Directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović
Written by Geoff Cox, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Brian Catling (novel)
Starring Paul Hilton, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers, Romola Garaï
Unrated
Running Time: 1 hour and 54 minutes
Now playing in select theaters

by Allison Yakulis, Staff Writer

Lucile Hadžihalilović has been on my radar ever since I watched her previous feature Evolution (2015). Quiet, beautifully shot, and entirely bewitching - it’s one of those movies that lives rent-free in my head, that I turn over in my mind every few months like some ornament you’ve forgotten you own until something calls it back to your attention, encouraging you to pick it up, regard it fondly, then replace it. For me, Evolution was so confidently weird, languidly paced, and delightfully enigmatic that I was excited to see what Earwig (2021) had in store.

Earwig is based on a novel of the same name from modern surrealist novelist Brian Catling, better known by his The Vorrh trilogy. Earwig was apparently inspired by a dream Catling had about a little girl offering him her teeth - naturally inspiring him to write about Mia (Romane Hemelaers), a little girl with ice dentures and Albert (Paul Hilton), a man serving as her guardian and caretaker who feeds her and continuously molds her new teeth. Albert performs his chores dutifully and deftly but without tenderness - caretaking without caring, perfunctory and without pleasure. She isn’t the cure to his loneliness. One day the phone rings like it often does but this time Albert is instructed to get the girl acclimated to leaving the house, something she has previously never done. As you can probably guess this is where things start to go awry with increasing disruption and chaos as the pair prepare to take a train ride to the other end of the phone calls, a building foreshadowed as the only painting in their spartan apartment.

Although I am unfamiliar with Catling’s novels, I can only imagine that Hadžihalilović has risen to the challenge of grounding such strange concepts into a world that feels only at a slight angle to our own. Hadžihalilović has a clear albeit oddly juxtapositional style; her films are often slow and methodical, yet with an undercurrent of tension and unease that keeps you from getting too comfortable. Her narratives are surreal and evasive, yet they tap into emotional language that provides a sense of poignancy despite puzzling story beats.  It reminds me of films like Return to Oz (1985) or The City of Lost Children (1995), but with a step backwards into plausibility. Earwig is decidedly not a full fledged fairy tale but is perhaps just the other side of the looking glass, the next room over from the reality we recognize.

Earwig addresses basic, primal instincts that drive lust, and that drive the yearning for social connection whether familial or more generally fraternal. It is about loneliness and isolation. It is about caring and caretaking and how those things aren’t always in unison. It is about habit and the desire for structure and order, and the discomfort that comes with a routine interrupted. It is about doing evil. It may also be about insanity or instability, and how that influences the narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Although this is Hadžihalilović’s first English language film she frequently eschews dialogue in this and her other films in favor of silent rituals, close-up shots of inanimate objects, walking montages and the like, all carried by foley and score. Earwig’s sound design is particularly stripped down and eerie, using the theremin-adjacent ondes Martenot and the singing glass sound-alike cristal baschet as its instrumental accompaniment. Paired with the diegetic sounds of the ticking of a clock, the clicking of Mia’s ice dentures, lonely footfalls, the electric humming of a refrigerator, and a ringing telephone as regularly heard noises, Earwig effectively sets a steady, droning comforting pace for it to later undo.

Her style is meditative, with long takes observing objects and vistas. Earwig spends as much time with unsettling dental headgear (somewhat a la Dead Ringers’s (1988) instruments) as it does observing mundane, tactile details like glass, newspaper, cracks in the wall. There is temperature, texture, an emphasis on natural light and shadow, on the appearance of things and the space they occupy; their weight, both physical and emotional. Many of the materials used (specifically ice, water, glass, and mirrors) reflect or refract, at certain times faithfully echoing back and at others twisting or distorting an image.

Time slips out of joint, with Albert repeatedly recalling his late wife and his own childhood in ways that are progressively more blurred within his narrative. We also experience the same moment twice from two different vantage points at two different parts of the film, calling the entire order of the previous events into question. As the film continues, Albert increasingly feels like an unreliable narrator, so much so that it leaves his connection to Mia and to the place they ultimately travel to very ambiguous.

Unanswered questions are a hallmark of Hadžihalilović’s work. Hers are journeys, not destinations. You’re never going to fully understand Albert or Mia or any other characters or the world itself or why they keep trying to give this child such impractical teeth. Having an answer would probably not be any more satisfying, as Earwig is best enjoyed as an impressionistic expression of large, messy concepts like solitude, wrath, loss, lust, ritual, duty, and so on.

If you like your films fast-paced, filled with sparkling dialogue, or with rational, straightforward narratives, this might be a frustrating watch for you. Earwig from stem to stern chooses ambience over all, with stunning cinematography and immersive (yet simple) scoring and sound design and very little dialogue or exposition. There are no concrete answers why things are the way they are, no definitive explanations about character interrelationships or motivations. Rather, it’s an experience - a dream, a feeling, an overture to your subconscious.