“The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear,” writes John VanderMeer, from his novel, Annihilation.

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This past weekend, the film adaptation, directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), debuted in theaters.

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The film takes place in Area X, a military-sectioned off area of land around a wonderland-like place expanding from the epicenter of a meteor impact, called the Shimmer.

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Biologist Lena (Natalie Portman), accompanied by a team of four other women (a psychologist, anthropologist, paramedic, and physicist), journeys into the Shimmer to try to save her husband (Oscar Issac), who had entered months prior and returned in critical condition.

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Unlike many films that maintain a particularly static tone with their score, Annihilation’s is expertly timed and contextually precise to the events on screen. Cinematography works cooperatively within this kind of surgical precision in the film, with camera angles and visuals that sometimes tell even more of the story than the dialogue, which is already considerably dense but somewhat awkward in the first act. Events later in the movie work to contextualize previous scenes, which works towards one of the films main relationships: that between the future, past, and present. These three facets of time influence most every situation in the film, and for this reason the movie is spaced out consistently, making two hours feel advantageously longer.

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Like a mature and slightly more disturbing version of Alice’s wonderland, the strange world reveals itself through bizarre manifestations based on the Shimmer’s distortion of the five new inhabitants’ perceptions. The film uses the characters’ areas of expertise to explore the different ways that human experiences are processed, with a special emphasis on trauma.

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Trauma in the film is portrayed fatalistically and dealt with accordingly. Each character has experienced their own traumas, which are either explicitly mentioned or heavily implied, that have lead them to cope in tragic ways, which the Shimmer exploits. There is an infernal capacity to knowledge, elements of loss that return to claim us, fears that avenge, self-harm that sobers, and narcissism that consumes most wholly. Such extreme downward spirals suggest dark consequences for personal growth. That to be reborn we must realize that we are the womb of our own annihilation – until we become the burning effigy of the past, or the paralyzed shell of our future.