Earwig

"You have a week to prepare her to be on the outside." The chilling, emotionless instructions come over the phone to a creepy, unfeeling, shell of a man. This man, Albert, treats a ten-year-old girl in his charge like she is a machine or an experiment, not like the child that she is. Albert does not let her out of the house. He changes her braces of metal and ice, feeds her, and little else. The little girl dutifully follows his instructions and submits to the darkness and control. The meaning of it all is unclear.

Earwig is a perplexing, eerie, bizarre, shocking, and fascinating puzzle to unravel. It is full of colorful sequences of light that reflect the emotional states of characters. It is unsettling, strange, and disturbing, yet entrancing and radiant. By bending reality, immersing you in low light and moody music, and with flashbacks, the film brings you into a Kafka-like story. There are so many questions left unanswered; a girl diving into water, a woman watching, stabbings, surprising emotional shifts, a girl singing that triggers deep emotions, and so much more.

In an introduction to the film the director encourages the audience to keep an open mind. Try to keep your head from exploding is better advice.

World premiere seen at the Toronto international film festival. English is the spoken language of this film based on a novel by Brian Catling. Not streaming anywhere yet.

EARWIG's bare-bones plot is filled with odd narrative choices, unintentionally slow pace, cryptic happenings and a heavy dose of bizarreness. It's an inane exercise in surrealism with a hallucinatory atmosphere but an incomprehensible narration that offers nothing worthwhile- just some cool sequences here and there, nothing much. It's a film that smartly tricks you into thinking as if you have watched something profound and meaningful, but in reality, is trivial and futile. It's beautifully shot and finely acted, and that's pretty much where its pros stop, the rest is a pure lethargic and labyrinthine mess, that has a quaint charm for sure but isn't sure about its objectives.

This movie is very clearly open to many different interpretations, mine is mostly based on my emotional response. I think in a way this work kinda dives into the hidden fear and repulsion many people have towards the female body: menstruations, fertility, pregnancy, etc.

Albert is scared by Mia's first symbolic period, has unnerving memories of his wife's pregnancy and Celeste's character speaks for itself. The war barely ended so we also have another layer of violence to add to the complex situation.

It's a very very interesting movie but the pacing is glacial so I can't give it more than 5.

I'm not a fan of films that are (literally) so dark I can't see what's going on. I know that this is a popular directors' device to "enhance engagement" but IMHO it risks losing the audience completely. In this case, I stuck with it, but remained quite irritated.

Fortunately, the tone and mood compensate somewhat, and the air of mystery is well-maintained, and the occasional bursts of extreme violence are appropriately shocking. I can't honestly say I worked out what it all meant and what was "really happening", but it was quite interesting nevertheless.

Worth a look - I preferred "Evolution" though.

Pretty pictures do not a film make.

Though Earwig has great cinematography and an ethereal glass harmonica score, it is dramatically inert from the word go.

It comes off as dull and pretentious and squanders its moody setting and mysterious premise.

Lucille Hadzihallilovic's third feature is arguably her weakest and most self-indulgent yet.