I watch it in the UK?

You can stream it on Netflix for free or rent it for £2.49 from youtube/google/amazon/apple.

Pairs well with

It’s hardly overlooked at this point, but you can’t talk about grief in horror without talking about The Babadook (2014, dir. Jennifer Kent, available to stream on shudder, bbc iplayer and amazon). The metaphor is so well established that the idea of subverting it and claiming the Babadook as a queer icon is a meme. I love that interpretation too. But I don’t think it can be overstated how important The Babadook is at really embracing the idea that you can’t conquer grief. You can hope it doesn’t destroy you, and you can try to learn to live with it. But you don’t beat it.

Further Reading
Other Recommendations
  • On the theme of grief, if you’re in London, I’d highly recommend going to see Ben Target’s new show Lorenzo. It’s on until the 14th October and is, in my opinion, a must-see piece of comedy/theatre.
  • This week, the Shortbox Digital Comics Fair is happening. If you’ve not already had a look, I’d really recommend stopping by and picking up some digital comics. There’s even a handy horror category. I’d highly recommend picking up Ver’s new comic - Extinction.
  • While I’m talking art and the importance of it, the Scottish Government have cut Creative Scotland’s budget by £6.6 million. Making Scottish art investment 0.1% of the Scottish Government’s budget. It’s an extremely worrying time to be an artist in the UK, so if you’d like to show your support - you can sign this petition and get involved in the Campaign for the Arts.