What Does The Ending Of Annihilation Really Mean?

3. The Nature Of Immortality

The notion of immortality if broached in unconventional ways in this movie, surely most horrifyingly when poor Cass is mauled to death by a bear-like creature, which is then able to use her dying screams to lure the rest of her unit.

The team even talks about how utterly horrific it must be for a human to die and only leave behind something so horrifying, which feels all the more pointed as Cass' daughter is dead, and so her DNA somehow mixing with the creature is all that remains of her on Earth. The creature is killed shortly thereafter, of course, but given the nature of the Shimmer as a prism, could Cass' death scream ultimately have materialised elsewhere?

It's also telling that one of the film's flashbacks shows Lena reading the famous novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is the true story of the titular woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, but her cancer cells were taken for experimentation purposes, and are still in use today as the first ever immortalised cell line, known as HeLa.

The allegory between Lacks' cancerous cells and Cass' lingering death scream are clear, that both get to "live on" in some biological form, but as the most horrifying aspect of themselves. At least in Lacks' case it led to major medical breakthroughs. Cass? Not so much.

Lena discusses immortality with Kane in a flashback, noting it to be a fault of our genes, and with Lena's genetic makeup clearly being altered by the Shimmer at the end of the movie, could she have unlocked a key to enduring human life?

After all, a tattoo of the ouroboros - that's a snake eating its own tail, perhaps the universal symbol for immortality - appears and disappears on the arms of various team members throughout the film. Could this tattoo have emerged from a previous expedition member who died within the Shimmer, and this is how a piece of them now lives on?

Whether or not Lena has indeed found a key to raising the limit on human lifespans by film's end, can we even be sure she truly made it back to civilisation?