Hadžihalilović

The films of the French director Lucile Hadžihalilović (Innocence, Evolution) are seriously weird, and utterly serious about their weirdness. There are no Gilliam-style winks at the audience, more a sober, studious perversity which at times feels like a murky Mitteleuropean take on David Lynch.Like her previous films, Earwig (adapted from the novel by Brian Catling) depicts a world that is insular and governed by baroque and sinister rituals involving children. In this case the child is Mia (Romane Hemelaers), a young…

It was a small clip, on YouTube. A young boy on an operating table. And he seemed to be … pregnant. What? The scene was velvety smooth, still, night time, yellowish. I was fascinated.I looked up the name of the film director: Lucile Hadžihalilović. French-Bosnian. A month later I got to see the whole film – Evolution – on a big screen. It was just as haunted, as obsessed by bodies and colour and mood, as the YouTube clip. I tracked down more of her work. Her debut feature, Innocence had girls, rivers, an old dark house…