What the Film Could Not Carry From the Page
Alex Garland made a genuinely unsettling film of Annihilation in 2018 and I watched it before I read the book. That was the wrong order. Jeff VanderMeer's novel works because it happens entirely inside a narrator who does not name herself and who cannot fully trust her own perceptions. The film externalizes what the book keeps interior, and in doing so it loses the specific dread that makes the novel work. They are related and one is much better than the other.
Thinking about how VanderMeer uses unreliability as plot architecture
"Nothing in Area X is what it appears to be. That is the first thing Area X teaches.
"Jeff VanderMeer
Reading Annihilation
Tension
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Section
Read the book before the film if you can. The film is good but the book operates through a mechanism the film cannot replicate and the difference matters enormously.