Screaming Nekomimi
I am unsure what to do with the Men Are the Expendable Gender entry. It seems to me that it's an aversion, not an inversion - both team have only a single survivor, who may or may not be the same person who went in - but...more of the women are killed on-screen than the men, which does feel inverted...but, on the other hand, none of the men are shown to have the relatively gentle deaths that Josie and Ventress got, which suggests that brutality toward men is more acceptable, which would be playing it straight.
The Tattoo: The Figure 8 Snake Forearm Tattoo looks exactly the same as the tattoo in Altered Carbon which is of course another series about the malleability of self and body swapping.
I believe that like in the books the original Lena was half Asian in the film universe. What came out of the Shimmer was a biological mashup of her teammates that only thought of herself as Lena and so Lomax (played by Benedict Wong) is so scared of being in the same room with her because she is obviously not of this world. Also in the books Ghost Bird doesn't know Lena The Biologist's name because it was never spoken inside Area X. This was a security measure to prevent the doppelgangers who regularly escaped from Area X from infiltrating society because the authorities would immediately hospitalize people who didn't remember their own names so the Southern Reach could just watch the hospitals and pick them up. In the Movie nobody mentioned that Lena was half-Asian (just like nobody in the team makes a big deal about race on the mission in general) so when The Brightness copies Lena to make the Humanoid it doesn't realize to make her Asian.
This doubles as a ActorAllusion because it wouldn't be the first time Benedict Wong wore an environment suit to talk to a humanoid who has the memories of an Asian woman.
Edited by Jinkee
Two points:
1) Are the visual effects inspired by DMT trips?
2) Is "Aliens Communicate in Jazz" (or something to that effect) slowly becoming a Trope? There is a scene with brass notes and a light show when she stares into the alien something-or-other that is reminiscent of the famous Close Encounters contact scene.