Interview: Lucile Hadzihalilovic on Evolution

It was a tiny arthouse theater in New York city, with only a handful of audiences, I first watched Lucile Hadzihalilovic's breathtaking film, Innocence, more than a decade ago. The allegorical, dreamy, hypnotic film made an indelible mark in my head. Her dark, gorgeous images imbued with hidden meanings recall the world of David Lynch, but not thetered to the usual macho noir trappings. I thought Hadzihalilovic was a major new talent and was very much looking forward to her next project, any project.

12 years have gone by without a peep (although she made a 12 minute short in 2012), and after finding out that she is a real life partner of one of cinema's major provocateur Gaspar Noé, I was very eager to see her new offering Evolution at this year's New Directors/New Films series. And it didn't disappoint. And I jumped at the opportunity to interview Hadzihalilovic when she was in town.

Evolution Opens in Theaters Friday, Nov. 25th in NY & LA and on VOD

It’s a big honor to meet you. I’m a big fan of Innocence. I think it’s an amazing film. Now some ten years later, you come up with something that is equally, if not more stunning. First of all, what took you so long to make another feature?

It has been very difficult to finance it. I didn’t expect such a difficulty. Because it’s a kind of genre film, I thought that it would be easier at first. In a way it’s less abstract than Innocence and so on. But in fact, it was the opposite. in France, the genre films are not well considered. And it’s not really a commercial one or a mainstream movie, and more like an arthouse film. To be financed as an arthouse film you have to go through the system- the commissions and such which would consider and greenlight such projects. But they couldn’t get a consensus - some understood the project but others didn’t. People in general were not too keen on children being in a horror movie. I thought in France or Spain, they would be quite used to putting children in horror movies. (laughs)

So, it was much more complicated than I thought. Also I began to work with the first producer and thought we could get money by rewriting the script to make it more explicit or more digestible… So we tried in many ways - adding more elements with my co-writer but we realized that it was a very dangerous way to go because…I think the film should stay with your original vision and should not be compromised.

So I realized that it wouldn't be made with this producer so I tried to find someone else. It was (producer) Sylvie Pialat who said, "We can’t get any more money than this much. So we need to cut a lot from your script". So I did. So it was a project that was a lot bigger in concept but it shrank to what it is now but also back to the essential. I had to cut a lot out. It came back to maybe essence of what was the project in my mind in the first place. It’s more about the subconscious and that’s the original idea of the film anyway. I don’t regret what I cut. And that’s why it took a long time.

That’s crazy. I would think after such an amazing film you wouldn’t have any problems finding funding.

Innocence didn’t seem to help, like when people say, “Innocence is ok but I don’t understand this new project.” I thought Innocence could show them what it was going to be. But they didn’t seem to make that connection. I think people who are working in financing films or commissions are usually not the type of audiences for my films. I probably made many mistakes dealing with them, I don’t know. (laughs)

Speaking of connections between Innocence and Evolution. For me it’s pretty obvious. Evolution is an amazing companion piece to Innocence about fear and mystery of growing up. Was it conceived as a companion piece to begin with?

It was not like, 'ok, now I’m going to do the boys version'. Not at all. It was more of a small intimate story in the beginning between a boy and his mother in the hospital. It was only after that I developed an environment around them and I had this idea that it had to be on the seaside with the water, etc. And then it was a village and then an island and other women and children. So it grew like that. In the very beginning of the project I had an idea for it but then I got to do Innocence. I liked the organization of the village (where the girls lived). So only after that, I somewhat created that micro cosmos in Evolution. But it didn’t come from this idea of creating a cosmos, it really came from the boy and his mother and the boy’s fears and expectations and all that.

Your co-screenwriter, Alante-

Alante cavaite, she is a director too. you know her films?

I saw the trailer for The Summer of Sangaile. It looks beautiful.

Yeah. It does. It’s a beautiful film.

Did you have Alante in mind to collaborate with?

I’ve known her for a long time. In the beginning she was a reader for different drafts of the film I went through, then I found out that she was a very good writer. And little by little she became more involved in the writing. Even though we do very different films, we have the same tendency and yearning for surreal, fantastical elements, not realistic portrait as much. Her cinema is also very physical and visual experience. So that’s what we had in common. She helped me a lot to build up the structure out of this materials I accumulated over the years and to help me to find the story and to make the world in Evolution as current as possible.

