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 Descen t 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 Descen t, 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. H