The Annihilation of Fish
First screened and reviewed in September 2025
Director: Charles Burnett. Cast: James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder, Linden Chiles, David Kagen, Paul Heller, Hoyt Richards, Tommy Redmond Hicks. Screenplay: Anthony C. Winkler (based on his uncredited short story). In Brief:
Middle stretch's warm actorly commitment and kooky camaraderie barely survive a stilted start and finish.
VOR:③
Devoting yourself to three such elaborate oddballs involves some risk, though from some angles it looks foolish. Distinctive film, though.
The beginning of The Annihilation of Fish made me fretful that there wasn't much chance this film, built around strenuously loopy characters, could ever find a frequency that I would join—emotionally, narratively, or behaviorally, even if the thematic intents and tonal aspirations are clear. We get some reasonably rich color photography, a fun but too-quick walk-on from Tommy Hicks, and a few tart lines in Anthony Winkler's script ("I thought you were somebody else." / "I used to be."), but mostly the exposition on both halves of a two-track script feels effortful and awkward.
The middle unites those tracks and disarmingly exceeds the expectations I had so quickly lowered. Around a half-hour in, as the first rummy game unfolds, James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave have begun palpably living inside characters that most actors would render with a hobbling self-consciousness or a camera-courting ostentation. Maybe that does happen sometimes, but these actors are really there: to themselves, to Burnett, to the audience, and even to the lens, though they don't seem at all preoccupied with where the lens actually is. (All of this is true of Margot Kidder, too, at her more peripheral circle of the film.) This is the passage where The Annihilation of Fish achieves the warmth and the low-key, quasicomic grace that have been extolled in so many reviews. We're privy to a rare, sweet, saucy, uncondescending sex scene between two older actors, and a welcoming ambience of characters accommodating each other's eccentricities, and some more good lines that crystallize the movie's POV, as when Jones delivers with empathetic straightforwardness, "I'd die before I'd laugh at somebody's loneliness."
And then we hit the last act, which I would call inarguably choppy, rushed, and close to unconvincing, even on the film's own clownfish terms. Each lead takes turns repudiating the other. An invisible antagonist becomes much too important across multiple, nearly identical scenes, which Burnett has great trouble staging with dramatic clarity or emotional truth. The prospect of one character's mortality is dangled over and over, in ways that feel ill-structured and a little cheap, and the end is, at best, very close to a cop-out. The air of almost Ionescoan surrealist merriment dissipates, and the film just shrinks. By the time Redgrave's character walks out in full Madame Butterfly regalia, it feels like odd fulfillment of a subplot wisely dropped long before, and Burnett doesn't even seem to know where to place the camera—embarrassed by his own film's climax, maybe, or just confounded by it, which isn't much better.
All to say, I started out worried and a little annoyed by The Annihilation of Fish, even as I was deeply rooting for it. Then, with great relief, I grew stealthily and earnestly affectionate toward the film. I enjoyed that feeling and admired the actors for getting me there. Then I broke faith with the movie (or it did with me), such that I doubted my pleasure in the improbable soufflé that had come before. And now I'm still doubting as I write, even if part of me is still smiling. Not quite an annihilating finish, but uncomfortably close. C+
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
