Annihilation

Alex Garland's directorial follow up to the great “Ex Machina” is another cerebral sci-fi thriller. It is an adaptation of the first part of Jeff VanderMeer's acclaimed “Southern Reach” trilogy, though Garland has streamlined the story and made it self contained.

It's a good job too, as no franchise is about to be kickstarted here. Paramount buried the film after Garland and his producer refused to make changes due to “disastrous” test screening responses. Thus “Annihilation” was not screened for critics, only had one trailer and was unceremoniously dumped on Netflix (outside of the US and China).

It turns out once again that test audiences are morons, because despite having the name of a fifth tier Nicolas Cage thriller, “Annihilation” is genuinely great. Comparisons are being made Andrei Tarkovsky's arty sci-fi masterpiece “Stalker” and may not be too far off the mark.

A meteorite lands near a lighthouse on the Florida coast and soon a mysterious zone called “The Shimmer” begins to expand across the nearby countryside. Ex-marine and current biologist Lana's (Natalie Portman) husband Kane was part of a special ops team sent into the zone to investigate, but has been missing for some time. When Kane (Oscar Isaac) does return something seems a bit off, plus he appears to be dying from catastrophic organ failure.

Lana and Kane are hijacked on the way to the hospital by Southern Reach, a mysterious branch of the US military led by Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who are hoping to stop the Shimmer's inexorable advance. Lana and Ventress eventually lead an all female team of scientists into the Shimmer to try and find out what's going down.

Once there, they find themselves at the mercy of odd time anomalies and that plants and animals are mutating, which while making the flora look pretty is kinda bad news when the local fauna includes alligators and bears. However, the closer they get to the lighthouse, the more metaphysical the threats become.

“Annihilation” contains some startling, genuinely beautiful images once the action moves into the Shimmer. Bright, multicoloured vegetation climbs trees and buildings, light refracts in odd ways and the beach contains one of the loveliest and strangest things I've seen in a film for a while (I'll not spoil it).

It also features some shockingly gruesome scenes of body horror, as well some unnerving, real scares. The second scene with the bear (oh-god-the-bear) manages both at once, while the climax manages to be actually convey something convincingly alien. Once the film enters the lighthouse this viewer felt like they were holding their breath for 20 minutes as Garland bombards us with revelations and uniquely weird images.

Obviously Garland is best known for his writing, first as a novelist then with his scripts for the likes of “Sunshine”, “28 Days Later” and the hugely underrated “Dredd”, but “Annihilation” should cement his bona fides as a director. The cinematography is off kilter to better convey the oddness of the Shimmer, while all of the performances are just slightly “off”. Sometimes the actors are not using the right eye lines in dialogue, something which is so antithetical to the basics of making films that the result is very disconcerting. Even the usual film editing techniques could be masking time skips or gaps in Lana's memory.

“Annihilation” is a brilliant film, as thought-provoking as it is technically accomplished. I've only really talked about the latter here and not really touched on the film's themes of self-destructive behaviour, grief and malign biology. If the film is destined for cult classic status (which it almost certainly is) then that's just fine, but shame on that test audience for denying us the chance to see it on a big screen - 8

Veronica

Spanish horror Veronica is the latest film to find itself lumbered with the “scariest film evah!” hype, which makes it even odder that it's just been unceremoniously dumped on Netflix with no hint of a cinema release. So is the latest from [REC] director Paco Plaza any good? Some mild spoilers ahead (clearly marked).

Sandra Escacena stars as the title character, a 15 year old living in Madrid in 1991. Her father recently passed away and her mother works long hours to keep the family afloat, meaning that Vero (as she is usually called throughout) has to look after her twin younger sisters and even younger little brother.

On the day of a total solar eclipse, Vero and her friends sneak off to a spooky bunker (I assume all Madrid schools have one) to use a ouija board, apparently not realising that they're in a horror film. Such antics have been the catalyst for films ranging from stone classics like “The Exorcist” to stone cold shit feasts with extra dollops of shit sauce like “The Ouija Experiment” and sure enough things turn spooktacular right at the height of the eclipse. Back at the family home, stuff starts going horribly wrong quite fast, with bad dreams, strange claw marks, odd noises and all sorts of regulation ghost story shenanigans going down.

“Veronica” doesn't have much in the way of original ideas, but it does have some effective moments. Scares tend toward the subtle (at least at first) and Plaza has a good eye for spooky little details (there's an early scene where a shadowy figure is just hanging around in the background with no attention drawn to it whatsoever, which is something I always like). There are a few odd touches which stand out, like the idea that the eclipse is responsible for the demonic incursion or the weird blind nun at the school (which I choose to believe is a “take that!” to “The Devil Inside”). It can also create some tension when it feels like it, such as a late scene with a rolling glass. It is much more heart pounding than it sounds.

But then the above scene ends with a crappy special effect jump scare (albeit one less loud than usual), the type of which a horror fan will have seen a hundred times before. The big bad is also distinctly underwhelming, even if it does give off an air of genuine malevolence.

SOME SPOILERS FROM HERE ON

The film also does a weird have it's cake and eat it thing where it tries the whole ambiguous “is it real or just in the main character's head” trope. Again, this is something the average horror fan has seen so often it's basically a cliché, but Plaza then seems to answer the question fairly definitively a few minutes later. It's an odd choice and one that does deflate the climax somewhat.

“Veronica” is not a bad film, it's just not a particularly good one either. It's anchored by a great performance from Escacena and some non-irritating child actors, who ensure that you don't want these people to get hurt. Plaza gives a few good moments, but undercuts them with boring cliches and scares that fall flat.

So it's far from being “the scariest film ever”. It may satisfy those who are less attuned to the genre as a sort of starter spook film, but for us horror aficionados it's not going to do much - 5