Here's Proof Films Need To Be Seen On The Big Screen BEFORE They Hit Netflix

annihilation

What’s your home sound-system like? Sorry if that’s a personal question, but it’s important to consider before you set out watching Annihilation. Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow’s score for Alex Garland’s second directorial feature is killer: a disarming, disturbing accompaniment that moves from harmonious to discordant across the picture, climaxing in a climactic piece, called The Alien, that might just make your skin crawl. It has all the unease and speaker-rattling grandeur of memorable modern-day scores for ambitious blockbusters like the collaborations between Jóhann Jóhannsson and Denis Villeneuve, or Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan; visionary imagery matched to a creeping feeling of sonic dread.

Ideally, you’d get to experience this sound in some giant theatre, with a humongous sound-system, so that it feels like an assault. But, unless you live in North America, you now don’t have that opportunity. In what feels like a sad death for cinematic choice, the international rights to Annihilation were sold to Netflix after “a poorly-received test screening” spooked its studio, Paramount, into selling it straight to streaming (is there a more reliable anti-art villain than a test-screening audience?).

Whilst there’s been much good that’s come out of Netflix’s increasing clout —the fact that they gave Bong Joon-ho $50mil to do whatever the fuck he wanted gave the world the giddy, nutty, tragicomic Okja— it’s hard not to lament cueing up Annihilation in your own house when it’s a work of such wide-screen scale; forever intended, as a disappointed Garland has publicly said, to be “seen on a big screen”.

Annihilation sets a team of five on a mission into the ultimate unknown: a genetic anomaly in the Florida swamps known as ‘The Shimmer’, into which many a troop has been sent, but from which no one has returned. Much is made, as the crew —Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny— first bond, of the fact that they are a different breed of adventurers: after the first missions were macho military platoons, they are coming in as women scientists. And, yet, in go a geologist, a physicist, a biologist, a psychologist, and a paramedic in military fatigues, armed to the hilt with automatic weapons; gun-worship forever the default setting of blockbusters.

Going into this otherworldly realm —swamp turned primordial, in which genes mutate swiftly in wild, alarming, oft-psychedelic ways— there’s narrative dislocation and audience/character disorientation: inexplicable cuts, ‘lost’ time, dream sequences, flashback, hallucination. But there’s also a video-game’s clarity-of-purpose and forward thrust: use those guns to ward off the mutant creatures —an albino alligator-shark; a skeletal bear with a nose for fear and a mockingbird’s mimickry— out to get you, and march on towards the source of the mutation. It’s a lighthouse, which shows that Jeff VanderMeer’s source text harbours, amongst other things, open Virginia Woolf homage.

As the mission progresses, in familiar fashion, the characters are picked off, one by one; from the least famous to the most famous. Aside from Portman’s heroine, no one else gets much backstory; characterisation and motivation spoken aloud in short-cut exposition by Novotny, who tells us everything we know in a minute’s worth of dialogue. We know that, ultimately, Portman will survive, because the film begins with her: in quarantine, recounting her experiences as mission debriefing; the interviewing conducted by a disbelieving Benedict Wong, watched on by a silent gallery, an anonymous chorus in blue hazmat suits. Portman’s husband, Oscar Isaac, was a previous visitor to the Shimmer, somehow returning, a year later, like a spectre. So, y’know, this time it’s personal.

What makes the genre-tropes feel particularly tropey is that they rub up against what’s obviously, from the beginning, a work of wild ambition. Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, was flawed but impressive, and Annihilation is an obvious attempt at radical scaling-up, out to stage the kind of mind-widening science-fiction that lives on, eternal, in memorable images and the whispered admiration of its ardent admirers. That noble goal seems, for much of the movie, as if it will remain out of reach. Until we get to the finale, a grand climax that journeys into such pure cinematic imagery that it calls to mind Tarkovsky.

It’s pure sight-and-sound spectacle, that score throbbing and snarling as Garland fills the screen with images of doubles and mandalas, playing with light, evoking the big-bang, dancing through a psychedelic hall-of-mirrors; this all equal parts filmic dreamworld and unfettered nightmare fuel. What it “means” is left completely open to interpretation, although the presence of digital cameras as witnesses to the doubles of The Shimmer suggest themes conversant in the doppelgängers/divisions/dissonance of the digital realm. Whether you have a theory or not matters little. As feat of audio-visual rapture, the final reel of Annihilation is unforgettable: bold, beautiful, and bonkers, it looks incredible, and sounds even better. Hopefully you’ve got access to a TV set-up that can do it justice.

the mercy

Sometimes the best true-life stories don’t make the best films. Real-life mysteries often stick in the mind because of the absence of facts, and the unanswerable questions that are taken to the grave. The story of Donald Crowhurst —a yachtsman who, attempting to sail solo around the world in 1968, seemingly descends into madness and disappears at sea— is so amazing that it’s long proved irresistible to artists, from musicians to novelists to, of course, filmmakers; The Mercy marking the second Crowhurst film to hit screens in the past year, in one of those familiar duelling volcano-movie/Capote-biopic type moments.

The Mercy comes directed by James Marsh, whose filmography —from his remarkable 1999 historical docu-riff Wisconsin Death Trip to his much-lauded 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory Of Everything — is full of stranger-than-fiction tales, be they expressed as documentary or drama. Here, Marsh marshals a top-shelf assemblage of talent for a grand prestige-pic: Colin Firth playing Crowhurst, Rachel Weisz his wife; the cast filled with great character-actors (Ken Stott, David Thewlis, Simon McBurney); the score by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. There’s great period-era wardrobe, a clear sense of dramatic purpose, handsome photography, and the amazing story.

But The Mercy never really comes to life, perhaps because anyone going in knows what’s going to happen. Firth will draw on actorly mettle to display a man breaking now, and familiar tricks of sound and montage will visually convey a descent into madness. This means that, as movie, The Mercy has the opposite quality of the real-life tale on which it’s based: instead of being an unsolved mystery, it’s a mystery in which you already know how it ends; the unknowable made not just known, but familiar.

in the fade

Fatih Akin is hardly known for subtlety. The German-Turkish filmmaker shot to fame with way-OTT 2004’s Head-On, so it’s no surprise that In The Fade comes on like a sledgehammer. It stars Diane Kruger as a German woman who loses her Turkish husband and their son in a right-wing neo-nazi terrorist attack. Just to let you know that it’s bad that they died, every scene from their death to the trial of the attackers takes place in the rain. Not just real rain, of course, but movie rain: this endless downpour spraying like a fire-hose, and continuing that age-old cliché of matching the weather to a film’s emotional mood (yes, there’s literally a scene in which Kruger stares out a window, reflections of the rain on glass making shadowy tears trickling down her face).

And, so, as the film explores themes of trauma, grief, recovery, redemption, and justice, they’re made plenty explicitly; the second act of the film is literally, in chapter’d intertitle, called ‘Justice’. In turn, In The Fade carries much dramatic gravity and real-world resonance; not to mention moments of photographic flourish, as with a brilliant closing shot that rises skyward than turns upside-down. But, at times, this apparent raw study of loss can get a little pulpy, as when Kruger rises out of a would-be-suicide bathtub, face streaked with blood, transformed from grieving widow to woman-on-a-mission vessel of vengeance.