Earwig

Directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović, Earwig follows a mysterious man (Paul Hilton’s Albert) as he tends to the needs of an equally mysterious little girl with ice-filled dentures. It’s as inscrutable and oddball a premise as one has come to expect from Hadžihalilović, and there’s little doubt, certainly, that Earwig is at its best in its atmospheric, dialogue-free opening stretch – with the complete and total lack of context initially offset by Hadžihalilović’s thoroughly singular approach to her and Geoff Cox’s mostly head-scratching screenplay. There’s little doubt, however, that the viewer’s patience grows increasingly thin as the movie progresses into an unreasonably deliberate and meandering midsection, as Hadžihalilović’s refusal to flesh out the pervasively off-kilter landscape in which the story unfolds paves the way for a nonsensical second half rife with exhaustingly weird set-pieces (and it doesn’t help, surely, that the picture’s length is an absolutely punishing 114 minutes). By the time the interminable and endless third act rolls around, Earwig has unquestionably cemented its place as just another misfire from Hadžihalilović that might’ve worked as a short but has no business running almost two hours. (And let’s not even get started on the astonishingly unpleasant sequence wherein a cat is tortured and abused by the main character.)

1/2* out of ****