The Spirituality of Annihilation

The film Annihilation explores a myriad of themes: loneliness, longing, loss, lust, love, deception, despair, depression, decay, destruction, division, duality, desire, cancer, corruption, concealment, fragility, and mutation. At its core, it is a spiritually charged narrative that delves into the human condition through disconnection, transformation, and the dissolution of boundaries between self and environment. The Shimmer—a mysterious, iridescent phenomenon—serves as a metaphysical space where characters confront their alienation and seek reconnection, embarking on a spiritual journey that transcends the physical. Here, spirituality refers not to religion but to a personal experience of connecting with something greater, often marked by awe or profound presence.

Disconnection and alienation lay the foundation for this spiritual exploration. Characters like Lena, Kane, Dr Ventress, and Josie enter the Shimmer already estranged from themselves and the world. Lena’s strained marriage, fractured by Kane’s absence and her guilt, reflects a loss of intimacy. Josie’s self-harm and Ventress’ detached intellectualism highlight a psychological alienation where the self and reality feel unreal. Inside the Shimmer, this disconnection becomes literal as communication devices fail, isolating them from the outside world—a physical mirror of their pre-existing metaphorical isolation, amplifying the spiritual void they seek to fill.

Water emerges as a central motif and symbol of spiritual transformation, embodying universal meanings of purification, dissolution, and rebirth across cultures. In Annihilation, it flows through pivotal moments: Lena and Kane’s tender connection over a glass of water, later tainted by his blood; the Shimmer’s oil-and-water-like sheen; and the alien’s landing by the sea. Water reflects duality—echoes, divided selves, and the interplay of destruction and creation. Lena’s ouroboros-like tattoo, an “echo,” and the glass of water at the film’s end, shimmering with cell division, suggest spiritual rebirth. A canoe scene on water marks a turning point as Lena learns of her companions’ loneliness and depression, her bruise transforming into a tattoo—an integration of pain into identity. Here, water symbolises a boundary between the known and the unknown, reminiscent of mythological rivers like the Styx or Lethe, where crossing signals a passage into another realm and erodes past identities, making way for something new.

Within the Shimmer, immersion becomes a baptism—not mere cleansing but obliteration and rebirth. People change as their DNA refracts like light through water, dissolving individuality. This mirrors spiritual concepts like Hinduism’s Moksha, where water signifies the loss of ego, or Buddhism’s impermanence, where identity is fluid. Water cradles moments of revelation, such as the mutated aquatic life and the coral-like crystallisation of a dead soldier, blurring lines between human and environment. Through this visual language, the film horrifically yet beautifully conveys the dissolution of self and the emergence of spirituality.

The motif of water in Annihilation acts as both a path and a force, carrying individuals toward the incomprehensible. It washes away old identities, transforms those who enter, and dissolves boundaries between self and other. Josie, uncomfortable in her own skin, merges with the Shimmer’s flora, becoming a human-tree hybrid—a literal union with the environment that transcends her alienated self. Beneath this, a deeper undercurrent emerges: a semiotic breakdown where language, which shapes reality, collapses at cellular, biological, and perceptual levels. The alien presence doesn’t speak but mimics, challenging notions of selfhood and interpretation. The Shimmer scrambles DNA—the code of life—blending species; human voices echo in non-human forms; memory and written language fragment; names and words lose meaning. Language, as a cornerstone of identity, organises memory, experience, and selfhood. Its breakdown—here a metaphor for grief, trauma, and depression—opens a gateway for the spiritual. To touch the spiritual, one must step beyond language, a concept echoed in mystical traditions: Buddhism’s transcendence of concepts, Christian apophatic theology’s unnamable God, or mysticism’s loss of self. Annihilation presents the unknowable—an encounter outside reason—disguised as science fiction horror.

This dissolution of language and self aligns with philosophical and spiritual traditions exploring “non-self.” Buddhism’s anatta teaches that the self is an illusion—a collection of transient experiences, thoughts, and sensations. Clinging to a fixed self causes suffering, as seen in the characters’ struggles, but mindfulness can reveal impermanence. Similarly, David Hume argued that the self is merely a bundle of perceptions, lacking a permanent essence. In existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre viewed the self as a construct shaped by choices, not an inherent entity, and clinging to a stable self reflects “bad faith.” Advaita Vedanta in Indian philosophy sees the individual self (Atman) as an illusion, ultimately one with the universal reality (Brahman). Neuroscientist Sam Harris, in Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, integrates these ideas with neuroscience, arguing that the “I” is a cognitive construct. Through meditation, he suggests, one can observe thoughts and sensations arising without a stable self, revealing consciousness as a field of experience rather than an owned entity.

At the film’s climax, Lena confronts her mirrored self—a being that reflects rather than speaks. Their final “conversation” is a silent, violent, tender dance, a nonverbal communion where understanding gives way to becoming. Annihilation frames language as a limitation—a veil that must burn away for transformation. The Shimmer poses a spiritual question: “Where do I end and my environment begin?” (This echoes the film, I Heart Huckabees, where Bernard, played by Dustin Hoffman, muses, “If you look close enough, you can’t tell where my nose ends and space begins,” blending existentialism and spirituality.) Ultimately, Annihilation presents spirituality as the dissolution of boundaries—between self and other, human and alien, loss and renewal—offering a haunting, transformative vision of wholeness.

By Scott Barnard

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