Evolution

A little like an abstract painting that refuses to represent recognizable subject matter in favor of expressing a "mood." Contrary to what others here have said, there *is* a story-line. The problem is that the underlying narrative structure is too basic to support so many elaborate, mystifying trappings.

It helps to know that the director based the movie on the experience she had when she was 10 and went to a hospital to get her appendix taken out. So given the main character's nightmarish attempt to figure out what's happening to him, we're basically seeing an elaborate series of puzzling visual metaphors for the director's disorienting personal experience as a child in hospital.

This movie isn't hiding anything or failing to be coherent. It just wants to be a darkly evocative visual collage instead of a straight-up narrative. Accordingly, it's rewardingly rich visually, but it's like a poem that sounds great but doesn't involve you in anything really important. All of the many unanswered questions it raises make it hard to let the visuals just wash over you.

In other words, behind all the evocative, disturbing imagery (again "unsettling" is the best word) it's *just* a retelling of a personal experience; there isn't a deeper message than "fear of the unknown." For me that wasn't enough.

The mood is conveyed. The story is told. It's just not terribly profound.

A young boy begins to wonder about the isolated community he has grown up in; one populated only with boys his age and young women.

This French film is an example of a recent type of development that I have noticed in horror cinema in that it is a film that is played out in such a self-consciously arty style that it seems to think engaging with the audience may in actual fact be beneath it. The events depicted have some genuine potential but they are played out in such an overwhelmingly downbeat manner that their effect is seriously compromised. The tone of the film is more or less one note from start to finish, resulting in a pretty unsatisfying experience. This is an especial shame when the overall setting of the story and its enigmatic qualities are fairly promising. Details are not fully revealed about what is going on but this fact didn't concern me too much – aspects such as the strange medical experiments and odd events that played out on the beach in the dead of night were intriguing. But the material was not served well in my opinion by the excessively po-faced execution and it was ultimately quite difficult getting very involved with the events that played out in this one.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic's long awaited follow-up to 2004's 'Innocence', the main characters in 'Évolution' are once again children nearing puberty, but whereas 'Innocence''s young cast consists of girls, all of the children here are boys. The plot involves one such boy discovering the dead body of another with a starfish attached to him, which seems to provoke all the mothers in town to send their boys to hospital, despite none feeling ill. As with 'Innocence', the plot is hardly straightforward here and it would be remiss to fixate over working out what is going on when it is such a thematically rich experience. The ideas at hand all pertain to normal growing up experiences, from a fascination with how humans reproduce to interest in the naked female form. One might even interpret the film as a living nightmare with the boy's very worst fears over such things manifesting themselves. Is human reproduction really that monstrous do naked women really have such strange bodies? The film is certainly littered with enough lush imagery and moments of eerie beauty that it is hard to bring a straightforward reading to the film. And yet, whereas the same can be said about 'Innocence', it is easier to interpret what is happening there. 'Innocence' also benefits from all its girls being three dimensional characters whereas all of the boys here are interchangeable. Simply put, 'Évolution' is not nearly as satisfying as 'Innocence' with an equal dearth of answers - but it is still a wondrous audiovisual experience the causes one to think as per Hadzihalilovic's earlier work.

After watching the film I read some interviews with the writer/director Lucile Hadžihalilović and she mentioned how it had taken her a long time to get funding for this film. Never have I been less surprised. Not creepy enough to be a full blown horror film and too creepy to just be a pure art film.

The film is about a young pre-pubescent boy named Nicolas who lives on a remote island with his mother, several other women and other young boys around his age. He is told he is sickly by his mother and urged to eat a really wicked looking blue creation for his "health" and eventually has to go to a hospital where he is repeatedly operated on.

I won't spoil the movie, but Hadžihalilović isn't one for jump scares and Nicolas's illness and the reason for his hospital visits are made clear very early on. It all unfolds in a creepy atmospheric way so that the audience is aware of the bad things that are going on before Nicolas is, though he too learns the secret behind his illness soon enough.

The movie is very beautifully filmed with lots of stunning shots of the water and the seaside. However one thing I take issue with is how dark some of the shots were. Maybe it was the fault of the distributor for not cleaning up the shots but there are some nightime scenes where instead of being frightened I was merely confused because the screen looked pitch black.

Nevertheless the movie is very easy to follow on and the ultimate story and horror is pretty simple.

I'm not a horror fan so this was not really a movie for me, but for art fans who are looking for a slow scare, this might be for you.

Evolution looked interesting in the previews, which left me wanting to see more. Sadly, after watching the movie, I was left feeling like I had walked somewhere but stayed in the same place.

The movie is a very stylistic an artful rendering of some place near the water where children play and their mothers care for them. The strangeness of the place slowly (and I mean slowly) becomes obvious. We soon notice that there are no grown adult males, for instance. There is very little that I can say that will spoil the movie, but I will refrain from going into anything that might be construed as a plot element. Suffice it to say, the movie is about 90% ambiance, with some beautiful shots. The underwater shots contrastingly more beautiful than the starkness and dullness of the village life. There were shots in which I measured a character literally staring at the lens for nearly one minute - and yes, I looked at my watch.

Evolution is, sadly, like riding in a beautiful elevator with some soothing background music playing through ceiling-mounted speakers. We feel like we are enveloped in the ambiance of that moment, staring in the same direction as everyone else. We may or may not notice the music, the ornate trim, or the polished floor. We just want to get to our floor. Or, perhaps, if it takes too long, we may consciously notice what song is playing. Nevertheless, at the end, the doors open and we get out, the elevator not leaving any impression on us. It got us somewhere, but we don't care, we are here where we always thought we would be, no thanks to the elevator. That is Evolution, a mildly satisfying piece of semi-conscious background images and sounds that dumps us at the end of the ride and lets us go on with our lives - we don't know if we liked it, it was beautiful but we are indifferent and only thankful that we did not go crashing, because it could have been worse.

OK, so where was I going before? .... oh yes, here is my floor.