Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution has been making the festival rounds for a bit now (Flavorwire’s former Editor-in-Chief, Judy Berman, caught it back in March), but now its arrival for larger audiences is imminent (it opens November 25). A stirringly creepy trailer for it — which makes it look a bit like a composite of Cronenberg films, the scarier, callous-scientist-ier parts of Stranger Things, and Splash — has just been shared, and can be viewed below.
Indiewire shared the film’s cryptic official description:
The only residents of young Nicholas’s seaside town are women and boys. When he sees a dead body in the ocean one day, he begins to question his existence and surroundings. Why must he, and all the other boys, be hospitalized?
Its trailer won’t reveal much more — beyond intriguing visuals of starfish, a seaside town, and then haunting visuals of young boys in said seaside town seemingly slowly being turned into starfish by a series of stoic starfish-transformation-enforcing female doctors. When Judy Berman saw the film, she called it a “a dark, strange, visually beautiful nightmare of a tale.”
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