Young Nicolas (Max Brebant) finds much more than he expected under the water in Lucile Hadzihalilović’s EVOLUTION
IFC MIDNIGHT: EVOLUTION (Lucile Hadzihalilović, 2015)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, November 25
212-924-777
www.ifcfilms.com
Lucile Hadzihalilović’s Evolution is a gentle and seductive, expertly made French horror film, a creepy twist on the feminist revenge thriller. Max Brebant stars as Nicolas, a clever ten-year-old boy who lives in a remote seaside village with his mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier). One day while swimming deep in the ocean, he sees a dead boy at the bottom of a coral reef, a red starfish on his chest. His mother insists he is just imagining things, but Nicolas suspects something strange is going on. “Why am I sick?” he asks as his mother gives him his usual medicine. “Because your body is changing,” she replies. We soon find out how much when he and his friends, Frank (Nissim Renard), Victor (Mathieu Goldfeld), and Lucas (Pablo-Noé Étienne), are suddenly taken to an eerie hospital run by nearly silent nurses. What goes on there evokes elements of The X-Files, Stand by Me, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Stepford Wives but is wholly original. Only nurse Stella (Roxane Duran) offers him the slightest bit of humanity, and the slightest bit of hope.
Nicolas (Max Brebant) is tended to by Stella (Roxane Duran) as his mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier) looks on in EVOLUTION
Directed by Hadžihalilović and cowritten with Alante Kavaite, Evolution is a dark journey into the waters of the subconscious, constructed around the innate fears of childbirth and adolescence. Manuel Dacosse’s gorgeous cinematography — the lighting throughout is breathtaking — is bathed in various shades of green, from underwater shots to the hospital walls, with splashes of red; one particularly memorable visual occurs when Nicolas, in a red bathing suit, runs across the rocky green landscape back to his house to tell his mother what he has seen in the sea. The film, sensuously edited by Nassim Gordji-Tehrani, moves at a slow, tense pace, with sparse dialogue. In only her second feature film, the follow-up to 2004’s Innocence — she has also made three shorts since 1996 — Hadžihalilović displays a mastery of cinematic technique, the narrative unfolding little by little while the mysterious mood remains steady, anchored by Zacarías M. de la Riva’s haunting score. “The water can make you imagine all sorts of things,” his mother tells Nicolas, but he is determined to discover the truth about what is going on. The water has made Hadžihalilović imagine the unimaginable amid a completely realistic setting, drawing the characters and viewers ever further into the depths. Winner of numerous awards at multiple film festivals, Evolution is both shocking and tender, psychologically gripping and utterly mesmerizing.