{"id":5944,"date":"2015-10-20T08:28:33","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T07:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=5944"},"modified":"2016-05-05T10:25:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T09:25:34","slug":"evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2015\/10\/20\/evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Evolution\"<\/a>
Evolution<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> Cinema

\nSeen at LFF 2015<\/a><\/b>

\nRelease date:<\/B> 6 May 2016

\nDistributor:<\/B> Metrodome

\nDirector:<\/B> Lucile Hadžihalilovic

\nWriters:<\/B> Lucile Hadžihalilovic, Alanté Kavaïté

\nCast:<\/B> Max Brebant, Roxane Duran, Julie-Marie Parmentier

\nFrance 2014

\n81 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Lucile Hadžihalilovic\u2019s follow-up to Innocence<\/i> is as poetic, disturbing and elusive as its predecessor.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Ten years after her wonderfully disquieting debut Innocence<\/i><\/a>, Lucile Hadžihalilovic returns with a tale that feels intimately close to it, thematically and atmospherically, despite the differences in setting. Here again, birth and transformation are elliptically explored through the creation of an immersive, sensory world infused with slow-burning unease. Just like its predecessor, Evolution<\/i> starts in water and ends with an ambivalent coming out of the water \u2013 symbolic birth? Escape? Expulsion? Abandonment? But where Innocence<\/i> revolved around a little girl\u2019s education at a peculiar boarding school, the protagonist of Evolution<\/i> is a little boy who lives on an island seemingly peopled only by women and other young boys. After seeing something alarming while swimming in the sea, a boy begins to question the way in which he is brought up. Soon he finds himself in hospital, the reason for his treatment unclear.<\/p>\n

Is what we see just a manifestation of a little boy\u2019s anxiety at growing up, or is the reality of life on the island truly sinister? Just as in Innocence<\/i>, Hadžihalilovic skilfully treads an ambiguous line, leaving us to interpret what we witness. Although at first view the film could be seen as the male pendant of Innocence<\/i>, its real focus is once more on the female. Choosing to tell the tale from a young boy\u2019s point of view allows the film to present the women as incomprehensible creatures with strange bodies and customs, and to underline the alien, disturbing nature of human reproduction. Innocence<\/i> looked at the rituals that marked a young girl\u2019s transformation into adolescence and adulthood. Here, the emphasis has switched to worrying, unexplained mutation, and to the weirdness of living matter in all its squelchy, mushy monstrousness. This comes to a head in a few moments of startlingly horrific imagery, which punctuate the fluid flow of oblique impressions, all the more powerful for their sparseness.<\/p>\n

Imbued with a mythical quality, Evolution<\/i> is constructed from simple, but unsettlingly effective motifs: water, a starfish, the colour red, the decaying white village and the decrepit hospital, the women\u2019s red hair and odd features, their identical outfits, either austere khaki dresses, or quaint white nurses\u2019 uniforms. These elements subtly draw on legendary and filmic creatures, suggesting aliens, sirens and monsters, giving the story a deeper resonance. A beguiling mix of art and horror, Evolution<\/i> is a richly evocative, intensely physical experience, an eerie, darkly poetic meditation on the strangeness of organic existence. Hadžihalilovic makes a cinema of textures, colours and sounds, a cinema of ideas embodied in sensations, a rare, precious kind of cinema that is both sophisticated and visceral. Let\u2019s hope it doesn\u2019t take her another 10 years to make another film. <\/p>\n

Virginie Sélavy<\/I><\/B><\/p>\n

This review is part of our LFF 2015<\/a> coverage.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucile Hadžihalilovic\u2019s follow-up to Innocence<\/i> is as poetic, disturbing and elusive as its predecessor.
\nReview by Virginie Sélavy<\/I><\/B><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[187,152,111,1271,1262],"class_list":["post-5944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-check-it-out","category-festivals","tag-french-film","tag-french-horror","tag-horror-film","tag-lucile-hadzihalilovic","tag-mutation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/purUP-1xS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":26,"url":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2007\/01\/04\/innocence\/","url_meta":{"origin":5944,"position":0},"title":"Innocence","author":"VirginieSelavy","date":"January 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Based on a nineteenth-century short story by Frank Wedekind, Innocence is the debut feature of Lucile Hadzihalilovic, a long-time collaborator of controversial French director Gaspar No\u00e9 (Irr\u00e9versible, Seul contre tous). 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