How was shooting in Lanzarote, Canary Island? And how did you find the place? It’s an amazing looking place.

When I was working on the script, I didn’t know about Canary Island. But one of the producers knew a lot about Spain and knew the island. So thanks to him we found the place. We chose it for artistic reasons but also we could do it there for the money we had. It was a perfect combination. We did some scouting in different parts of the island. And I found this village in Lanzarote. There was another village in another island so I had to choose between the two of them, but Lanzarote was more simple and minimalistic. There is something very strong about the island. It’s volcanic with its black sand and
rocks so its very dramatic. But at the same time the white village is very familiar.

That’s a real village then?

Yeah. but it's not abandoned, really. People are not actively living there but they come for the weekend to relax. We didn’t do almost nothing to decorate the village. We just added a bit of dirt sometimes on the doors and the windows. There were a lot of green and blue color but it was too pleasant, so we did change that a bit. We didn’t have any time or money to do anything, so the village is pretty much like what you see on screen.

Wow. that’s crazy.

It was even better than what I imagined it to be.

Watching the film, the whole time I was thinking about the little wormy green gruel stuff the mother is feeding the boy. It looked very disturbing.

Very healthy. (laughs)

What was it made out of?

Maybe you should ask the guy who was in charge of the props. But it was just pasta and seafood but we added some green food coloring. But he wanted to make it taste good for the boy. But I thought it would be better if it didn’t have such good taste because it’s very hard for children to pretend. So I thought, 'ok, it should not be too delicious'.

Innocence was shot on Super 16mm film. And this was shot on digital?

Yes we shot it on digital camera. I wanted to shoot it on super 16 like Innocence but it was difficult. It wasn’t really about money but it was time constraints. We had to do it very fast and we were on this island, so in order to develop the film and see the dailies, it would’ve taken a lot longer. We had a very little margin of error window because of time we could afford. So we decided to shoot digitally. I was afraid that it would be too flat and not dreamy enough, not only physically but mentally. But we tried to work on it to have more texture and added fog. We did a lot in post production to add more texture and grain. That was what we were always looking for, texture all the time - texture with the sun, texture with the set, on the actual image and material. We tried to get that 'ethereal but also concrete at the same time' feeling somehow.

The whole film seemed it was intentionally underexposed. The film is physically dark.

There was a lot of night scenes and inside the hospital scenes are very dark.

So you did a lot of colorgrading and post work.

We did a normal colorgrading. We did make color a little more intense but it was not like totally changing the image. The image was captured like that by Manuel Dacosse.

How did you find Manuel to be your DP?

Few years ago I watched the film he did called Amer which I loved. I loved the work he did on it. There were both exterior and interior scenes in that film with lots of different colors and so on. Then I saw Strange Colors of Your Body’s Tears, also the colors in it were amazing. And we did a short film (Nectar) together before this. With Evolution, we were really heading into the same direction. He’s very quick. It was quite difficult shooting in Lanzarote because it was very hot and shooting with water was quite challenging physically. But we understood each other very well.

It’s so gorgeously shot.

I was very lucky to have him. And my set director, Laia Coll, who is great. She can do a lot of things with nothing. She was always happy and had a lot of great ideas. She and Manuel worked a lot together, especially in the hospital scenes. There were a lot of logistics to figure out because of the location with the set and the lights, but they worked together very well.

You’ve worked on many of Gaspar Noe’s films.

It was long time ago. When we first started making films. We founded a film production company (Les Cinema de la Zone) together because we wanted to produce our own films. But it was more for short films. But after that we didn’t produce our own films. Gaspar produced his last film (Love) himself but for mine, I didn’t produced it with the company. I did a medium length film called Mimi: La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, long time ago and he worked on it and I worked on Carne. But then we stopped working together because it became a normal production company.

Did he see the film? What does he think about it?

Yeah yeah yeah. He thought it was very strange. (laughs)

Well some thought it was strange and some people thought it was very familiar. I like that. I hope it’s not only strange but I’d like to be touching as well.

It's touching, it is very touching especially at the end.

It’s interesting about your take on the palpable male fears - fear of penetration and of pregnancy. I do fear those elements.

That’s interesting.

You said it was a bigger film. Was there more element to that of male fear?

