Earwig: A weird and wonderful film that approaches transendence

After the differently unsettling nightmares of Innocence and Evolution, Lucile Hadžihalilović, whose name should be better known, comes as close to transcendence as anyone could manage when cramping so much of their film in a tatty container the colour of last week’s tea. Working from a stubbornly elliptical novel by Brian Catling, author of the Vorrh trilogy, the picture concerns — of this much at least we can be sure — the relationship between Aalbert Scellinc (Paul Hilton), a frayed, furrowed youngish man, and Mia (Romaine Hemelaers), a child of Cronenbergian strangeness. If I am reading this right, Aalbert generates Mia’s teeth by freezing her own saliva. When he is not doing that, he is reporting on her progress to a mysterious voice and preparing her for life beyond the building. Their jaunts outside are not entirely successful. Mia ends up neck deep in a pond while a mysterious woman (Romola Garai) stares from a distant bridge.

The temptation to “figure out” Earwig should probably be resisted. It is not a crossword puzzle and there is no solution. But Hadžihalilović and Catling do seem to be nagging away at familiar concerns from the aftermath of the first World War. When Aalbert enters a bar, he is approached by a man who feels he recognises him from, perhaps, “the field of battle”. This is the French film-maker’s first feature in English, but — the characters’ names offers a clue — we seem to be situated somewhere in the continental nowhere of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. The architecture is middle-European. The food and drink has the grey sludge of English interwar misery. The incidents echo Eliot’s wilful obliqueness.

It hardly needs to be said that the film will not be for everyone. But even those frustrated by the knotted plotting will admit that Hadžihalilović masters the crucial trick of presenting the narrative as if it makes sense to itself. It helps that she has conjured up a consistent audiovisual aesthetic. Jonathan Ricquebourg’s camera allows halved faces and quartered bodies to (just about) emerge from fetid, underground gloom. Augustin Viard’s music, created in collaboration with Nicolas Becker and Warren Ellis, spreads brilliantly eerie glitch about the queasy action. The effect is of a wireless communication constantly failing to get fully through to the viewer.

It all ends in a swooping, puzzling final shot that presses an immediate second viewing on anyone who has stayed the course.