Netflix's 'Annihilation' will mess with your mind

AT A GLANCE:

WHAT: A new Sci-fi thriller in which an all-female crew go in search of Singularity-like monster. The film is based on a novel of the same name by Jeff van der Meer.

WHO: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, director Alex Garland (Ex_Machina).

WHY WATCH: To mess with your mind.

WHERE TO FIND IT: Netflix.com

FULL REVIEW:

Science-fiction narratives have often centred on strange dimensions where inexplicable things happen. What this trope provides is the opportunity for edge-of-your-seat suspense as monsters and creatures lie in wait for the tinkly music that signifies that - hold your breath - they're about to leap out of the shadows.

The Netflix original Annihilation is no different, except that it's a team completely made up of women that enters the realm of spine-jerking fright.

The film stars Natalie Portman as Lena, a biologist whose missing husband - who returns under strange circumstances - has ventured into what's innocuously called the Shimmer, an ever-enlarging anomaly that's able to mutate the DNA coding of Earth's flora and fauna into incredible hybrid forms.

Exhibit One: a 3,5m albino crocodile with the mouth of a shark. Exhibit Two: flowering creepers growing out of, and then taking over, human bodies. Exhibit Three: a bear with a skeletal face that growls with the cries of its last victim.

WATCH | The trailer for Annihilation

All pretty chilling stuff, and the fact that it is an all-woman team that's dispatched into the Shimmer to succeed where all male military missions have failed enhances the suspense. Although it's contentious to admit it, I just can't help feeling that a team of women is more vulnerable than a gung-ho gang of males.

The other leads are the strangely aloof psychologist Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who seems to know more than she's letting on; the brilliant but introverted physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson); paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez) and geologist Cass (Tuva Novotny), who's mourning her daughter.

The real star of the film, though, is the surreal, overgrown world in which the women find themselves once they've crossed the oil-slicked miasma into a place where beauty and terror exist side by side, like a Venus flytrap.

The setting is a metaphor for the psychology of the women as they confront themselves in this hostile place. The closer they get to the source - a nightmarish lighthouse hit by a meteor-like object at the start of the film - the more disorientated, mutated and paranoid they become.

The ending is open to interpretation. Is it a comment on human consciousness under threat from creations that can outperform us? A premonition of alien invasion? Or a nightmarish vision of the evolutionary reality of our planet (we all, in some way, become extinct)?

Whatever you decide, Annihilation's greatest success is its exploration of the tension between the vulnerability and the power of the human mind.