No it was more to do with elements that gives context to the situations, like more things about the women- who they are, that maybe they are all part of the experiments. And the people who are doing experiments… Those elements wouldn’t have changed the nature of the film, they would’ve simply make audience understand more as to what’s going on. It was a funnel to create all this but then when the time came for me to cut, it seemed to me that those are not the heart of it. By cutting it I was going back to the emotional, the fear aspect of it.

When I was first experiencing Evolution, I felt that I needed more explanations but now I talk to you about it, keeping all its mystery, I think it’s perfect.

Interview: Avishai Sivan Talks Tikkun

Set in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem, Tikkun gives a unique glimpse into a highly reclusive world where tradition and religion dominate private lives. With its haunting imagery and thought provoking subject matter, Tikkun left me a lasting impression long after I left the theater. I had a chance to talk briefly with its fiercely cerebral director Avishai Sivan when he was in town for the New Directors/New Films series in March.

There seems to be a theme going on here, with your first feature WANDERER and TIKKUN, both featuring the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. Is this because of your background? What’s your fascination with the community?

It’s not my background. But I am interested in those communities, I think, in an almost romantic and stupid way, because they have this strict way of living. They dedicate their whole lives to a simple way of belief. I think you can find this belief not only in Judaism but it can be found everywhere - seeking and exploring. As a filmmaker and an artist, I try to reach that sublime of next masterpiece in films or fine art. Sometimes I have this inner battle, like the theme of this film Tikkun - the battle between mind and body…

What does TIKKUN mean in Hebrew?

It means to rectify, to fix something that went wrong but in Judaism, it has a deeper meaning: when a person dies and something went wrong in his life, his soul needs to go back to his life to fix it. Tikkun is the act of doing so, crossing over to the other life as a true believer of Jewish faith.

It’s interesting. I live in the part of Brooklyn which is a predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Even though we are living right next to each other, I feel they are living in a very different world. What was the reaction of the community when it came out in Israel?

Had several screenings in Jerusalem Film Festival last year. It won almost all the awards there (Best Film, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay) and also small festival in Tel Aviv called Utopia, but that’s about it. It will be out in September in Israel. Those film festivals attendees are film geeks, so I don’t think they (the Ultra Orthodox Community) had a chance to see the film yet. I am assuming they will see it in the future when its widely distributed. And am also assuming their reaction will be not good. (Laughs.) But I’m not doing films to please anybody.

How did you find Aharon Traitel, who portrays Haim-Aaron?

He’s not an actor.

Right. How did you get to cast him?

It took almost two years to find him for that role. It’s not like you can call an agent or find someone who wants to act. Usually the people who come out of religion are very vulnerable and don’t really want to expose themselves. They are also wracked with guilt - usually they left their family and the family is understandably angry with them.

I advertised Haim-Aaron’s role in this on-line community of people who left the religion. I think he was the only one who answered the ad and luckily he was the only one that fit the role.

The film is shot beautifully. I understand your background is in painting and video art. What made you to decide to shoot film on black and white? THE WANDERER was in color.

When I was writing it, I knew instantly that it would be in black and white. From that point on, I tried to reach the vision in black and white. The story is about life and death - the big battle/contrast. I tried to investigate that grey area in-between. Color wouldn’t have worked in that sense. B&W matched perfectly with the big theme of the film.

Haim-Aaron’s journey - his faith is shaken after the near-death experience. It struck me as the story of Golem - the undead. Does he think he is a dead person? Is that why he has a freedom to explore the outside world? Or is he looking for regaining his faith?

I don’t think he is looking for regaining his faith again. I think he wants to deepen his faith after he was re-born. All of sudden he can see much better than before. His physical experience is getting much more vivid. And he is feeling like God is testing him. He is a bit confused and trying to find his way. He is still sticking with his community. He is not shedding his clothes or anything. He is trying to find his true path within himself- how he is supposed to act as a believer, even in these radical, extreme places that I put him in as a screenwriter.

One of the most interesting aspects of both your films is the father-son relationship: how they see things differently. It was his father who revives him but also feels guilty that he did something against God’s will. Is this relationship an important theme for you?

Yes. It’s a not so sophisticated, not subtle way of seeing my relationship with my father. Because my father is a very enigmatic character. He speaks very little but he is...a very good person. He can break your heart with how good he can be. He is that kind of person. At the same time he is not very communicative. So his goodness can be seen as problematic.

