Évolution

A mysterious horror story, or maybe a dream or someone’s memory, Évolution defies easy categorization, just as the movie also defies narrative exposition. This French film’s unsettling imagery and intimations of a plot linger in the mind long after one makes peace with its ultimate unknowingness. The horror imagined by Évolution does not depend on the genre’s familiar tropes but instead its arousal of dread and fear, not unlike Guillermo del Toro in The Devil’s Backbone, in which the peril is intuited rather than defined.

One day, while swimming in the waters off the volcanic rock at the edge of a seaside town, Nicolas (Brebant) spots a dead boy with a starfish on his belly. His mother (Parmentier) dismisses his tale and then feeds him his regular meal of wormy mush, washed down with drops of inky “medicine.” His mother appears as undescriptive as the small house in which they live that contains no evidence of personal items. Nicolas’ discovery of the dead boy (who is not there the next time he looks) opens his mind to the notion that something is not quite right in this odd community whose only residents are pubescent boys and their mothers. He spies the disturbing and inexplicable rituals conducted by the mothers on the beach at night, and soon justifiably wonders why the boys have all been placed in a local clinic where nurses subject them to bizarre surgeries every evening. He forms a special bond with a nurse named Stella (and kudos to Hadžihalilović for having Nicholas cry out “Stella,” like a pipsqueak Stanley Kowalski, before the film is through).

The meanings and what is signified by these surgeries and the community of adult women and presexualized boys are open to interpretation. And what is the evolution indicated by the title? The questions are more numerous than this film’s answers, but in a brief 81 minutes Hadžihalilović creates a disquieting mystery that persists long after the movie ebbs.