“Annihilation” flew under my radar for a long time, actually. I have no idea how, because when it popped up on my recommended queue on Netflix, I read the description about Natalie Portman being a soldier/biologist and I hit play. That sounded like a good movie by itself, honestly.

Really, “Annihilation” is ultimately an action movie about an all-female cast heading toward an unknown threat. I think that just at that level alone the movie functions very well; there’s more than enough gunfighting and explosions to satiate fans of the genre.

To get to the horror, I think it’s important to understand the story just a little bit.

Portman starts out in the movie as a professor lamenting the loss of her husband who has been missing for a year. He is a member of a covert branch of the U.S. military, and she hasn’t heard anything from him since he left. Suddenly he returns, but he’s incredibly sick and being pursued by U.S. officials. They take him and Portman to a secret base.

There, they find out that some time last year, something from space crashed into a lighthouse on the southeast coast of the U.S and began emitting a strange field from the crash site. The field bends light and does weird things to all living things that go inside it, and it’s growing.

Portman finds out that her husband was in there, so naturally she must go to investigate. She’s joined by other women, because they have only sent men in so far and none have returned except her husband.

As they journey toward the source of the field, they notice strange shifts in living things; plants growing strange flowers, and an alligator that had shark teeth. Things only get weirder the closer they get to the lighthouse.

OK, now we can talk about the horror. So you probably noticed in the title that I labeled this movie as “cosmic horror.” It’s a concept popularized by 20th century author H.P. Lovecraft, author of works such as “The Call of Cthulhu.” The simplest way to explain cosmic horror is the fear of the unknown; it’s looking into the depths of the ocean, or the vastness of space, or a dark forest, and the fear you get from not knowing what’s out there.

The real reason I finally watched “Annihilation” was because I was on a kick with this weird subgenre of horror, and I was intrigued at what a big-budget production would look like (most of the works in cosmic horror are indie films and/or shot in black and white due to their age.)

“Annihilation” delivered exceptionally well in my opinion as a biology nerd. It eases you into the weirdness caused by this alien thing, first showing you animals and plants that although are new, are made up of things that were already there. They’re familiar; we can understand them.

The understanding quickly gets replaced by panic as the search party gets closer. Another part of any good cosmic horror movie is the characters losing their sanity, and that sure does happen in this one. Confusion sets in, and only one thing is clear anymore; Natalie Portman is going to get to that lighthouse.

Once inside, she is confronted by the antagonist, the alien being emitting the field that threatens to engulf Earth. Now, this isn’t me trying not to spoil you; I genuinely can not describe it to you.

My favorite quote of the entire movie is when Portman is being debriefed after she returns from the lighthouse, and she’s asked if she can describe it. She just pauses for a moment then says “No.”

This was actually my main concern with the film; it was going to make it or break it for me how they presented the bad guy. Cosmic horror thrives in a written format because you aren’t responsible for the visuals; you can present the idea of an unimaginably horrifying being and the reader can make it in their head. Translating that to a visual format is an impossible task, but they really crushed it here.

While Portman was interacting with the alien, I can only describe what I felt as terror. I didn’t know if it was evil, what it wanted, if it wanted, or if it was even sentient; if it was even alive, for that matter. I felt so small watching it do its thing; here is this unimaginably powerful entity, capable of eradicating humanity and altering all life on earth by accident, just by existing on the planet, and here it is staring at you with no indication of what comes next.

While I do think that H.P Lovecraft and others have timeless examples of cosmic horror that could never be overlooked, I think that “Annihilation” made the genre more accessible. There aren’t many examples of cosmic horror movies that have it all, and I think that as a newer entry into the genre “Annihilation” is an excellent ambassador for cosmic horror.