The peculiar and beautifully unsettling Earwig begins like something out of a dark, Grimms fairytale. The setting is a gloomy apartment, somewhere in a mid-20th European city, and a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) has been employed to look after Mia (Romane Hemelaers), a young girl with icy dentures that need changing every day. Her melting saliva is then used to make new moulds. There is sustained threat, but also a paternal and tender solemnity to their near-wordless dynamic. This bizarre ritual is one of many strange moments in this haunting and mysterious work from visionary director Lucile Hadžihalilović, a gothic art horror that is more Béla Tarr than Bela Lugosi.
The time-period is vaguely post-war, but we don’t know exactly when. Is Albert the young girl’s father? The telephone keeps ringing, but who is the mysterious voice Albert takes orders from and calls “master.” There is an old painting of a mansion which may hold clues, but is what we are seeing actually happening, or is this a psychological dream state? The narrative constantly keeps us submerged in shadows and Hadžihalilović resists the urge to give us easy storytelling cues, instead favouring a kind of abstracted and hallucinatory logic that is sometimes hard to grasp. The spare emptiness of the apartment and Jonathan Ricquebourg’a expert visuals, all green and yellow lighting and dimly flicking candles, adds to this feeling of being trapped somewhere between waking and dreaming.
Adapted from a novella by novelist Brian Catling, Earwig is the French filmmaker’s first English-language film and she is a master at creating queasily nightmarish and visually gorgeous narratives about burgeoning adolescence. Her debut film Innocence was a dreamy exploration of young female sexuality at a boarding school, and Evolution was an allegorical body horror about a strange island populated by women who perform experiments on young boys. Both of her previous films were in their own way coming-of-age tales, but in Earwig, the young girl takes on a more secondary role to Hilton’s character who soon gets instructions by his shadowy master to deliver them the girl. As part of these preparations, he tells the girl that she must get used to being outdoors and the red coat that she adorns and a watery incident is a clear allusion to another puzzle-box film, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.
There is also a secondary storyline when Albert ventures out to the quiet streets and ends up at a bar where an encounter with a man and a young woman (Romaola Garai) has violent, grisly consequences. These two narrative strands will slowly intersect in ways which are not always clear and it is sometimes opaque as to the meaning of this barrage of strangeness. Is Hadžihalilović commenting on trauma or parenthood or both?
As in the ambient horror of David Lynch or more recently Peter Strickland, Hadžihalilović is able to imbue the mundane with terror and a feeling of the uncanny. She makes the familiar unfamiliar so a tin pot on a stove rattling with heat or a character staring at a crack in the wall becomes pregnant with menace. There is also an effectively droning electronic score that is used sparingly but pulses underneath like skin prickles. Earwig’s elliptical dread may not be to everyone’s taste but it is an exquisite and poetic nightmare vision from an unclassifiable director.
