EVOLUTION – On a remote island inhabited only by male children and female adults, one young boy finds the body of another on the ocean floor and is drawn into a world of midnight experiments taking place in a derelict-looking hospital. 'Evolution' is Lucile Hadzihalilovic's follow up to 'Innocence', another surreal exploration of a cloistered community of children. This time, the director conjures up a more obviously nightmarish atmosphere – 'Evolution' might be the kind of movie that has critics of a higher brow than myself delving around for epithets like 'dark fairy tale', but the tone is uniquely oppressive and uncomfortable in places, enough to push it well into the horror bracket. There are echos too of familiar genre touchstones such as Cronenberg and Lynch, even Lovecraft with his 'Shadows Over Innesmouth', which should give you a notion of the fishy tone that prevails here, especially when we're talking about those creepy surgical procedures which seem to be about impregnating youngsters with starfish. As menacing as all this sounds, 'Evolution' tilts towards a more bitter-sweet undercurrent in the end, and is moving in its depiction of the central kids maternal yearnings (although these are certainly ambivalent, witness the resus scene). Despite its imagery and its oneiric tone, both of which are thickly laid on though with an art-house frostiness, 'Evolution' is I guess a film about the trials of life's awakenings. It's a beguiling and intoxicating film, one that I recommend strongly as probably one of the best I've seen this year, certainly the most interesting.
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