You mean for you.

Yeah. This element is strongly reflected in Tikkun: he is trying to give his son love but in doing so, he is causing more and more problems. At the end, the accident happens by one of the cows he releases. He is inadvertently causing all the negative things that happens in the film.

That’s very interesting.

Your art and the elements of your films are sexual in nature. Can you tell me a little about that?

It’s human nature. What more can I say? It doesn’t matter what kind of background or environment you are living in, it’s still all there. I just reflect what’s already there.

I also saw some of your drawings of Jean-Luc Godard pleasuring himself on your website. I don’t know what to make of them since I am a big Godard fan.

I have more drawings of Godard. I’d love to compile them as a book and present to him!

Kaili Blues, The Most Impressive Debut in Years

Kaili Blues (2015) - Bi
A country doctor's search for his nephew becomes an unforgettable existential road trip in Kaili Blues, directed by a 26-year old Chinese filmmaker, Bi Gan. It's an ambitious, mesmerizing film that you'd never think it is the work of a first time director. I don’t think I’ll be seeing another film as audacious and beautiful as this one anytime soon.

Chen (Chen Yongzhong) lives and works as an assistant doctor in Kaili, a sub-tropical region of southeast China. Through Chen’s sporadic conversation with the elderly woman doctor and with his irresponsible half-brother, Crazy Face, we gather Chen's past: he was in jail for taking the rap for his boss. His sickly wife died while he was incarcerated. Crazy Face resents the fact that their mother left Chen her house to continue housing the doctor's clinic to this day.

Crazy Face's young son, Weiwei, neglected and locked up most of the time at home while he's out gambling, is in danger of being sold off, according to townsfolk. It's usually under Chen's care Weiwei eats properly and goes to school. One day, Chen finds Weiwei missing and discovers that Crazy Face has dumped him at his old boss's house who lives in nearby Zhenyuan, because he is fleeing Kaili in order to evade debtors and won't take the boy with him. The old doctor happens to have an old fling living in Zhenyuan, of whom she hasn’t seen since the days of the Cultural Revolution, and wants Chen to find him and deliver a shirt and a mix-tape she made for him, too. So begins Chen's dreamlike journey, where past, present and future are all mixed in with lush greenery and sinewy river system in picturesque Southern China.

The 40 minute no-cut, wide angle traveling shot on a moped in the middle of the film is a legend in the making – it is a pure bravura filmmaking at its most playful and a feast for your senses. Wang Tianxing's fluid camera work is just as much a star in Kaili Blues. Even though all the scenes are exquisitely framed and every slow pan shot beautifully and meticulously composed, the technical aspect doesn't overshadow the overall lucid, mysterious, fantastic tone of the film. The camera freely moves from one conversation to another, often mingling with Chen's beautiful poetry (the director's own, I'm told) voiceover.

I think of Kaili Blues as school of fish. All the small characters and stories and their connections are illusive, fluid and gone in a flash, but when caught, every one of those fishes are unique, shiny, slippery individual jewels. The only way to catch them is with a net and your hands in the water. This very loose and thin net, full of holes and tears, that Bi uses is made of seemingly unrelated recurring motifs -- Weiwei's hand drawn clocks, an old photograph of the old doctor's lover, motor bikes, a disco ball, a childish pop song -- and Bi deliberately doesn't catch them all. What's left is a palpable, lasting sensation of fish swimming and touching your hands as they get away from your grasp.

I don’t want to pull ageism here but Kaili Blues doesn’t feel like a debut film of a 20 something director. If I had to compare it to the works of another filmmaker, I guess the film most resembles the films of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao Hsien, particularly Goodbye South, Goodbye but with added lyricism and dreamlike quality. Infinitely wise and breathtakingly beautiful, Kaili Blues is definitely one of the very best films I've seen so far this year.

Kaili Blues has an exclusive one week engagement at New York's Metrograph, starting on May 20.

Ebbs and Flows: Gabriel Mascaro Interview

I had a chance to get a phone interview with Mascaro to discuss his first retrospective anywhere and his new film, Neon Bull.

Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Gabriel Mascaro’s new narrative feature, Neon Bull, is garnering much critical acclaim. On the occasion of the theatrical release of the film in New York, Film Society of Lincoln Center revisits the works of one of international cinema’s most exciting new auteurs in Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows, a five-film retrospective, starting 4/15.

