From outside, the Shimmer is a wall of moving colour over a swamp that runs out to a lighthouse, and nothing that goes in comes back, except one man. In Annihilation, Alex Garland’s 2018 film, a biologist named Lena walks in after him, and halfway through, among plants that have grown into the shapes of people, the physicist Josie Radek works out what the place is doing.
“The Shimmer is a prism, but it refracts everything. Not just light and radio waves. Animal DNA, plant DNA… all DNA.”
Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), Annihilation, 2018
Someone asks what she means by all DNA, and the answer comes back: “She’s talking about our DNA. She’s talking about us.” That is the Shimmer explained: a zone that takes in everything that passes through it, light, radio, plants, animals and people, and sends it back out bent and mixed, the way a prism sends one beam out as many. The metaphor is optics, and the optics hold up, from the prism to the oily rainbow on the Shimmer’s skin. Annihilation is two hours of a body becoming something that isn’t yours, and the camera never stops finding it beautiful.
What is the Shimmer in Annihilation?
In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation, the first book of his Southern Reach trilogy, the place is Area X. The film names it for how it looks. At the Southern Reach base Lena hears how it started, three years before: “Blackwater National Park reported that a lighthouse was surrounded by something they termed ‘a shimmer.’” Drones, animals and teams of people followed. “But nothing comes back. And the boundary’s getting bigger.”
Lena (Natalie Portman) is a biologist who spent seven years in the army. Her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), a sergeant, has been gone a year when he walks back into their house, the only one who ever came out, and soon collapses. She goes in with four other women: Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Josie Radek, Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez) and Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny).
Garland put it in human terms: “It’s like being overwhelmed by subjective experience,” he told Nerdist in 2018. Of such experiences: “They just simply change us, and the person who walks in isn’t the person who walks out.”
The Shimmer is a prism: how refraction splits white light
Light slows down in glass, and when it meets the glass at an angle the slowing bends it. That is refraction, and how hard a material bends light, its refractive index, is different for every colour. In ordinary crown glass blue bends a little more than red, so white light through a wedge of glass leaves as a fan of colours: dispersion.
Turn it and watch the wall. Tip the prism so the light meets it more head-on and the fan opens wider, until violet meets the far face too steeply to leave and reflects back inside the glass: total internal reflection, the effect that keeps light inside an optical fibre. Dense flint spreads the colours wider than crown glass; water spreads them least.
Isaac Newton proved the colours were in the white light to begin with. In a letter printed in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in February 1672 he described his experimentum crucis, the crucial experiment: a prism, two boards with small holes so only one part of the spectrum got through, and a second prism behind them. The light “tending to that end of the Image, towards which the refraction of the first Prisme was made, did in the second Prisme suffer a Refraction considerably greater then the light tending to the other end.” Light, he concluded, “consists of Rays differently refrangible.”
Switch on the second prism above and turn the first: blue comes through the hole and bends more, red bends less, and each comes out the colour it went in. A colour once parted from the others, Newton wrote, “hath afterwards obstinately retained its colour, notwithstanding my utmost endeavours to change it.” Josie’s line puts the Shimmer where the first prism stands: light, radio, a plant, a person, everything that passes through comes out sorted and bent by its own amount.
Why the Shimmer looks like oil on water: thin-film interference
A prism explains the idea but not the look. The Shimmer’s surface is the colour of petrol on a puddle, and that was the brief. The film’s visual effects supervisor, Andrew Whitehurst of DNEG, told Art of VFX in 2018: “we settled on using an unwrapped Mandelbulb fractal shape, and shading it to have the properties of oil on water.”
Oil on water has no pigment. A film a few hundred nanometres thick sends back two reflections, one off its top surface and one off the bottom, and the second has travelled further, so they arrive out of step. Where the extra trip lines a colour’s waves up crest to crest, that colour comes back strong; where it puts them crest to trough, it cancels. Which colours win depends only on the thickness, so a film that thins toward its edge paints rings of colour.
Drag the thickness down and the colours walk through the same order every time, pale pinks and greens giving way to strong blues, magentas and golds. Thin the soap film to almost nothing and the two reflections cancel at every colour, so the film goes black. Newton saw that too. In Opticks, Book II, he covered soap bubbles with a glass and watched their colours settle into rings, and as the water drained, “there grew in the Center of the Rings a small round black Spot.”
