Evo­lu­tion

Evo­lu­tion is sen­su­al cin­e­ma. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s sec­ond fea­ture evokes the per­spec­tive of a child who can­not trans­late the strange­ness of the world into words. Analysing this film with any sense of author­i­ty is a doomed endeav­our. Bet­ter just to describe it.

It is com­pa­ra­ble to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin in that every­one will inter­pret the ​‘sto­ry’ in a dif­fer­ent way. A more com­mu­nal expe­ri­ence will be the appre­ci­a­tion of Manuel Dacosse’s sump­tu­ous pho­tog­ra­phy. The colours are almost too sat­u­rat­ed to be real – and yet the set­tings evoke all that is glo­ri­ous about the nat­ur­al world. After 90 min­utes of such heady beau­ty in colour and com­po­si­tion, anec­do­tal find­ings would sug­gest that peo­ple depart from the cin­e­ma in the altered state of a swoon.

Nico­las (Max Bre­bant) is a tiny slip of a tanned boy with big brown eyes and small red swim­ming trunks. He lives on an island with equal­ly small boys and their strik­ing­ly pale moth­ers. There are no adult men any­where. The film opens with cov­er­age of the island’s clear sur­round­ing waters, white foam col­lect­ing as the waves crash into rocks with a crack­ling hiss that rings in your ears. Thomas dives into the calmer, deep­er blue and finds what seems to be a dead boy of his age. His moth­er dives in after and brings back only a red starfish.

What fol­lows is vir­tu­al­ly dia­logue-free world build­ing. Every­one on the island lives in spar­tan con­di­tions. Homes con­tain tables, chairs and beds. Meals con­sist of a slimy sea­weed-like sub­stance washed down with a few pipettes of deli­cious iodine.

Hadzihalilovic’s state­ly pac­ing cre­ates a feel­ing of relax­ation tinged with adren­a­line. Some­thing eerie is unfold­ing, one per­fect image at a time.
There are ele­ments of sci­ence fic­tion, body hor­ror and com­ing-of-age dra­ma at play. Fabi­o­la Ordoyo’s sound design is incred­i­ble: squelchy, pre­cise and echo­ing. Nico­las is a sto­ical lit­tle boy, react­ing to strange rooms and even stranger events with sad-eyed prag­ma­tism. In his accep­tance of night­mar­ish cir­cum­stances is some­thing of the real world bur­den of knowl­edge that accom­pa­nies grow­ing up. Con­verse­ly, the specifics of his bur­dens are sur­re­al­ly and vis­cer­al­ly inven­tive. The com­bi­na­tion of the famil­iar with pure oth­er­ness cre­ates a mes­meris­ing atmosphere.

Images and themes recur: stars; the colour red; starched med­ical pro­ce­dures; goo; bod­ies; the metro­nom­ic robot beat of the moth­ers’ foot­steps. The deep­er you go (if you accept the film’s non-nar­ra­tive pow­er), the more you’re able to aban­don your log­i­cal fac­ul­ties. On the sur­face there are basic stakes to enter­tain: Nico­las is the hero and he is in per­il. There is a self­less angel on his side. Events feel pre­des­tined. Very lit­tle is explained. Many char­ac­ters are defined by alien, Pre-Raphaelite looks.

The end­ing offers a com­par­a­tive land­slide of infor­ma­tion in terms of enabling a read of what the film is all about, but even that is very abstract. What makes Evo­lu­tion unfor­get­table is not its sto­ry, but the seduc­tive pull of its car­nal lan­guage and what that means for a young boy who can’t help but lose his innocence.