French film-maker Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s ambiguous horror “Evolution” (2015) is beautiful as well as frustrating movie. It is the kind of movie that makes you scratch your head during the end credits, leaving you to reflect on the bizarre and ethereal visuals. “Evolution” is a nightmarish fairy tale about childhood, puberty, alienation, abuse of gender roles, and sexual reproduction. That’s pretty much evident, but it’s ‘show, don’t tell’ approach by the film-maker demands some patience, contemplative mind set, and a strong stomach to take in the unsettling images. The body horror element and isolated atmosphere reminds us of David Cronenberg works and H.P. Lovecraft’s short story ‘Dagon’.
The movie opens in the ocean bed, the camera looking towards
the sun as its majestic light shines through the prism of clear water. We
observe the aquatic plants, which elegantly dances with the current. An
unsettling silence hovers around as we perceive these beautiful images. It made
me remember the opening scene of Herzog’s “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” asking
“But did you not hear the dreadful screaming all around that people usually
call silence?” The spiritual calmness of the images insinuates that deeply
distressing element is concealed. A boy named Nicolas (Max Brebant) swims into
the ethereal frame and as expected the calmness is disrupted when he sees the
corpse of a child in the ocean bed with a starfish resting on the corpse’s
stomach. The shocked little boy runs towards his volcanic island, whose streets
are paved with black sand. When Nicolas tells what he saw under the ocean bed,
his mother with parched eyebrows (Julie-Marie Parmentier) replies “the sea
makes you think all kind of things”.
Wearing red trousers and red t-shirt, Nicolas seems to be a
curious boy. He lives in a barely furnished house and his pastime is drawing in
the little notebook. To our surprise, we find out that the island’s meager
population is consists of enigmatic women and their little sons. The boys eat
boiled seaweed and ink-like substance to drink before sleep. A bullying boy in
the island dares Nicolas to come out and bury a big lifeless mollusc. As
Nicolas touches the lifeless form, he contemplates death and has more questions
about growing up. Soon, the boys are moved to a ghoulish hospital, situated on
the edge of the island. A young nurse Stella (Roxane Duran) has a kind look on
her face, while the rest of the hospital staffs, like the boys’ mothers,
possess unnerving gaze. They huddle around watching c-section procedure, from
an old recorded tape. Nicolas is strapped into a gurney as the doctors perform
some kind of operation in the stomach. Soon, all the boys of island are staying
in the hospital bed with little scar near the belly button. The woman routinely
gathers around the shores at night, walking from their house holding a lantern.
Nicolas after his return from hospital decides to discover the secret of what
the women are doing in the night. The boy comes across a nightmarish truth
which partly seems like a hallucination. The boys are gradually pulled into a
deeper abyss, full of distressing intentions.
Director Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s debut feature “Innocence”
(2004) was set in a boarding school for little girls, who were restricted from
leaving. While the gender roles are revised in her second feature film
“Evolution”, the young ones growing in restricted environment forms to be the
central, intriguing idea. We are all brought up in what’s called a ‘normal’
environment. But, doesn’t this normalcy sort of enshroud us inside a cocoon,
allegedly protecting us from outside, malevolent forces? The events unfurling
in “Evolution” looks bizarre, cruel and surrealistic, but it basically peels
the layers of what’s thought of normal behavior in the isolate community of
humanoids. Like us, the children in the film have an illusion of freedom as
they freely roam around, poking at things. But, there are definite limits to
this roaming. Nicolas is curious enough to perceive this imprisoned status and
look beyond the illusory freedom. Similar to the manner, he swims deep and away
into the ocean, he seeks a total freedom, whose ultimate price is his
innocence. This narrative arc (desire for freedom, threat to innocence, etc) is
pretty much what we come across in all coming-of-age films, but only here it
all conveyed through a nightmarish, metaphorical meaning. The swapping of
gender roles was also interesting. While we usually see (in movies) girls being
groomed from a young age to find a place in the man’s world, “Evolution” offers a
scarier play with those gender roles. Here the boys remain passive and the
women are the threat. They are the evil force intent to create life without sex
and love. The images that repeatedly lingers on the boys’ stitched-up stomach
is unnerving to watch, but this switching of roles questions the role of boys
and girls in a society.
Apart from the movie’s disturbing images (the extreme
close-up of a snail crawling over a belly button was unforgettable), there’s
lot of mesmerizing visual compositions by cinematographer Manuel Dacosse.
Director Hadzihalilovic’s clear sense of direction creates mysterious
aesthetics, bathed in blues and greens (these colors in the low-lit hospital
rooms gives us a feeling of being under the water). As the narrative is light
on explanation, the visuals consistently maintain the sense of dread and
strangeness. Of the various visual motifs, the ‘starfish’ was the most
intriguing. The starfish’s asexual reproduction and the ability to regenerate
limbs are evoked to insinuate how the boys through surgeries are being mutated
to attain the sea creature’s trait. The bacchanalia of nude women, lying near
the shores, moaning loudly facing towards the skies, when see from above, takes
the form of a starfish. The color ‘red’ from Nicolas t-shirts and trousers
(shown in the first half) seems to indicates the passion and primal life
forces, seething inside his soul. Nicolas’ bright drawings of Ferris wheel,
cars and Christmas tree (and who could be that curly haired woman?) seems to
indicate his ‘normal’ past (if there was one). But, still despite the profound
interpretations and unsettling plus beautiful nature of the images, something
stops “Evolution” from being a wholly satisfying horror experience. Heavy
comparisons are being made between this movie and Jonathan Glazier’s astounding
sci-fi “Under the Skin”. But, I felt an emotional connection with an alien,
trying to be human. The alienation of the alien creature, trying to fit into
the normal human society sort of reflects our own alienated feeling in
submitting to the conventions of normal thinking and lifestyle. In “Evolution”, the neutral and passive
emotions of the boys (Max’s minimalist performance has no faults) plus the
monstrous behavior of women (except Stella) doesn’t offer an emotionally
relatable perspective. Yes, in the second viewing the deeper themes and
intriguing ideas of the film-maker becomes clear, although I was not able to
feel a emotional fluidity, strongly present in “Under the Skin”.
Trailer
“Evolution” (81 minutes) is an unsettling mood piece that
uncovers the hideous layers lying beneath a sensual atmospheric surface. It
demands our whole attention to observe the visual craft on display, which also
provides good distraction to the narrative shortcomings.
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