The rest of the look came from the camera. The cinematographer Rob Hardy told British Cinematographer that he and Garland started from one idea, that “the sun would behave normally, but would be refracted through the dome of the shimmer, therefore everything inside of the shimmer would be likewise affected … So there would be rainbows within the highlights.” They hunted for them in real glass: “We pulled almost every single lens Panavision had off the shelves to find the one that gave us the perfect ‘shimmer effect’.” The best flares went to Whitehurst in small pieces, and “every effect with regard to the shimmer that was added back into the movie was generated from an analogue source.”
DNA refracted: the flowers and the Hox genes
The film shows the refraction in living things before anyone names it, in a bush of flowers by a hut in the swamp. “Well, they’re all so different. To look at them, you wouldn’t say that they’re the same species. But they’re growing from the same branch structure… so it has to be the same species. It’s the same plant. It’s like they’re stuck in a continuous mutation.” “A pathology?” “Yeah, well… you’d sure as hell call it a pathology if you saw this in a human.”
Then the plants shaped like people. “That leaf in your hand… know what you’d get if you sequenced it?” “Human Hox genes.” “They’re the genes that define the body plan, the physical structure. And the plants have human body plan. Arms attached to shoulders. Legs to hips.” Hox genes are real, and that is their job. A 2001 paper from Walter Gehring’s lab sums them up as “common to most or all animals”, genes that “define positional information along the antero–posterior axis”, head to tail. In fruit flies, switching on Antennapedia in the head grows legs where the antennae should be. Hox genes belong to animals; a human body plan in a plant is the film’s invention, and the characters know it: “It’s literally not possible. It’s literally what’s happening.”
The film’s best-known scene is the same idea with teeth. A bear drags Sheppard away in the night, and when it later finds the others in an abandoned house, it roars with her agonised screams. Whitehurst told The Verge what the effects team was after: “We wanted to suggest the idea that some of Sheppard’s DNA is somehow added into the bear.” Her last moments go into the animal that killed her and come back out of its mouth, refracted.
Early on, Lena teaches the other end of that idea: “This is a cell. Like all cells, it is born from an existing cell. And by extension, all cells were ultimately born from one cell.” Inside the Shimmer she puts her own blood under a field microscope at night, and then says it: “I checked my blood last night. It’s… in me.” The answer is the line the whole film leans on: “It will be in all of us.”
Redon’s hybrids: monsters from under the microscope
Painters were making these bodies a century before the film. Odilon Redon, born in Bordeaux in 1840, was close in his youth to the botanist Armand Clavaud, and he wrote about him in the journal published after his death as À soi-même. “He worked in the infinitely small,” Redon wrote. Clavaud was searching “at the borders of the imperceptible world, for that life between animal and plant, that flower or that being, that mysterious element which is animal for a few hours of the day and only under the action of light.” The Getty’s curator Danielle Canter describes the two of them “looking at tiny life forms through the lens of a microscope”.
What came out of it were Redon’s noirs, charcoal drawings of what MoMA called “monstrous beings not quite human, not quite animal, not quite plant.” In 1880 he drew a flower with a human face, Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor).
Of black, Redon wrote in the same journal: “It is an agent of the spirit far more than the beautiful colour of the palette or of the prism.” His monsters come out of the dark and the Shimmer’s out of the light, but they’re the same bodies: a plant with a person’s face, one organism grown halfway into another.
In 1883 he published Les Origines, eight lithographs about the first life on earth, which MoMA tied to “his interest in evolution as well as a variety of scientific disciplines including microbiology, osteology, anthropology, and teratology (the study of monsters and mutants).” The first three go from a creature waking in the dark, to a flower that has grown an eye, to a grinning polyp with one.
Plate 1
Plate 2
Plate 3
By the turn of the century, MoMA’s exhibition brochure notes, “Redon had abandoned his noirs and lithographs for the luminous color of pastel and oil paint”, and flowers were the new subject he brought to colour. Poppies, anemones, lilac and daisies come out of one blue vase here, as close as painting gets to the bush in the swamp.
