It’s been over ten years since Lucile Hadžihalilović made an indelible impression with her first feature INNOCENCE (2004), so there might have been something of a ‘difficult second album’ feeling building up around her long awaited return to the screens with EVOLUTION. Would Hadžihalilović ride on the success of her debut, and settle for a look-and-feel carbon copy of INNOCENCE – or would she take a risk and strike out in a new, experimental direction? The long gestation period for her new movie might suggest the latter approach, but EVOLUTION doesn’t seem to mark any significant progress or development in the director’s ideas, style or even content.
Essentially, EVOLUTION is another dark, colour-saturated, gothic body-horror movie about the experience of a child growing up. Where INNOCENCE took on the altered sensation point-of-view of a young pre-adolescent girl as she began to experience her awakening as a woman, EVOLUTION follows a similar journey from the perspective of an 11 year old boy. If the same concerns are there about the mysteries of the body and the changes it undergoes, the sequences that follow the boy’s journey to a somewhat less definable outcome are somewhat less easily defined.
Nicholas lives on the coastline of a rocky island. The dark volcanic rocks and sand contrast with the blocky white houses of a little village, battered by the winds and sea. There are no men on the island, just single boys, each of them cared for by their mother. Perhaps ‘guardian’ might be a better description, as the ‘mothers’ all have an androgynous/amphibious quality and there is little that resembles a normal family situation here. Nicholas’ drawings show that he is familiar with the trappings of life beyond the island, and he has an inquisitive nature. Venturing where he is not supposed to go, Nicholas witnesses some strange creatures in the sea indulging in some disturbing behaviour with the ‘mothers’. His sense of something deeply unsettling taking place on the island is confirmed when he is admitted for an unusual procedure at the hospital.
EVOLUTION is not so much an out-of-body experience as an inner body one.
Hadžihalilović’s approach to her first film certainly didn’t appeal to everyone, and her stylistic mystification around the rite of passage could be considered somewhat overwrought; so the even more abstract approach in EVOLUTION is not going to win any new fans. Reactions to the director’s choice to review the same limited subject matter from a different angle might therefore be disappointing, but there is some appeal in a director with a distinct vision continuing to explore their own inner world, seeking to find new means of expression for it on the screen. Hadžihalilović, albeit on the basis now of only two films, is clearly a director whose working methods and obsessions are not unlike those of David Lynch, Philippe Grandrieux or Terrence Malick.
It’s clear, however, that Hadžihalilović is putting more trust in instinct and improvisation here, exploring ideas and sensations by allowing them to follow their own unconventional path. The director has spoken of her own childhood experience of her body being probed by outsiders while undergoing an appendix operation, and the even more uncomfortable matter of her body being opened up for an operation. The sensations of that experience are not unexpectedly associated here with a squeamishness or fascination about strange nature of childbirth, but the use of a young boy as the vehicle for those fears makes the procedures feel even more invasive, suggesting that there are other psychological and biological factors involved.
The director allows those more mysterious sensations relating to the body to be further complicated by associating them with the flow of water, with starfish and other strange creatures that live beneath the surface of the sea. The free-associative connections between these contrasting elements are less obvious than the more conventional use of symbolism found in INNOCENCE, and it’s left to the individual viewer to arrive at conclusions that are not easy to pin down. EVOLUTION doesn’t have a strongly defined narrative, communicating the strange nature of biological transformation through images, rhythms, patterns and sounds: not so much an out-of-body experience as an inner body one.
httpvh://youtu.be/H5cmrW-Ej84