Annihilation and Other Arguments for Staying In

Winter was still persisting and Netflix had assembled a March slate that felt like a genuine argument for not leaving the apartment. The anchor piece was Annihilation—Alex Garland’s adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, which Netflix distributed internationally—a film about a biologist who enters a quarantined coastal zone called the Shimmer, where the rules of biology have quietly stopped applying. She goes in one person and comes out as something else. The film refuses to explain why, which is exactly right; the explanation would have ruined it. I watched it twice in the same week, which almost never happens.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones was back for a second season, and I was glad. Krysten Ritter doing damage through Hell’s Kitchen, the show’s willingness to sit with trauma that doesn’t resolve—it kept the whole thing feeling like more than superhero television. The returning runs of Love, Santa Clarita Diet, and Suits rounded out the binge queue for evenings when I wanted something less demanding on the nervous system.

The anime side was worth paying attention to. B: The Beginning was Netflix’s first original anime, a rain-soaked detective thriller with a serial killer subplot that kept threatening to collapse under its own ambition and mostly didn’t. Children of the Whales and A.I.C.O. Incarnation covered the month’s other genre needs. The back catalog was expanded with the core Marvel run—The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, several entries besides—alongside Black Swan, which meant the month offered two Natalie Portman films about women coming brilliantly, terrifyingly undone. A specific double feature, if you were in the right mood for it.