Earwig
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A Mysterious Pathway Into a Tormented Mind: Lucile Hadzihalilovic on Her Trance-Like Psychological Drama, Earwig
A young girl with melting ice for teeth bound to a mysterious protector, an older man who drains and refreezes those teeth each day — such a scenario, found in artist Frank Catly’s 2019 novel Earwig, provides the perfect source material for French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, whose films depict the uncanny transformations of adolescence in startling, near-surreal ways. In 1994’s medium-length La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, a teenage girl, ensconced at her aunt’s following her mother’s suicide attempt, is subjected to the menacing gaze of her aunt’s abusive boyfriend. In her feature debut, 2004’s Innocence, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha, or On […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 25, 2021 -
TIFF 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig
Lucile Hadzihalilovic*’s Earwig is, in broad outline, synopsizable with the same sentence as her first two features, Innocence and Evolution: a child (or group of children) grows up in deliberate isolation from the wider world under the watchful gaze of ambivalently motivated custodians, themselves operating under the direction of obscure masters. Intentions are unclear, but the fundamental fears—of puberty, parents, the body and its sexually-tinged conditioning for adulthood—remain clear and similar. The visual approach is always that of horror’s visual language without its traditional jolting sonic components—i.e., long walks down sinisterly lit hallways or down stairwells, no suddenly violent sounds. When I asked Hadzihalilovic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2021
