EVOLUTION

Belgium, 2015, 81 minutes, Colour.
Max Brebant, Roxanne Duran.
Directed by Lucille Hadsihalilovic.


Evolution is an evocative title for this rather mysterious film. It will depend on audiences’ understanding of the meaning of evolution, in nature, in humans.

The film opens and ends with beautiful underwater photography, underwater life, creatures, the starfish.

The film focuses on a young boy, Nicholas, swimming, going home to his caring mother. He is an artist, drawing. He is taunted at times by the other boys in the village.

He goes to the sea and plays, and his mother brings out a starfish, he also burns some of its limbs – a sign that he is questioning what is going on. He goes to the hospital, is served by a nurse, his mother present, he is given medication, is tested and joins other boys in a dormitory. It is never clear what the women are doing to the boys. Some have suggested that they are rebelling against their treatment by men because men are absent and they are treating only the boys.

There is a sympathetic nurse who takes interest in Nicholas’s drawings and there is a possibility of some breakout but the ending is undetermined. Left to the audience to ponder.

1. The title? Audience response to the idea of evolution? In the context of the island, the boys, the women and nurses? The absence of men?

2. The theory that the women were controlling the children because of past domination by men?

3. The visuals, the underwater photography at the beginning and end, the swimming of the rocks, the water, the town of the buildings, the interiors and homes, the hospital, the dark corridors, the dormitories? Sunlight but also a sinister atmosphere? The musical score?

4. Nicholas, swimming, the dead body, the reaction of the boys? Nicholas and his mother, her strictness, yet her care for him? His playing with the boys and their having the dead animal? The further swimming? His mother bring out the starfish, his studying it, the close-ups, his burning one of its limbs? His concerns, suspicions, his mother, the nurses, the medical care, the sympathetic nurse and his drawings? The treatments, the effect on the boys, in the dormitory? Nicholas and his breaking out, the confrontation? His fate?

5. The boys, the treatment, the women controlling them – to what purpose?

6. The characters of the women, their appearance, sharp features, uniforms? The place of the sympathetic nurse and her behaviour?

7. The mysterious atmosphere? Audience response? Evocative? Questions?