'Earwig': Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Latest Is A Beautiful Baffler [TIFF Review]

We have a tendency, as difficult films work the festival circuit, to reduce them to simplistic, giggle-worthy loglines, perhaps as a way to avoid grappling with work that challenges our ideas of what this medium is and how it should work. “Annette” somehow became a movie about Adam Driver singing during cunnilingus, even though that moment comprised maybe 20 seconds of a two-plus hour film; if all you read were snickering tweets about it, “High Life” is a movie about a “f*ck box.”

This brings us to Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “Earwig,” which has already become somewhat notorious as “the movie about the girl with ice cube teeth.” So it seems worth starting out by noting that “Earwig” is not about that. I’m not sure what it’s about, but it’s definitely not that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There is certainly a central character with ice cubes for teeth, a ten-year-old girl named Mia (Romane Hemelaers), and early on, we watch the meticulous execution of what must certainly be a frequent ritual: the removal of accumulated liquid, the retrieval of prepared ice dentures, their insertion, so on. When this is done, she smiles broadly. And Albert (Paul Hilton), her caretaker, nods proudly.

The time is the mid-20th century, the place somewhere in Europe (though the characters speak English; it’s Hadžihalilović’s first film in the language). Albert and Mia share an apartment and never leave, so she must occupy herself within its walls. The first quarter of the film – scripted by Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox, who also co-wrote, coincidentally enough, “High Life” – is played without dialogue, relying on visual observations of her strange, muted life. It’s also hushed that after a time, even the most innocuous of sound effects land like gunshots. And then the tiny events of their small world have the same impact.

Occasionally, the quiet is disrupted by disturbing phone calls from a distant-sounding voice, checking on Mia’s progress. “Everything is as it should be,” Albert replies, until one day, the word comes that she will soon leave this little bubble. “You must teach her how to behave outside,” Albert is told. That is, understandably, easier said than done.

All of this is complicated by the darkness in Albert’s past, with which he still clearly struggles. One night, overwhelmed by his burdens – and fear of what happens to Mia outside of his attentive care – he goes out to a bar, where a menacing stranger approaches him. A horrifying act of violence follows, which then splinters off into its own story, holding its own mysteries, before finally, inevitably intersecting again with Albert and Mia.

You see the difficulties of twisting and squeezing a film like this into the confines of something as conventional as a plot summary. It resists, and events are mysterious enough that even these descriptions are subject to interpretation. But Hadžihalilović isn’t interested in straightforward narrative anyway. She’s telling her story in her images and their relationships to each other, intercutting moments of fear, trauma, and guilt, juxtaposing memory and fantasy, inserting haunted dreams and nightmares, which begin to blur with this peculiar reality. Some (okay, many) moments are inexplicable – or at least seem so until they return to chilling effect later on because nothing is a throwaway in a film like this.

Cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg finds beauty in the picture’s ugliness (or perhaps finds ugliness in its beauty?) – it is, at a few key points, extremely hard to watch, but every frame is sumptuously photographed, painted with darkness and shadows that seem to hold infinite secrets and dread. And Hadžihalilović’s cast tackles a seemingly impossible task with abandon, playing every beat matter-of-factly, no matter how bizarre its circumstances.

Movies like “Earwig” defy criticism or even explanation. There’s not much else to compare it to, in the strictest “well, if you liked [blank] you’ll like this” sense, and some of us (particularly critics) aren’t quite sure where to go when we have to go off the map like that. We don’t have easy frames of reference – but frankly, easy frames of reference are what have put this art form into the story state it’s in. Lucile Hadžihalilović took a risk by making a movie this peculiar; it feels like the least we can do is take a risk by watching it. [A-]

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