Evo­lu­tion – first look review

Shar­ing its alien DNA with the likes of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Col­or and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin while also lay­ing bold claim to being an entire­ly new cin­e­mat­ic spec­i­fies in and of itself, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s tri­umphant return to cin­e­ma fol­low­ing a near 12-year absence is a film which wan­ton­ly dri­ves of direct readings.

It’s a hor­ror movie in a loose sense, shorn of all con­text (and con­tain­ing bare­ly a line of dia­logue) so events play out inside a shim­mer­ing, sui gener­is bub­ble, invit­ing inter­pre­ta­tions that could range from a com­bat­ive essay on ways in which women could fea­si­bly pass on phys­i­cal bur­den of bear­ing chil­dren, to an oblique, poet­ic metaphor for the birthing process itself.

The title along with the film’s focus on exper­i­men­tal surgery sug­gest that it’s touch­ing on what a phys­i­cal inter­ven­tion in the evo­lu­tion­ary process could look like, replete with filthy spec­i­men jars con­tain­ing mys­te­ri­ous hunks of sup­pu­rat­ing tis­sue, syringes full of cloudy vis­cous flu­id, and prison-like birthing tanks.

In Hadžihalilović’s very sim­i­lar pre­vi­ous film, Inno­cence, from 2004, the images she offered coa­lesced too neat­ly into a sim­ple, cyn­i­cal state­ment about female exploita­tion and sex­u­al­i­ty. This film avoids such ser­mon­is­ing, ask­ing new ques­tions and explor­ing new angles with every sub­se­quent sequence, right up to a breath­tak­ing final shot which abrupt­ly turns every­thing we’ve seen on its head.

The sto­ry fol­lows Max Brebant’s spindly pip squeak Nico­las who is fed a mulch of worms and forced to take a spe­cial ​“med­i­cine” by his swad­dling ​“moth­er”. Liv­ing in a com­i­cal­ly aus­tere con­crete vil­lage sit­u­at­ed on a black-sand­ed seafront, his para­noia is piqued one day when he spies the corpse of a sim­i­lar­ly-aged boy at the bot­tom of the sea, a big red star fish attached to his rot­ting chest cav­i­ty. His moth­er assures that his mind was play­ing tricks with him, and even though defence­less against her relent­less insis­tence that he’s being cured of an unde­fined ill­ness, Nico­las now wants to dis­cov­er what these dead-eyed cap­tors real­ly have in store for him.

The film dis­plays a fas­ci­na­tion with what goes on inside our bod­ies and how our organs and genet­ic make-up can be manip­u­lat­ed at will, and the film’s few close-up shots com­prise of scalpels slic­ing across arms and legs, or nee­dles punc­tur­ing the skin. Grue­some and aus­tere though this all this sounds, Hadžihalilović’s film nev­er descends to base shocks or hys­ter­i­cal twists, and even though what she’s film­ing could be described as con­ven­tion­al­ly ugly (every­thing is rusty, water-dam­aged, dis­tressed, dirty), every shot is a mar­vel of macabre beau­ty. Even though it runs at a trim 80 min­utes, you real­ly feel that the direc­tor has sunk incred­i­ble amounts of time and resource into mak­ing sure that ever frame is total­ly pre­cise and adds to the heady over­all effect, that no extra­ne­ous mate­r­i­al is allowed to con­t­a­m­i­nate its sin­is­ter perfection.

One read­ing of Evo­lu­tion is that it’s a re-ren­der­ing of a clas­sic fairy­tale, pro­duced with bold over­tures towards med­ical accu­ra­cy. Hadži­halilović is dig­ging up the corpses of Lewis Car­roll, the broth­ers Grimm and Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­son, chop­ping them to pieces and then stitch­ing them back as a grotesque film sculp­ture, but also adding her own dis­tinc­tive and pro­gres­sive sheen.