Five years doesn’t sound like a long time, but it’s an eternity in the world of streaming, and one of the many reasons why Alex Garland’s mind-melting Annihilation is a movie you never hear anyone talking about anymore.
The visionary novelist, screenwriter, and ultimately director – who saw his feature-length debut behind the camera win an Academy Award and gain instant classic status – presented a vision so unique and singular that it bewildered the executives at Paramount, who eventually struck a deal with Netflix to distribute the film internationally to offset any potential losses.
Annihilation sounds straightforward, with Natalie Portman leading a star-studded cast – including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac, and Benedict Wong – on an expedition to uncover what happened to her husband inside the mysterious Area X, although the execution was anything but.
The film proved to be every bit as polarizing as everyone was expecting it to be, with the psychedelic and hallucinatory hybrid of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and existential f*ckery splitting opinion straight down the middle. Based on the rules of the algorithm, it’s very difficult to accidentally stumble upon Annihilation unless you go actively looking for it, but its reputation as a deeply disturbing psychological nightmare endures nonetheless.
Thanks to a Reddit thread, viewers are traumatizing themselves all over again by revisiting the ups, downs, nightmares, and emotional scars left behind by the harrowingly one-of-a-kind trip to the other side, even if it’s only going to get harder for new fans to discover something that’s been buried so deeply in the recesses of the Netflix library.