Living and working in Recifé, the cultural capital of Pernambuco, a once neglected northeast region of Brazil, Mascaro established himself as an artist delving into photography, installations, documentaries and digital animation, commenting on ever so changing political, cultural, geographic landscapes. His astute observation on the lives of margins of society using non-actors in their working environs bore layered, fascinating, impossible to categorize films.

Neon Bull is the culmination of all of Mascaro’s preoccupations and his practices as an artist. It stars hunky Brazilian TV star Juliano Cazarré as a Vaqueiro (cowboy) who dreams of being a fashion designer. Gorgeously lensed by Diego Garcia (Cemetery of Splendour) and naturally acted by non professional and professional actors alike, the film observes human body at its most natural state – at work place and subverts it in the social, cultural, political context. It’s a multi-layered, sensual, deeply complex film.

Q: Congratulations on your retrospective, Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows at the Film Society at the Lincoln Center here in New York.

A: Thank you very much. It’s the first time that my work has been shown all together. It’s a very interesting moment for me to see them all in one setting like that. I like the title Ebbs and Flows. For me it was a short (A Onda Trás o Vento Leva) that didn’t really work. It’s a happy choice of a title because I can reflect on my own work.

Q: Your discipline as a visual artist is not limited to a feature filmmaking. You’ve done shorts, documentaries, computer animation and installation work. Now you’ve done two feature length films back to back, what is it about a feature length narrative that are different than your other work? What is it that you are exploring in a narrative feature?

A: It’s a difficult question. I don’t really know exactly. But for me it’s a natural evolution. I came to make narrative features after getting into discussions about negotiating images in making documentaries. For me, documentaries are like auto-fictions…I don’t know how to translate this, but it’s the real people telling fictional stories about themselves, like a self-made fiction. In a way I wanted to deepen that experience.

Working with experienced actors in Neon Bull was a very different experience. It was a challenge because I’ve never really worked with experienced actors before. There was a change in my approach. But interestingly, one of my favorite moments was when Cacá (Aline Santana, an 8-year old who’s never acted before) became quiet in the film. The silent moments were the time when she was actually discovering herself and building her character. It was a magical moment in directing because she’s not an experienced actress. I told Aline to only speak when it’s necessary and assured her that there is no hurry, that filming can wait. That she should speak only if she believed in what she was saying, that she should take a deep breath and speak when only necessary. So it’s a film where characters only speak when they want to, when they have a desire to speak.

Q: On that note, I was wondering about your writing process. Did you have a tightly written script for both August Winds and Neon Bull? Or is your filmmaking more of an organic process where improvisation is necessary?

A: It’s an interesting question. I do work with a structured screenplay- the traditional one with dialog. But what’s different is the process of preparation with the actors.

In case of Neon Bull, the actors all read the script and they spent two months of preparation where they didn’t use the script anymore. They were working more on the dynamic of interactions. They did exercises with the dialog from the script but they weren’t rehearsing the dialog.

Before shooting the scenes in Neon Bull, I’d read out loud the dialog to the actors. And they would try to recover the structure of the script but they would still use the dynamic that they had developed during those two month of preparation. It brought them to a special place because these mixture of two approaches.

Q: That’s very interesting. How did Juliano Cazarré (who plays the main character, Iremar) take the script when he first read it?

I think Juliano was very intrigued and happy because the script gave him the opportunity to change the image that people have of him and the role they usually associate with him - strong, tough, macho type. And with this character, he shows his sweet and sensitive side.

He was worried about the sex scene, because he realized that it was a very strong scene. But he was very nervous and insecure about doing it. It was a challenge. But they figured it out.

The process for preparing the roles was that of a…gradual deduction: shedding the typical element of their supposed characters. They were entering it and giving themselves slowly to the process.

Q: There are a lot of interesting contradictions in Neon Bull. Iremar is a big handsome cowboy but he wants to be a fashion designer and two girls - Galega and Geise are a tough truck driver and an armed security guard. Was this sexual politics something you were interested in exploring?

I think the film is about the process of transformation, transforming bodies. Economically the transformation is very accelerated in Brazil. To project these bodies to the landscape without the typical gender roles and to contextualize them in the cowboy universe was something I was interested in.

