EO film review — vivid meditation on power through the eyes of a donkey

Recent years in cinema have brought fine-grained animal portraits in Gunda (a pig) and Cow (self-explanatory). Now, the Oscar-nominated EO makes a drama from the odyssey of the restless donkey of the title. The film is a remake of sorts: a riff on Robert Bresson’s 1966 masterwork Au Hasard Balthazar.

Director Jerzy Skolimowski is unafraid to tweak greatness. Where Bresson found a microcosm in a single Pyrenean village, EO journeys across European borders. Beginning in modern Poland, change is already afoot. Employment in a circus is ended by protests, and so the film is set in motion.

Yet “now” and “then” are not easily untangled. Ahead are lorry parks and slabs of industrial agriculture. There are also forests still alive with wolves, and Jewish graves from the Holocaust. In place of Bresson’s ascetic black and white, EO brims with colour: a string of vivid imagery sometimes captured in neon or rave-red. There will be stunning pit stops by towering dams, spectral pet shops, ornate villas.

The movie looks great, but with good reason. Might the sight of this small, Old Testament animal in our kaleidoscopic century give us pause for thought? Magic and threat arrive together. That fairytale forest becomes a dazzling laser field: bloodshed comes next.

If humanity is a menace, Skolimowski doesn’t overstress the editorial. Brutality is our brand, whether in the salami factory or senseless thuggery. But people are complicated. There is also a kiss on the nose, a necklace of carrots. Yet the common thread is ownership. Power. That is already the theme of one knockout movie this year, Tár. EO makes another.

EO is named for his bray. At key moments there are memorable line deliveries. (Journalistic duty obliges me to point out that six animals share the role.) But while Bresson made his donkey saintly, Skolimowski leaves his beast less burdened by symbolism. He also dances mischievously with the essential fact of animals: their unknowability. In close-up, we are teased by the idea that we might grasp what EO’s gaze is saying. Perhaps the truth is about the eye of the beholder. What kind of ass, the movie asks, believes they can read a donkey’s mind?

★★★★★

In cinemas from February 3