The lighthouse: the ending of Annihilation explained by the light
At the lighthouse Lena finds the video Kane left. On the tape he talks to the camera: “People called me Kane. And now I’m not so sure. If I wasn’t Kane, what was I?” His flesh, he says, moves “like liquid”. He holds up a phosphorus grenade, “Shield your eyes”, and asks the man behind the camera to find Lena. That man steps into the frame afterwards, and he’s Kane. The one who came home was the copy.
Below the lighthouse Ventress is already changing. “It’s inside me now,” she tells Lena, and “it will grow… until it encompasses everything.” What forms out of the light is a humanoid that copies Lena move for move. Sonoya Mizuno played it on set, and Whitehurst says what is on screen is “the raw performance meticulously copied and adapted to the Humanoid form.” Lena gets out, and when a team reaches the lighthouse, “Everything is ash.”
Read the ending through the light. A prism gives back a version of whatever goes in, changed by the trip. The double is that version of Lena, and the Kane who came home is that version of Kane. In her debrief Lena says of the thing in the lighthouse, “It mirrored me. I attacked it. I’m not sure it even knew I was there,” and then, “It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new.” In the last scene she sees him again. “You aren’t Kane… are you?” “I don’t think so.” “Are you Lena?” She doesn’t answer. They hold each other, and the camera closes in on his eyes, then hers.
The Shimmer is gone, and the thing it did is still walking around in both of them. Plants with human limbs, Kane’s flesh moving like liquid, a bear with a woman’s voice, a woman copied by a thing made of light: every one is horrible, and the film lights every one like a jewel.
The print to set beside the lighthouse is The Rage In My Resonance. Bodies wearing the same face pour out of a field of red and gold, their skin gone violet and pearly, one hand catching a breaking star: a self copied until the copies crowd out the sky, which is what the Shimmer does to Lena.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Shimmer in Annihilation?
A growing zone around a coastal lighthouse, walled in by a moving rainbow surface like oil on water. Josie Radek calls it a prism that refracts everything: radio is scrambled, light bent, and the DNA of plants, animals and people mixed. The novel calls the place Area X.
Who is the double at the end of Annihilation?
A humanoid that forms in the lighthouse and copies Lena move for move, played by Sonoya Mizuno. The Kane who came home is the same kind of copy: on the tape Lena finds, Kane counts down with a phosphorus grenade, and the man who then steps into frame is another Kane.
Is Annihilation based on a book?
Yes, Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation, the first of the Southern Reach trilogy, with Authority and Acceptance the same year.
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- Paintings of space, from Elsheimer’s Milky Way to Webb.
References
- Annihilation, written and directed by Alex Garland, Paramount Pictures, 2018. Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
- Vincent Frei, “Annihilation: Andrew Whitehurst, Overall VFX Supervisor, Double Negative”, Art of VFX, 21 March 2018: artofvfx.com
- “Rob Hardy BSC / Annihilation”, British Cinematographer, 21 March 2018: britishcinematographer.co.uk
- Alex Garland interviewed by Rosie Knight, Nerdist, 29 May 2018: nerdist.com
- Isaac Newton, “New Theory about Light and Colors”, Philosophical Transactions 6, no. 80 (19 February 1671/72), 3075–3087: archive.org; Opticks, London, 1704, Book I, Part I, Exper. 6 and Plate IV; Book II, Part I, Obs. 17: archive.org
- SCHOTT data sheets for N-BK7 and N-SF11, via refractiveindex.info; M. Daimon and A. Masumura, Applied Optics 46 (2007), 3811–3820; NIST Standard Reference Material 1922; C. Wyman, P.-P. Sloan and P. Shirley, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques 2, no. 2 (2013): jcgt.org
- Bryan Bishop, “How Annihilation’s visual effects artists created those terrifying mutant creatures”, The Verge, 28 February 2018: theverge.com
- S. Plaza et al., The EMBO Journal 20, no. 4 (2001), 802–811: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Odilon Redon, À soi-même. Journal (1867–1915), Paris, Floury, 1922, pp. 19–20 and 120, translated from the French: archive.org
- Jodi Hauptman, Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon, The Museum of Modern Art, 2005, exhibition brochure and press release: moma.org; Laura Hubber, “Odilon Redon’s Dark Humor and Darker Worlds”, Getty: getty.edu