News

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Earwig (2021).There’s a moment in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s feverish 2021 psychodrama Earwig in which a man rifles through a small refrigerator, within it an icebox, and within that a stack of thick metallic cases, each one containing denture molds brimful of frozen saliva. Behind him sits a young girl in elaborate headgear, her small face flanked by tubes and two ampoules collecting her spit. The act is uncanny but clearly routine—a chilling, briefly expository moment that proffers countless questions and exemplifies Hadžihalilović’s aesthetic of reticence. Her films all possess this matryoshka-like effect, coming undone only to neatly curl back into themselves at will. As female-driven body horror stipples its way into the mainstream, Hadžihalilović’s work feels all the more resonant and, perhaps most crucially, misprized. Hadžihalilović auteurism is...