There’s so much going for Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution, a film expertly lensed from the deliberate first shot: looking up to the sky from underwater. From beneath, the ripples and waves on the ocean surface produce undulating shadows, a play of light and dark. We eventually leave the water for land and get slowly introduced to the strange, insular world for this work of body horror and dark fantasy, a place where everything seems so off and so mesmerizing all at once.
At its best, Evolution feels like a collaboration between David Cronenberg, H. P. Lovecraft, and Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s sexually bizarre and clinical, it’s eldritch and slimy and afraid of seafood, it’s thematically and compositionally contemplative. Still, whatever spell Hadzihalilovic weaves early on unravels after a certain point. It’s a deliberate move, and it’s a frustrating one, and yet I think I’m okay with it, at least in concept.
[This review originally ran as part of our coverage of New Directors/New Films. It has been reposted to coincide with the theatrical release of the film.]
Evolution
Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Release Date: November 25, 2016 (limited/VOD)
Rating: NR
Country: France
The world of Evolution is mysterious from the get go, which is due largely to the coastal locale where the film is set. We don’t know what year it is, or quite where this place is either. It’s all so otherworldly, the sort of setting for tales, allegories, and de Chirico paintings. There are white stucco buildings built near the water, and the sand is black leading to the turbulent shore. It’s beautiful in how stark it is. In the distance, there’s a medical facility that looks like it was abandoned years ago, but boys and their mothers walk back and forth for periodic examinations.
There are only grown women and young boys on this island. There are no men, there are no girls, and the mothers have a sinister uniformity about them. At night, the mothers leave their homes carrying hand lanterns and congregate near the water. The boys are just boys but are in the dark about their caretakers. The boys are raised on a diet of mashed kelp and something like worms, one of those foods that while heated in a saucepan still looks cold when it’s served.
Evolution centers primarily on Nicolas (Max Brebant) and his mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier), and what Nicolas discovers about this town and where babies come from. We follow him into the night, down long corridors, to water in the dark, and in the process participate in the act of discovery, unwrapping the allegory along with Nicolas, sharing in his repulsion and curiosity.
Roughly midway through Evolution, this dive into the unknown slows, maybe too much for what’s revealed about the mothers and their boys. Yet even what’s revealed is just enough to suggest larger possibilities and delve deeper into the thematic territory of the movie–sex, childbirth, asexuality, violation, flesh, reproduction, biological processes. I sensed in the film’s lull that Hadzihalilovic was signalling a move away from an explicit exploration of the plot and the machinery of the world to a series of ruminative brushstrokes, each one a deliberate move to the film’s finale, which is more conceptual than visceral.
In the immediate aftermath of Evolution, I felt a little let down, expecting more of a resolution to what’s introduced early on. Yet the movie has this strange, lingering quality thanks to its pervasive otherworldliness. I mentioned Lovecraft and Cronenbeg earlier, but Hadzihalilovic makes this movie her own, invested with unique hobbyhorses and a fascinating sensibility.
It’s rare to see a movie that sticks around in your mind after an initial sense of disappointment. The fact I’m still thinking about Evolution, and deeper now than in the hours after the first viewing, have made me reevaluate Hadzihalilovic’s languid pace, which unfolds with the same speed as a dream verging on a nightmare but never quite arriving there. Cinematographer Manuel Dacosse does a magnificent job in rendering these images and giving them such a haunting quality that I can’t get several of them out of my head. Evolution‘s grown on me, like a skin graft or like coral, or maybe it’s grown in me, like the stuff of recurring bad dreams.
