10 Movie Endings You Definitely Misunderstood The First Time

Alex Garland's stunning sci-fi horror Annihilation ends with professor and army vet Lena (Natalie Portman) burning down the expansive alien zone known as The Shimmer and, upon returning to civilisation, being reunited with her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac).

Kane promptly suggests to Lena that he probably isn't the real Kane but a doppelganger, and in the film's final moments, Lena's eyes glean with an unnatural shimmer.

The surface-level reading of this ending adopted by many is that Garland wanted to leave audiences unsure of whether we're looking at the real Lena, and that she could in fact be a Shimmer-produced doppleganger.

But for starters, this doesn't really make much sense given that we saw Lena very clearly kill her Shimmer doppelganger a few scenes prior.

And beyond that, Lena comments just before this that the Shimmer doesn't destroy but makes "something new," which would rather suggest that Lena has been mutated by the Shimmer into a potentially new branch of humanity, in ways we're left to ponder past the end credits.