Évolution (2016)
Directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Film Review

More than a decade after her debut feature Innocence (2004), director Lucile Hadzihalilovic returns to our screens with another, even more puzzling and idiosyncratic foray into early adolescent sexuality.  Positively wallowing in its oneiric oddness, Évolution has no trouble claiming the title of the strangest French film of 2016, so unlike anything else on offer this year that it looks like something that has fallen through a wormhole to a parallel reality.  It's apparent that the film is intended to be an allegory of male pubescence, feeding hungrily on the murkier neuroses therein, but it approaches this theme from such a skew-wiff angle that it can just as easily be enjoyed as a piece of pure escapism - part mystical poem, part sci-fi fantasy, one that gives a disturbing new meaning to the term navel-gazing.

Despite the promise of her early work, Hadzihalilovic has had a much harder time establishing herself than her partner, Gaspar Noé, with whom she worked on their first films.  Hadzihalilovic shares both Noé's visual flair and his penchant for the provocative and unfamiliar, although her work to date has been somewhat less startling.  Évolution is (appropriately enough) the film where Hadzihalilovic appears to have finally come of age, forging her identity with a style of cinema that appears bizarre even by Noé's exceptional standards.  The B-movie sci-fi plot, about an isolated community of women performing experiments on young boys to turn them into baby producers, is merely the jumping off point for a lurid visual fantasy that abounds with macabre poetry and icky body horror creepiness.

This is not the kind of film that tends to do well in France - French cinema is famously deficient in the horror genre - but it stands up well against comparable excursions into nightmarish unreality by such masters of the genre as Lucio Fulci and David Cronenberg.   Let down slightly by a plot that is persistently vague throughout and fails to reach a satisfactory resolution, Évolution still makes a tremendous impact by virtue of its stark, imaginatively composed visuals.  With its jet black beaches and lack of vegetation, Lanzarote provides a suitably alien-looking location for this dive into the unknown, but what impresses most are the eerie underwater sequences, which lend a distinctive lyrical flavour to the film.  Tapping into fears that stay with us long after the traumas of puberty have passed, Évolution feels more like a nightmare experience than a film.

Film Synopsis

Somewhere on a remote stretch of coast there lives a community of women and young boys.  Nicolas is an eleven-year-old who lives with his mother and is beginning to ask himself questions about the life he is leading.  Every so often, like all of the other boys in the village, he is taken to a hospital where he receives a strange treatment, the purpose of which is never explained to him.  Nicolas is anxious for answers but his mother seems reluctant to enlighten him.  His curiosity leads him to spy on his mother when she goes out at night to join the other women on the beach, where they take part in some mysterious ritual.   Nicolas's only confidante is a young nurse at the hospital.  Perhaps she may be able to help him to uncover the truth about his increasingly bizarre existence...