Annihilation is a beautiful movie, terrifying and powerful and deeply contemplative. Directed by Alex Garland, adapting the first novel in a trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer (which I have not read, but will now), it’s one of those movies that gets much creepier the more you think about it, but which I also found completely compelling while I was watching it. It’s also a big budget Hollywood action movie in which the five main characters are all interesting, dimensional, well-written and well-acted women. That shouldn’t be as much a rarity as it is. A feminist sci-fi horror film? That works.

It’s a basic alien-invasion movie, like Arrival; like, for that matter, ET. Something has appeared on earth. It shimmers. It’s even called that; the Shimmer. You can see through it, but light is refracted; you can’t see in very far, though what you can see doesn’t look all that abnormal. A person can also pass through it. Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist with military training, is married to a Sergeant in the US army, Kane (Oscar Isaac), who has been gone on assignment for a very very long time. He returns. He’s very ill. On her way to the hospital with him, the ambulance is stopped by mysterious security forces.

Turns out, he’s been inside The Shimmer. And project leader, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist, is planning to take another expedition inside. And Lena volunteers to join them.

The rest of the expedition consists of women with combat training and helpfully correlated skills. Anya (Gina Rodriguez) is a paramedic. Cass (Tuva Novotny) is a surveyor and anthropologist, and Josie (Tessa Thompson) is a physicist. They’re good with automatic weapons, and they’re all fit. Turns out that all matters less than you might think, given the actual threat posed by the Shimmer.

That’s what’s so marvelous about the movie; the world inside the Shimmer. Everything’s just off. And then Josie offers a hypothesis. What if this entire world was a prism. But instead of refracting light, it refracted, well, everything. Including DNA. What if the basic building block of life can do, in the Shimmer, things it can’t do in our reality? What if Time itself was refracted? What if reality . . . changed?

And what if these particular alien invaders aren’t malevolent, aren’t ill-disposed towards us, aren’t benevolent either? What if they are just . . . alive? I mean, we think of nature as threatening, but it really isn’t. I mean, it might kill us, and that would be bad for us, but bad for Life? Certainly not.

I think that’s one of the things that most bothered people about Darwin. We wanted to believe, and still want to believe, that God ordered everything, that mankind evolved as we did due to some larger directing intelligence. Darwin’s blasphemy was in positing an indifferent universe. Our life is just . . . what happened. Nobody arranged for it, and nobody’s particularly interested in the outcome. Life has its own imperatives–reproduction and survival–and while pursuing them it remains entirely impersonal and indifferent.

So within Shimmer-world, the two scariest creatures our heroines meet are a ginormous alligator (with shark’s teeth), and a monstrous brown bear-like creature. And so we come to think of the Shimmer as ill-disposed towards Lena and her companions. But there’s no reason to think so. Those two creatures are dangerous to humans, because they’re doing what they do; eat, survive. But the Shimmer itself doesn’t seem to have created them as sentries or soldiers or anything. The Shimmer refracts normal DNA processes. Weird biological phenomena result. That’s all that’s going on.

I think. I think that’s the point of the film. The Shimmer is an invading alien force. But it’s not like the creatures in, you know, the Independence Day films or something. Or so many other bug-eyed monster films. The Shimmer is just seeking food, shelter, survival, like any other living thing. It arrives someplace, alters the DNA of whatever life forms that exist there, and survives. It’s not Trying to Get Us; it doesn’t recognize an Us it could be trying to Get. It’s way scarier than most alien invasion movies, and way more plausible.

Portman is great in it, but the performance I loved most was Leigh’s. She’s emotionless, pitiless, determined, and single-minded, but we also sense the deep personal trauma that has made her that way. A terrific characterization by one of our great actresses.

Anyway, a strange and beautiful and terrifying movie.