Lucile Hadžihalilović's Earwig is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries—including the United States, United Kingdom, India, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, and Canada—starting October 15, 2022, in the series Luminaries, as well as in the series MUBI Spotlight.
One day, my collaborator Geoff Cox told me about a mysterious novel that a friend of his, the British artist and writer Brian Catling, had begun to write after having had a dream—or dreamlike visitation—in which a little girl came to him and, opening her closed hand, gave him her teeth. She was called Mia. I felt immediately intrigued. A few months later, Geoff gave me the finished, still unpublished novel to read. He felt that it could inspire me for a film. It was called Earwig.
Catling’s Earwig was full of tension, emotion, and wonderful surprises. It was very cinematic, too: the girl with ice-teeth, the cabinet of glasses, and that cloistered and silent life Albert and Mia spend together in the semi-obscurity of their apartment with the shutters always closed.
I felt on familiar ground with the young girl, the psychic tensions of a ritualized existence, the gothic and surrealist motifs, as well as the “middle Europa” mood that reminded me of Kafka, or Walser. But the story also led me into more unknown territory. Here, the protagonist is a broken adult and not the child: the caretaker and not the subject of care, like the reverse angle of the films I’ve made previously. The nightmarish logic of the narration was a very inspiring and exciting perspective to work on. And since the book was deeply mysterious and ambiguous, there was a lot of room to explore, and the possibility of creating a world of delirium, repression, and madness; a world that exists in the head of a man living somewhere in Europe in the aftermath of a war, and who has lost his love, his bearings, his past. A man caught in a loop, unable to discriminate between dreams, memories, and reality. I’ve tried to put the audience in the same position, as if we are inside Albert’s head.
I love when films don’t “explain,” but rather explore or make you “feel”; when they are more immersive than narrative, when they favor visual and aural elements over “plot” and dialogue, especially when they play with ambiguity, multiple meanings, oddity, mystery, even incongruity, all manifestations of the unconscious. And when we can use our imagination, the film becomes more intimate and stays with us longer.
If you want to enjoy the movie as it is, to let yourself be “hypnotized” as in a movie theater, please switch off your cell phone, turn off the lights, and make sure the sound level is good.
I wish you a good journey…