The pleasure of witnessing a new kind of story on the big screen is hard to replicate. Originality of vision is often cited as the highest virtue of filmmaking by moviegoers and critics alike, even if the trophies and accolades tend to elude cinema’s more experimental offerings. That said, the sands are shifting beneath our feet, exposing gaps in our collective imagination waiting to be filled by ambitious storytellers.
Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year and is the second of the director’s films to be submitted by his native Poland to the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature competition. If nominated, it would be the fourth Polish film to be nominated for the Oscar in the past decade, following a hot streak of hits from his compatriots, emerging and established voices alike. At 84 years old, Skolimowski decidedly falls in the latter camp, but his latest offering pushes boundaries that demonstrate a commitment to constant innovation.
Our protagonist is EO — a donkey named for their whinnying by doting circus colleague Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). Together, the duo perform an acrobatics routine for a traveling circus, a shared life punctuated by colorful personalities and the occasional carrot muffin. The nature of the performance is obscured by the camera, which only shows the act from EO’s perspective. Between the flashes of a strobe light, we see the performance through EO’s eyes and perceive glimpses of mutual affection. When the circus goes bankrupt and shuts down amid protests from animal-rights activists, the separation of the co-stars is difficult to bear. While the stressful circus environment is far from ideal, it is clear that EO’s life will be harder without a guardian to help navigate the social architecture of the human world.
The liquidation of EO’s nomadic home is the catalyst that sparks a wandering pilgrimage across Europe, as EO encounters humans looking for a mascot, a pet, or a beast of burden. Taken together, these meetings form a quiet yet powerful meditation on how we tend to use other animals to serve our technological ends. The director trusts the viewer to evaluate the justice of these situations without making any on-screen pronouncements. The result is a film you can think about for days.
EO clearly reveres its star character and the six animals — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco, and Mela — playing the titular role. The donkeys are at times so charismatic that they appear to emit an otherworldly glow. EO is often shown among other creatures more typically known for their grace and beauty, but the viewer’s eye is never tempted to look away. This film has one beatific protagonist and no showcase stallion is going to steal the show.
For a film that verges on elegy, EO commits to a visual style that shocks and awes. Its aesthetic might best be described as “zoological punk,” using choppy editing and stark colors and contrasts to jar viewers in and out of EO’s world. The score similarly never lets up, evoking the dislocation of a sentient being moving through a world built for other minds. Seen through a donkey’s eyes, even green infrastructure like wind turbines looms over the landscape, representing yet one more incomprehensible change to be assessed for potential danger. Perhaps more radically, the film invites us to consider how non-human animals view each other. The resulting work is cognitively demanding in the most satisfying way.
This is a political film that avoids being didactic. It skips any hemming and hawing about whether animals are sentient, feel pain, or are worthy of our moral consideration. These debates are unspoken. Though fantastical in some respects, the collection of experiences on display clearly constitutes a life. The audience is spared any direct images of brutality and suffering, reflecting a clear respect for the animal performers in the film. This choice — arguably a moral imperative — creates storytelling constraints that demand innovation from the filmmakers. They boldly rise to this challenge by using innovative technology and imagery that is much more striking and impactful than any exploitative cruelty (or CGI recreation thereof) imaginable.
While the film mostly hews to EO’s point of view, the camera will occasionally stray to capture some human drama happening just out of earshot. These moments are few and far between and are, in my view, the weakest of the links that hold the story together. A small appearance by Isabelle Huppert — a cinematic flex if there ever was one — is particularly jarring, breaking the social reality that permeates the rest of the film. These shoehorned moments of human drama left me cold, wondering what EO was up to off-screen. It is strange to come away from EO wanting more donkey content, but I can’t help but wonder if an even tighter focus would have been more effective.
Roger Ebert famously described film as “a machine that generates empathy.” Films centered on non-human experiences — from Robert Bresson’s classic Au hasard Balthazar to contemporary offerings like Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Andrea Arnold’s Cow — demonstrate the truth and possibilities contained in this edict. In a time when the canon is beginning to reflect new voices and realities, EO makes the case for even further expansion. While humankind may control where cameras are pointed and when to cut away, there are other voices eager to guide us to new insight and understanding. Jerzy Skolimowski is listening, challenging his fellow creators to attune themselves to the other worlds that surround them.
