French horror movies are weird, and I usually enjoy weird. I’m very familiar with New French Extremity, which includes men and women directors, but I would not put women directed films such as Evolution or High Life in that category. They’re closer to Cronenberg’s body horror meets sci-fi meets existential crisis meets philosophy. They share similar color palettes, an inherent suspicion of women as the real holders of power and biology and empathize with men as slaves to their biology trying to transcend the necessities of having a body and escape existence. I don’t enjoy these movies, but not enjoying a movie does not mean that I can’t tell there is an authentic artistic expression, which I cannot appreciate and isn’t my cup of tea, but could speak to others in a way that leaves me cold and repulsed. You will have to decide whether or not Evolution is for you.
Evolution follows a boy protagonist on an island community filled exclusively with boys and women. All the women look similar. What I appreciate about French body power horror is how the viewer is thrown into the situation with very little exposition, little dialogue and has to discern what is going on by giving the screen your complete, undivided attention. It is easy to treat most movies as radio and listen to it in the background while doing something else and still get a fairly good picture of what the movie was about, but it is impossible to do that with this genre. A lot is communicated with unsettling images that evoke primal, visceral meaning that is extremely difficult to articulate. Unfortunately by watching this movie that way, I fell solidly asleep and kept rewinding to watch what I missed. After awhile, I gave up, went to sleep then woke up and resumed watching the film. I don’t even think that I was tired. I was just not invested in these people, and a little boy protagonist apparently is a soporific for me.
Evolution has a Chthulu, Lovecraftian vibe, but more low key and organic reminiscent of an undiscovered realm on Earth as opposed to an aggressive invasion from another dimension. If feels as if something crucial got lost in translation, a serious miscommunication with harmful, dangerous implications. The problem with being an American viewer of a foreign film is how to differentiate between what is foreign and unfamiliar versus foreign and strange. While I didn’t need a complete explanation of everything that was going on or an autopsy to determine what each unusual biological characteristic meant, I did feel slightly cheated when something would occur on screen that was odd and elaborate, but really hard to determine by solely looking at what was going on. As the viewer, I’m in the same position as the protagonist, just as confused as the child in my obscured witness of unfolding events around me, but if a bunch of women are moaning under the moonlight on the beach, I want a better glimpse of what they’re passing around, and if I don’t get it, I want to at least get it on some level. Do the actors know what their characters are doing? Does anyone know? Or am I just supposed to be vaguely unsettled by the unusual scene? Sometimes I’ll watch a movie and have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’m confident that someone has fully thought the concepts through and how it all fits together. I felt that way during High Life, but not Evolution. Evolution felt evocative, but unclear if details actually were examined.
Evolution and High Life seem to embody women’s fear, horror and disgust over biological functions that normally only happen to women, but they express that disgust by relating to and centering a male character while projecting disgust on to and apprehension of all women characters. In these genres, all women are depicted as more dangerous than men even when these women are allied with men, but especially when they hold power. There seems to be a Freudian resentment and distrust of mothers. The helplessness and powerlessness of childhood has grown stronger with age so anything that identifies along traditional gender norms as cis women is inherently suspect. These women directors may be cis women, but they fear cis women and seem to view them similarly to men that reductively define women solely by biology. If they were men, they would be called misogynistic or at least problematic for their views of women. To be fair, Evolution’s women do not fit our traditional definition of women, but they present as them. What does it mean when we believe the worst about who we are and this fear is borne from prevalent societal gendered stereotypes and primal fear promulgated by those that we relate to more, but also include the people who mistakenly engendered that fear thus createing an exile from one self?
Or am I completely wrong with my instinctual reading of Evolution? Is it really a subversive way to imagine the reversal of traditional gender roles and imagine a world where power roles are reversed, and the only practical way to do that is grown women and little boys because physically it would be less likely for grown women to dominate grown men though High Life does so successfully and more fully imagines such a scenario. I honestly can’t entertain that possibility because Lucile Hadzihalilovic, the director of Evolution, said that the removal of her appendix as a young girl at some point during 1971 through 1972 inspired her to make this movie so I think that she completely identifies with the boy. It seems likely that the doctors who removed her appendix were men, but nurses probably surrounded her, and they were predominantly women at that time. She may have felt that her mom abandoned her to the medical community. Her fear, resentment and sense of betrayal are rooted against women. Women are the source of pain, not men, though like some men, she fears any woman in power, and the reality of becoming a woman is equated as the threat of becoming a monster, which explains why she centers her story around a boy, who is indistinguishable from a prepubescent girl yet because of inherent societal expectations, would be horrified at the sudden imposition of standards usually foisted upon girls.
Evolution seems to be Hadzihalilovic way of dealing with the trauma of being a girl getting prepared to be a woman at the hands of women. I’m hoping that making the protagonist as a boy is a clever way to get audiences to empathize with the horrifying absurdities of gender imposed on children and not a subconscious alienation and horror of women in general, which I would find incredibly sad. Forget vagina dentate, what do you call the fear of the wandering womb?