Falling into fly-eating – Newspaper Kommersant No. 140 (7341) of 08/04/2022

Lucile Adzialilovich’s film “Earwig” (Earwig), as if a scary surreal fairy tale in strict Belgian scenery, was awarded the jury prize at the San Sebastian festival. Mikhail Trofimenkov I expected something more shocking from the film, shot by the wife of the furious extreme Gaspard Noe.

At about the twentieth minute of the two-hour film, his hero, a certain Albert (Paul Hilton), puts a glass to the wall in the corridor in order to hear what is happening in the room of a certain girl, Mia (Romana Hemelaers). All you can hear is the clicking of girlish teeth and the chirping of the paws of some vile arthropod. Perhaps this creature is the notorious earwig, after which the film is named. But it looks like a cockroach cockroach. Not otherwise, a well-read viewer will guess, this is a subtle allusion to the immortal poems of Captain Lebyadkin from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Demons”. “There lived a cockroach in the world, // A cockroach from childhood, // And then he got into a glass, // Full of fly-eating.”

Why not. The film by Lusil Adzialilovich is open to any interpretation, as it is boundless, like a cosmic void. And, like a cosmic void, cold, meaningless and unpleasant.

Its action takes place somewhere and sometime in Europe. Judging by the literary source, the novel by the English artist Brian Catling, by the on-screen references to the painting of the surrealists by Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux, and by the type of beer that Albert prefers, this “somewhere” is conditional Belgium. Judging by the costumes of the characters, the old-fashioned comfort of train compartments, and vague references to a certain war, “once” can be dated to the era either after the first or after the second world massacre. But the relationships that the characters of The Earwig enter into do not lend themselves to any not only logical, not only, Lord have mercy, Freudian, but even metaphorical interpretation. Myths, fairy tales, and even dreams have their own logic, but not the Earwig. In general, this is a kind of scriptwriting and directorial feat – to make such a movie.

The film bears the stamp of weirdness for the sake of weirdness, disgust for the sake of disgust, gravitas cubed. Or, given the film’s color scheme, haze for the sake of haze. And it is impossible not to admit that these self-sufficient strangeness, disgust, significance and turbidity have a kind of hypnotic effect on the viewer. Moreover, the first twenty-five minutes of the film pass in complete silence, broken only by the distant sounds of a passing train, the creaking of floorboards, and the chattering of teeth. Another thing is that in the case of “Earwig” – in contrast to truly surrealistic works – it is enough to shake your head for the hypnotic haze to recede. And for the viewer to ask questions: what the hell is happening on the screen, what is it for, what is it about, and what do I care?

So, in the old house, consisting of ascetic rooms, corridors, stairs, corners and sideboards filled with glasses, some chewed Albert and Mia live, playing with strange, self-made paper dolls, and she herself resembles a doll. Albert performs some creepy dental experiments on Mia every night. And he listens on the phone from a certain subscriber – the “master” who regularly sends him a salary – questions about the state of Mia’s teeth, until he receives an order to take the girl somewhere.

Who are they to each other in general? Father and daughter? Guardian and ward? Pedophile and victim? An affirmative answer to any of these questions would be too simple for Adzialilovich. Everything is much easier. The girl has icy teeth. Every day they melt, and they have to be replaced with new, equally short-lived ones. Why teeth, and not legs, arms, eyes, or, at worst, a heart? No reason. Adzialilovich, apparently, just likes to close-up a sadistic tool with which Albert fixes Mia’s parted lips in order to exchange her one melted ice prosthesis for another.

Perhaps the film would benefit if Adzialilovich closed all the action within the four walls of the dentist’s torture chamber. But the film inexorably creeps out, like your earwig, into stuffy streets and cozy half-stations. Now moving to the fore is a oh-so-mysterious “traveler” provoking Albert into an outburst of murderous madness, then the ghost of Albert’s late wife Marie. Either the cheerful waitress Celeste (Romela Garai), doomed to lose both fun and beauty overnight in front of the eyes of the audience, then another mysterious Lawrence (Alex Lawther), devoted to Celeste in her misfortune.

Blood is pouring from a face torn open with a “rose”; a certain mansion from the picture that adorned Albert’s house materializes in a majestic park; But all this ugly splendor is crowned with a scene worthy of vampire trash of the 1960s. In general, Adzialilovich finally makes it clear that she made a movie about love and blood. Great, we get it, but why Mia has ice cold teeth remains a mystery.