Film Review: ‘Evolution’ – Variety
Variety: Put aside everything you know about the birds and the bees. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s “Evolution” proposes an entirely new paradigm to explain where babies come from, burrowing into young men’s subconscious anxieties about those aspects of their biology that they can and cannot control — including fear of penetration and pregnancy — to create an unsettling companion piece to her 2005 arthouse provocation, “Innocence.” Whereas that film was rather faithfully adapted from Frank Wedekind’s boarding school-set novella, in which prepubescent girls are groomed for ambiguous adult roles, Hadzihalilovic’s latest nightmarish allegory is entirely her own invention, an open-ended visual feast that disconcertingly turns the tables on the snips-and-snails set for a narrow, yet discriminating cult audience.
