Earwig

French cinema’s dream weaver Lucile Hadžihalilović returns with a haunting, eerie tale about a child with teeth of ice and her anxious guardian.

In her films Innocence and Evolution, Lucile Hadžihalilović proved herself one of cinema’s foremost explorers of the hallucinatory. Her first film in English confirms her visionary status. Based on the novel by Brian Catling, Earwig tells the story of Albert (Paul Hilton), a man employed as guardian to Mia (Romane Hemelaers), a young girl kept in a desolate old house; his job includes tending to her dental prosthetic, which is made of ice. Eventually, he learns that Mia must soon leave. But an encounter in a bar – first sinister, then violent – may change everything. Mesmerizingly photographed by Jonathan Riquebourg, Earwig entirely creates its own hermetic universe – an archaic Belgium of the mind? – through hauntingly strange imagery and the subtle spells of sound design, décor and light through glass