Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
The world is a mysterious place when seen through the eyes of an animal. EO, a grey donkey with melancholic eyes, meets good and bad people on his life’s path, experiences joy and pain, endures the wheel of fortune randomly turn his luck into disaster and his despair into unexpected bliss. But not even for a moment does he lose his innocence.
EO is a visually audacious and deeply singular film — Jerzy Skolimowski's loose reimagining of Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar is shot with wild, almost hallucinatory cinematography that sets it apart from virtually any contemporary drama. The fragmented episodic structure seen through a donkey's perspective is handled with rare poetic intensity, and the bold use of color, drone shots, and expressionistic lighting elevate the film visually to an exceptional level. Novelty is high because while the Bressonian influence is clear, the execution is so distinctively modern and feverish that EO feels genuinely one-of-a-kind. Acting is limited by design — human characters are deliberately underwritten and functional, serving as moral stations rather than fully realized people. The plot is loosely picaresque and intentionally episodic rather than dramatically structured, which works thematically but limits engagement. The ending is abrupt and bleak in a way that is tonally consistent but not fully satisfying on its own terms.