Évolution [film]
Entry updated 23 February 2026. Tagged: Film.
French film (2015). Le Films du Worso, Noodles Production, Volcano Films. Directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović. Written by Hadžihalilović, Alante Kavaite and Geoff Cox. Cast includes Max Brebant, Roxane Duran and Julie-Marie Parmentier. 81 minutes. Colour.
On an Island populated entirely by apparently sickly 10-year-old boys, women who may or may not be their mothers, and their nurses, strange experiments are being performed on the boys, seemingly to enable them to give birth to children who can live underwater. Not all the boys survive these experiments, other grow suspicious and begin to investigate the limitations of the world and the activities taking place in it, which include some kind of communal orgy between the women and the sea. The film focuses on Nicolas (Brebant), whose drawings suggest memories of a world outside the island, and who opens the film by discovering the body of a boy with a large starfish attached to it. With the aid of one of the nurses, Stella (Duran), who shows him the suckers on her back, he attempts to escape. She initially tries to drown him, presumably to see if he can live under water, but revives him and takes him away on a boat. She leaves and returns to the island, leaving Nicolas about to reach a city on the shore.
The plot outline may suggest a classic Conceptual Breakthrough storyline, but nothing about this woozily dreamlike film comes close to genre conventions. Indeed, it is one of the most hermetic and mysterious of contemporary sf films. Little is explained and mysteries remain unresolved, while the beautiful cinematography of the island, the hospital and underwater reefs succeeds in creating a level of abstraction which adds to the surreal atmosphere. The boys' bafflement and alternation between rebellion and sullen resentment towards the adults, make for a potent metaphor for the confusions of adolescence, thought the film is rich and intriguing enough to dispel reductionist readings.
Hadžihalilović is a French director with a highly distinctive vision; her other films with fantastic elements are Earwig (2019), based on the novel by Brian Catling, and The Ice Tower (2025), a Fantasy set around a film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen". [CWa]
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