Annihilation (2018) quotes

Director
Alex Garland.

Cast
Natalie Portman.
Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Tessa Thompson.

A biologist signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition into a mysterious zone where the laws of nature don’t apply.

Why did my husband volunteer for a suicide mission?
– Lena
Is that what you think we’re doing? Committing suicide?
– Dr Ventress
You must have profiled him. You must have assessed him. He must have said something.
– Lena
So you’re asking me as a psychologist?
Programmed into each cell?
– Dr Ventress
– Dr Ventress
Yeah.
– Lena
Then, as a psychologist, I think you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… and a happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions, they’re… they’re impulses. In fact, you’re probably better equipped to explain this than I am.
– Dr Ventress
What does that mean?
– Lena
You’re a biologist. Isn’t the self-destruction coded into us?

You aren’t Kane… are you?
– Lena
I don’t think so.
– Kane
Are you Lena?
– Kane

It’s not like us… it’s unlike us. I don’t know what it wants, or if it wants, but it’ll grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains… Annihilation.
– Dr Ventress

Did it communicate with you?
– Lomax
It reacted to me.
– Lena
You really have no idea what it was.
– Lomax

Ventress wants to face it. You want to fight it. But I don’t think I want either of those things.
– Josie Radek

I don’t feel very well.
– Kane

I thought I was a man. I had a life. People called me Kane. And now I’m not so sure. If I wasn’t Kane, what was I? Was I you? Were you me?
– Kane

We have many theories, few facts.
– Dr Ventress

You said nothing comes back. But something has…
– Lena

These are very strange.
– Lena
Why?
– Dr Ventress
Well, they’re all so different. To look at them you wouldn’t say that they are the same species… but they’re growing from the same branch structure… so it *has* to be the same species. It’s the same plant! It’s like they’re stuck in a continuous mutation.
– Lena
A pathology?
– Dr Ventress
Well… you’d sure as hell call it a pathology if you saw this in a human.
– Lena

Imagine dying frightened and in pain and having that as the only part of you which survives.
– Josie Radek