It’s not just about inverting gender roles, its about bodies that are working in different scale - the opposites of pleasure and violence, sensibility and anger, it’s all about all these things together. It’s not about masculine woman and feminine man but we are talking about more abstract categories.

Q: What’s also interesting is that Housemaids, August Winds and Neon Bull all feature working people doing manual labor. Can you elaborate on that aspect of your films?

A: It’s a great question. No one asked me that before. I do research on bodies that are contextualized in the world of work. So in some ways, my work is a gesture in trying to explore the common subject. I guess the larger meaning in my work is to try to find extraordinary experiences in ordinary work.

Their occupation, their work that I show in these films often shows impersonalized faces and movements in repetition. So these films are subversion of the work itself. For example in August Winds, they have sex in the coconut cart during their break where they work and in Neon Bull, he makes fashion out of fallen tails of the bulls. So in a way it’s imagining the work in a more personal way. I am trying to elaborate the intervals of this kind of work with an eruption of the body in a more abstract sense as well- a warm and affectionate form of a body in impersonal places.

Q: Can you tell me about Pernambuco, the northeast region of Brazil in context to your films?

A: The region is often associated with poverty and hunger and people wanting to escape. I spent my whole life there and never left nor I wanted to. So I tried to build my work there. With the characters in my films, I try to discuss how to redefine this place. They are there in the northeast and they don’t want to leave.

The way these characters are written, they are not the ones you feel sorry for. They might have simple lives but they are strong people and they are not naive. Though in some ways, Neon Bull deals with the economic transformation that is happening in the region and it shows a lot of challenges that people are facing there, but I think a lot of it is universal - like gentrification, industrialization, large scale construction everywhere.

Q: What is your assessment of the recent surge in Brazilian cinema? I’ve seen some really interesting films produced in recent years. Adirley Queirós’ White Out, Black In and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, just give you couple of examples…

A: We are speaking of very special moment in Brazilian cinema. Many filmmakers who are working are more interested in developing a new language of film. They don’t have the pressure of the market so much. They are modest budget films but they all have one thing in common - they are all supported by the government funds. So they are able to elaborate their language of film without making any concessions.

The filmmakers you mentioned, Adirley Queirós and Kleber Mendonça Filho are doing very interesting films. Filho also has a new film out called Aquarius, and it will be a special and important film for Brazilian filmmaking.


**Special thanks to Austin Kennedy at FSLC for arranging the interview and Micheal Gibbons for translation

Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Stunning Allegory of Man's Fear

Evolution (2015) - Hadzihalilovic

So more than 10 years after Innocence, Lucille Hadzihaliovic returns with a stunning companion piece, Evolution. Innocence, an allegorical tale of reaching puberty and womanhood was a cinematic feast for the eyes. This time she turns her attention to young boys. Shot by Manuel Dacosse (Amer, Strange Color of Your Body's Tears) in anamorphic format, the result is equally impressive. If all-girl boarding school in the forest served as a conditioning girls to conform to traditional female roles, or worse, be a man's toy in Innocence, in Evolution, a remote, manless white village on the jagged coast of volcanic island and coarse black sand (shot in Lanzarote, Canary Islands) with a creepy medical lab serves as the backdrop for men's fear of penetration and pregnancy.

There are no grown up men nor young girls in this white walled village, literally a stones throw away from roaring sea. All the women are uniformly androgynous, wearing the same style beige clothes, including Nicolas's mom, who feeds him some kind of green worm mush and ink drops "to make him strong". One day, diving into the bottom of the sea floor, he finds a dead body with a bright red starfish on it. He mentions this to mom. She shrugs it off, telling him that he doesn't know what he actually saw. He notices that mom sometimes goes out at night to the shore along with all other young moms in the village. He secretly follows her one night and witnesses a ritualistic orgy of women. They are all naked and putting some sort of slime all over their bodies.

Nicolas is soon taken to a decrepit medical building few steps away where they inject something in his belly. It is all perceived as a normal procedure, as his friends are all there, spending the night to recover. Nicolas senses that there is larger conspiracy and decides that mom is not his real mom. Soon he finds that his friends are disappearing in the lab and he finds bodies floating in a tank filled with green water. With the help of a kindly red haired young nurse, he plans to escape.

Anamorphic cinematography is out of this world. Underwater photography is rapturous. Its intentionally underexposed look gives the film ominous feeling whole throughout. Don't miss seeing it on the big screen.