The Presentation of Grief in The Descent and Annihilation

The Descent (2005), image courtesy of Lionsgate and
Annihilation (2018), image courtesy of Skydance media.

Neil Marshall’s The Descent and Alex Garland’s Annihilation are similar in concept and plot, though they take different approaches when exploring the theme of grief and trauma. Both films follow a group of women exploring potentially dangerous unmapped terrain; in The Descent, we focus on thrill-seeking cave divers who want to claim a new cave system as their own, but who soon discover that they are not alone in the darkness, while Annihilation revolves around five scientists venturing into the mysterious “Shimmer”, an unexplained, seemingly radioactive area of swampland causing disturbances in the local nature, from which no previous research team has returned.


The unknown environments in both films clearly represent the process of undergoing a severe trauma or loss; indeed, both protagonists have suffered a significant bereavement prior to the film’s main action. How the films differ is in how they present the consequences of loss and how it can change who you are as a person; The Descent suggests there is no way out of your grief except through, and that you have no choice but to trust in other people to help you, while Annihilation shows that grief is unpredictable and repetitive but ultimately escapable by yourself, though it will change you fundamentally.

Courtesy of Lionsgate.

In The Descent the imagery of the cave represents grief, both in general terms and specific to our protagonist Sarah, having suffered the loss of her husband and daughter a year previous to the cave-diving trip. Grief is a deep, unknown cavern filled with monstrous horrors, pitch dark and with no visible means of escape, and for Sarah to get back above ground and above her grief, she must first confront its source; this is shown in dream sequences and flashbacks that she experiences while in the cave, where she must relive the car accident that killed her family. When the film becomes a creature feature in the second act and the cave monsters are revealed, another layer of interpretation can be added; it is implied that these monsters are previous cave divers who became trapped and then adapted to live underground, representing the danger of submitting to your trauma and giving up on recovery. Grief has the ability to make you monstrous if you give into it. In one scene, Sarah lies perfectly still as she lets a cave monster climb over her, very literally demonstrating the necessity of confronting your grief before you can overcome it; you have to feel it, it has to walk on you, for you to be able to defeat it.

Courtesy of Lionsgate.

By the end of the third act, only two of the cave-diving group remain; Sarah, and the leader, Juno. Sarah discovers Juno had been having an affair with her late husband before his death and lashes out, striking Juno in the knee with an axe, leaving her to die and unknowingly sabotaging them both. The final ten minutes are a harrowing scene in which we think Sarah has escaped the cave; we see her break through the grass, gasping for air, and stumbling back to her car, before realising this is an illusion and snapping back to the reality of Sarah still being inside the cave, shivering and awaiting her own death. This demonstrates the paradox of suffering; when we are vulnerable and grieving we need other people to find solace in more than ever, but we are also more likely to hurt them because of our own pain. Where Sarah fails is in her inability to trust other people. It is possible that if she had not injured Juno, they might have found a way out together, but Sarah lets her grief overpower her; she gives into it instead of working with it.

Courtesy of Skydance media.

Learning to live with your grief is explored, in a far less literal way, in Annihilation. The Shimmer can be interpreted in much the same way as the caves in The Descent; as a grief that traps you, disorients you, and eventually changes you beyond recognition. The Shimmer causes mutations in DNA, and some are destructive (moving fingerprints, a bear that echoes human screams), but some are beautiful, like a flowering plant system that has sequenced human Hox genes and assumed a humanoid form. Our protagonist Lena (one of the only two people who escape the Shimmer) explicitly states “it wasn’t destroying, it was changing everything; it was making something new”. This exploration of grief as not inherently malevolent but simply a force of change, that can cause positive or negative change depending on how it is received, brings a nuance to the discussion of trauma that has been previously neglected in horror films.

Lena is irreversibly changed, by the Shimmer and therefore by her grief, both on a biological level, represented by her mutating DNA, and a psychological level. Having experienced the perceived loss of her husband Kane only to have him return from the Shimmer, changed like she herself is, Lena must confront the nature of this change. Lena is changed, but she is alive, because she works with her grief, as opposed to Sarah, who fights it at every turn. The final shots of The Descent are Sarah fantasising her own escape and healing, while physically remaining trapped. But the last sequence of Annihilation brings a sombre kind of closure; the new Kane embraces the new Lena, and the final line is the unanswered, and unanswerable, question: are you, you? What has grief done to you, and what did you let it do?

Written by Millie Felton.
Published 16th November 2019.