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Within a film world that overweights narrative clarity, exposition through dialogue, conventional coverage and fast cutting, Hadžihalilović’s daring, disquieting, formally rigorous work is both a welcome outlier and a much needed reminder of cinema’s power to create aesthetically seductive worlds of inner space that linger long after the lights come up.
#THIS WAR OF MINE THE LITTLE ONES SKIN#
The pacing is deliberate, and the sonic universe is one of quietude, all to make sudden sounds - a breaking of glass, or the thrust of a knife onto skin - all the more arresting.
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I really wanted the film to be like his dreams, or his nightmare, and to put the audience in that position.” Taking place within a depopulated small city somewhere in the mid-20th century, one with dark, green-hued interiors seen through director and cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg’s artfully arranged planes of shadow and light, Earwig proceeds as if in a trance, capturing the eerie feelings of a disquieting nightmare half-remembered upon mid of night awakening. But when he’s informed that in a short while his services will no longer be needed, that the girl will be transferred out of his care, Albert enters a psychological spiral, with visions of the past (some involving a woman who may be his wife and the actual mother of this child) colliding with a Mephistophelian figure able to awaken a violence that lurks within him.Ībout Albert’s world, Hadžihalilović says in our conversation below, “He’s confused between reality, dreams and hallucination. As long as Albert can spend his days caring for the girl, and payment is regularly sent by off-screen employers, he’s able to live his life in a kind of reassuring stasis.
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The latter are mysteriously motivated figures in the director’s previous work here it’s the child whose provenance and needs form a kind of puzzle for middle-aged Albert (dubbed “Earwig” in the book, a nickname earned during World War 2).
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If Hadžihalilović swapped the gender of her protagonists in Evolution, in her latest, Earwig, adapted by Geoff Cox and the director, she shifts her focus from children to adults. And in Evolution, her follow-up, just over a decade later and based on an original script, a young boy is the protagonist, dropped off at a futuristic hospital near the sea where operations cause boys to grow fetuses - a story that also involves amphibious nurses and a possible conspiracy of mothers. In her feature debut, 2004’s Innocence, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, puberty and the performance of gender is taught and ritualized at a girl’s school where young pupils arrive in coffins. In 1994’s medium-length La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, a teenage girl, ensconced at her aunt’s following her mother’s suicide attempt, is subjected to the menacing gaze of her aunt’s abusive boyfriend. Brian Catling, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Earwig, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Toronto International Film Festival 2021, Warren EllisĪ young girl with melting ice for teeth bound to a mysterious protector, an older man who drains and refreezes those teeth each day - such a scenario, found in artist Frank Catly’s 2019 novel Earwig, provides the perfect source material for French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, whose films depict the uncanny transformations of adolescence in startling, near-surreal ways.