Ahead of a release this November, the unsettling U.S. trailer has arrived for Evolution, writer-director Lucile Hadzihalilovic first feature since 2004’s Innocence. The mind-bending fever dream follows Nick, who lives in a hospital in a small seaside town where the only residents are boys and women. When Nick comes upon a dead body in the ocean resting beneath a starfish, he begins to question the very fabrics of his world, which includes the question: “why am I here?” What follows seems to be a visually compelling journey into the bizarre, which one critic has described as a cross between Jacques Cousteau and David Cronenberg.
While it is assuredly visually stunning — as many of the reviews covering the trailer state — the question remains of whether or not its narrative and deeper thematic trappings can hold up to its aesthetic qualities. We said in our review: “Despite all the needles going into skin throughout, Evolution feels ultimately bloodless, as if every attempt at some kind of sensory overload is muted. One wants it to let loose the way a less pretentious genre exercise likely would, say how John Carpenter’s metaphysics-heavy Prince of Darkness wasn’t afraid to throw in a bunch of acid-vomiting demons for the cheap seats, something that at the very least gave it more fury and verve than the “tastefulness” of Evolution.”
Check out the trailer below and a talk with the director.
This eerily seductive mind-bender is a dark, dreamlike descent into the depths of the unknown. Ten-year-old Nicolas (Max Brebant) lives in a remote seaside village populated only by boys his age and adult women. But when he makes a disturbing discovery beneath the ocean waves—a dead boy with a red starfish on his stomach—Nicolas begins to question everything about his existence. What are the half-remembered images he recalls, as if from another life? If the woman he lives with is not his mother, then who is she? And what awaits the boys when they are all suddenly confined to a hospital? The long-awaited new film from the acclaimed director of Innocence is awash in the haunting, otherworldly images of a nightmare.
Evolution opens November 25th.