MUBI Streaming: Earwig (2021) - Reviewed

Courtesy of MUBI

It’s been six years since the film world last saw Lucile Hadzihalilovic and her sleepy nightmare film Evolution, a kind of science fiction horror fantasy film about an island of young boys tended to by adult women who seem to be influencing a fish-like evolvement in the children’s biochemistry.  As with her previous film Innocence realized ten years prior, it was a coming-of-age tale primarily focused on minors infused with elements of the macabre and subtle hints of transformative body horror. 
 
Though remaining busy with her husband and business partner Gaspar Noe’s work, serving as a producer on his recent films Lux Æterna and Vortex, Hadzihalilovic was in the midst of mounting her first English language feature as well as offering up an adaptation of English art professor Brian Catling’s surreal horror novel Earwig.  Though as austere as her previous two works, her newest film is at once her most focused and most shocking imagining yet, a film that submerges into sleepy warm waters before jolting you alert with frontal assault.

 
In the strange netherworld of Earwig resides Albert (Paul Hilton), a middle-aged man entrusted to look after a little girl named Mia (Romane Hemelaers) who wears false teeth made of ice affixed to her gums with a brace-like apparatus.  Like Yorgos Lantimos’ Dogtooth, the child never leaves the house and the shutters to windows are always closed.  She never speaks but he spies on her by putting a glass against her door to listen.  An omniscient figure we never see but hear over phone calls known as The Master instructs Albert to start weaning the girl out of the household and into the real world, an act that gradually brings on a maelstrom of horrific developments all by itself.
 
Touching on the invasive Cronenbergian body-horror deployed in Evolution with a greater sense of urgency and cohesion, Earwig starts off nebulous before eventually baring fangs like a mother wolf who springs into action after being encroached upon.  Co-adapted by Geoff Cox and Hadzihalilovic, the director’s first English speaker has the skin and blood of Innocence and Evolution but the teeth of an untamed animal lying in wait to attack.  Here, Hadzihalilovic continues exploring her fixations on adolescence and the point in which the child begins to break away from the parent while soaking the viewer in a dreary atmosphere that feels like it could burst into horror. 
 
As with her previous two features, the film looks exquisite.  Shot in lush but largely dimly lit widescreen by The Death of Louis XIV cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg, Earwig has a soft green-amber glow that also invites the viewer into a comfortable lull that makes us let our guard down.  Scenes that will really strike the eyes involve surreal montages of Albert gazing into a rotating glass with the screen turning into a kaleidoscope of colors and dissonant reappearing images of faces we’ve seen and have yet to see.

 
Augmenting the soft ambient glow of the imagery is the trifecta score by Nicolas Becker, Augustin Viard and Nick Cave partner Warren Ellis.  Minimalist but hinting at something massive, the soft electronic score barely rises above the soft hiss of a whisper but immediately cloaks the imagery in a creepy sheen that never quite breaks into a scream but does sneakily unsettle the listener.
 
Hadzihalilovic’s cinema naturally stars near-mute child performers which this one has no shortage of, but when adult characters including a stranger played by Peter Van den Begin come together the film bursts into exchanges of dialogue and takes on an urgency.  Also appearing in the piece are Alex Lawther and Romola Garai who get caught up in the spider web tied to the little girl Mia. 
 
Usually this director’s films stay quiet and tease at horror, making the volcanic eruptions contained therein this one all the more startling when they present themselves.  Mostly though this is Paul Hilton’s film who brings to the middle-aged Albert a cantankerousness as well as paranoia that invariably begins the moment he’s instructed to take the little girl into the outside world.
 
Considerably more accessible than her previous two films but no less relevant or timeless, Earwig is a continuation of the themes explored by Hadzihalilovic’s prior works while presenting a more broadly appealing and digestible version of such this time around.  People bored or eluded by her first two will find much to chew on here while also being pushed outside of their comfort zones. 

 
One of the year’s most peculiar and unsettling offerings, the film after playing in limited festival circuits now makes its appearance on the streaming service MUBI where it’s exclusively showing.  Not everyone will take to this deliberately affronting creeper but longtime fans of Hadzihalilovic and darker worldly extensions of the New French Extreme will be elated by its unnerving strangeness.

--Andrew Kotwicki