TIFF 2021: Earwig
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s haunting slow cinema dreamscape is not going to appeal to everyone. Anyone looking for the spirit of a traditional genre, plot, character, or conflict won’t get an easily digestible dish from Earwig. The film’s imagery that provides the greatest hook comes from the images of a young girl with a dental apparatus, which looks not unlike a trap from the Saw series. We learn that this headgear supports her dentures which are made of ice. A sullen, grumpy, dimly-lit, gothic gentleman tends to the girl and carefully replaces her teeth on a daily basis. It’s a bizarre hook, which sucks one in as such a scenario demands context. However, none is provided. Hadžihalilović instead relies on this bizarre background, which is shot with an ethereal minimally lit beauty, to entice the viewer with the equivalent of slow steady servings of frosting while hiding the fact that the substance of a cake may never be coming.
Earwig is slow. Tedious would not be a completely unfair adjective. The ice-toothed girl and her very serious dental caretaker go about their daily routine – slowly, always slowly. She plays with a rolled up paper, he walks around taking the occasional phone call from someone giving him guidance. And through this routine we become introduced to a couple of particularly significant motifs. We see a painting of a house that both the characters spend quite a bit of time studying. The characters also spend time looking through windows and looking through the various colored crystal goblets. Hadžihalilović is clearly interested in perception of life through another means: be it glass, crystal, or a painter’s brush. Therein lies her curious perspective, I suppose, as she’s recreating the same experience for her audience. Her ask is that the audience stare at her work until they see something of meaning.
As the film slowly unravels its form into something that feels like a linear plot, it becomes the man, not the ice-toothed girl whose journey becomes important. An act of surprising and vicious violence undercuts the remaining two acts of the film with a steady hum of dread and threat, where anything can happen. In this, Hadžihalilović proves herself to be a competent manufacturer of suspense when she’s so inclined. Dream sequences – well, scenes that are probably dream sequences, who really knows? – suggest that the gothic dental caretaker (played with antisocial grumpiness by Paul Hilton) is actually a widower whose present has been precast by a personal tragedy in his past. He’s a powder keg of moodiness in whom the audience never really knows what to expect – what he’s going to do or who’s pulling his strings. If you can get engaged with the imagery and mood of this piece, he’s a compelling central character.
This realm of contemplative, abstract, what-the-hell-is-going-on cinema makes it difficult to compare Earwig to other pieces. Under the Silver Lake or Southland Tales come to mind as other projects that are aware of things like plot but don’t necessarily subscribe to them – at least not in a convenient sense that connects with audiences. That’s the way of Earwig, too. It’s an elegant and haunting piece, wonderfully crafted, but Hadžihalilović has not come here to leave breadcrumbs for the audience to follow. She doesn’t care about such things. She just wants folks to settle in on the visuals and squint to see if they see anything – just how her characters here stare at the painting of the house. She’s on a bit of a challenging journey with this film; not unlike David Lynch’s artsy roadtrips into the surreal or Dario Argento’s hard look into art in Stendhal Syndrome. It may not be easy to join along with films like this – especially at an over-bloated 114 minutes – but it’s gorgeous, wacky, violent climax precisely parallels the final moments of an absurd nightmare: disturbing images, sudden alertness, and resonating unsettling feelings and pictures that won’t leave you any time soon.