“You must teach her how to behave outside,” a distant voice drones over the phone to tight-lipped middle-aged patriarch Albert (Paul Hilton) early in Lucile Hadihalilovic’s Earwig. That aloof instruction, beamed into an otherwise oppressively silent mid-century apartment as though it’s a high-level alien communiqué from mission control, constitutes a rare but welcome scrap of exposition in a film that is as stingy with narrative detail as it is generous with atmosphere. Despite its opacity, though, Hadihalilovic’s minimalist adaptation of Brian Catling’s 2019 novel is affecting stuff, its portrait of the rhythms of a hermetically sealed home marked by a dreamlike simplicity and clarity of vision, while its eerie images of a non-standard family unit navigating the tender mercies of childcare and daily bodily maintenance bypass the brain to reverberate…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 89 - Winter 2022