Lucile Hadžihalilović's Evolution, not to be confused with the Science Fiction Comedy film of the same name, is a 2015 French Science Fiction Horror film that was shown in the Vanguard section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
It revolves around a young boy named Nicolas, who lives in a small village on a remote island. Strangely, the village's population is entirely made up of young boys and adult women, and Nicolas will soon uncover the dark truth behind that unusual demographic...
This film includes examples of:
- Body Horror: The Glamour Failure of the village "women" is a series of pulsating suckers in their backs.
- Death by Childbirth: The "women" of the village haven't perfected the breeding project yet, and some of the hosts end up killed by their unfamiliarity with the surgery involved. The movie opens with Nicolas stumbling across the corpse of one of the fatalities, whilst a boy named Victor dies in "childbirth" around the film's midway point.
- Foreshadowing: The women of the village are seen gathering together to watch videos of Caesarean sections and human childbirth at different points in the movie.
- Medical Rape and Impregnate: The fate of all the boys on the island is to be surgically implanted with infant creatures, nourish them to the delivery point, then be delivered of their unwanted "daughters". If the boy survives, he'll be re-implanted once he's recovered; if he dies, his corpse is discarded of in the sea.
- Mister Seahorse: For some reason, the "women" have decided that human boys would make better incubators than human girls, despite the latter being biologically suited to the role. Nicolas himself is impregnated and ultimately delivered of twin "daughters" before he escapes.
- Sea Monster: The village's "women" are some kind of mutated or hyper-evolved sea creature, implied to be starfish.
- Token Heroic Orc: Stella, Nicolas' nurse during his pregnancy, ultimately decides to smuggle him off of the island and back to human civilization rather than risk him dying in a future pregnancy.
- Town with a Dark Secret: The whole premise of the movie is that Nicolas' little island community has something not right with it. It turns out the village is actually a colony of some kind of sea-based mutant life-form that merely resembles human women, who are kidnapping human boys to use them as incubators for their offspring.
- Traumatic C-Section: A more realistic example than some. Because of their lack of familiarity with the procedure for a C-section, sometimes the "women" get it wrong, resulting in the boy they are operating on bleeding to death.
- Womb Horror: The dark secret and the crux of the horror is how all the boys on the island are unwitting victims who have been gathered to serve as surrogate mothers to the nonhumans pretending to be their mothers, even if this kills them.
