Lucile Hadžihalilović/ France Spain Belgium/ 2015/ 82 mins

In cinemas nationwide now

Lucile Hadžihalilović has taken more than a decade to follow up her debut film, Innocence.  Like that extraordinary work, Evolution takes place in an hermetic environment devoid of men.  It is also ambiguous in its sense of time and location, and whether this matriarchal society is utopian or otherwise in nature.

Evolution takes place in an unnamed little town by the sea, of spartan white houses on black volcanic sands.  Populated by young boys and their ‘mothers’, life here seems set to rigid, possibly cultish rhythms.  The women are all extraordinary-looking;  serene, severe, ethereal and alien; they aren’t ugly or beautiful, but are presented as almost neutral.  The boy’s lives seem to revolve around the digestion of some singularly unappetising green, wormy goop, and a refreshing glass of ink.  One young boy, Nicolas, goes swimming and thinks he sees the corpse of a boy on the seabed, with a vivid, red starfish on the dead boy’s stomach.

Evolution is ostensibly a coming-of-age story as Nicolas investigates his environment following his discovery, and uncovers a disturbing truth; one best experienced without prior knowledge.  It has a similar meditative science fiction approach to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and a gradual drip of information like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, with additional hints of body horror and a subversive, unsettling undercurrent of unwholesome eroticism.

Hadžihalilović has made a defiantly obtuse arthouse film, and its appeal will limited – there was even baffled laughter from some of the audience following the screening – but Evolution is worth your time because of its sheer beauty.  There isn’t a frame that isn’t an aesthetic wonder.  The underwater shots have a dazzling scope matching the best work of recent BBC documentaries, with repeated shots of Nicolas floating in the depths having a metaphorical amniotic connotation in keeping with the the themes of the film.  When the action relocates to a sinister, crumbling hospital, cinematographer Manuel Dacosse mutes his pallet to sickly greens, yet loses none of the intensity of his stunning images.

For all the echoes of other films that peal like bells throughout Evolution, Hadžihalilović has created a work of art that is thoroughly unique, enigmatic, strange and bold.  It remains elliptical and elusive to the end, and it’s best to surrender to it; prop up a chair on the beach like Canute and let your feet get wet.  It will undoubtedly garner accusations of pretentiousness, and these may even have some grounding, but this is a film that lingers in the mind, and shouldn’t be ignored.