Screened to acclaim at the Toronto and London Film Festivals, French writer-director Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution is a remarkable and visionary work, conjuring a Blakean worldview wherein the line between innocence and experience is repeatedly transgressed.
Building on the promise of 2004’s critically lauded Innocence, this poetic horror, pitched somewhere between Franju’s Eyes Without a Face and Glazer’s Under the Skin, follows – in the loosest sense – 10-year-old Nicolas, who lives on a remote island inhabited only by women and young boys like himself.
As he approaches puberty, Nicolas is forced to confront the enigma of this world without men and his own impending admission to the island’s sinister hospital, where only the healthy are welcomed within its forbidding walls.
Full of incredibly striking imagery, Evolution‘s indelible, claustrophobic atmosphere transports us into an eerie, spellbindingly weird world like no other.
