Mark Reviews Movies: EO

EO, Janus Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 1, 2022

EO occasionally makes the fundamental error of giving emotions, some kind of consciousness, or some spark of the recognizably human to its eponymous character. That character is a donkey, wandering from place to place, from adventure to adventure, and from person to person in a search for something—some meaning, perhaps, to its life. In one way, co-writer/director Jerzy Skolimowski's movie is a patient rumination on how humans imbue animals with purpose and value—or deny them such things—based on seemingly random conditions. In another way, the whole thing is a sentimental crock.

To focus on its strengths, the movie is beautiful, strange, and thought-provoking, if only because so little happens in the narrative that Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska force us to think about every twist of fate, every action, and every image on screen. As EO's journey progresses, though, it becomes more and more difficult to tell if the filmmakers have put in as much thought to the narrative and its themes as they expect us to put into those things.

EO, a name that might suggest the sound of the animal's braying, begins its story as a circus performer and worker. In the ring of the big-top, the donkey's handler is the kind Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), whose performance includes a moment that almost appears as if she's breathing life into the creature. Indeed, the donkey does seem to have some kind of awakening, as the two perform for a cheering crowd and the young woman gently caresses its hair and face. We'll get to that in a bit when it comes to the faltering ways of the movie.

As a worker, EO is just a beast of burden, lugging scrap metal to a junkyard in a cart for the cruel owner of circus, whose attempts to whip or beat the donkey are stopped by Kasandra. Upon returning from the task, the owner discovers that all of the circus animals are being repossessed by the government amidst protests against animal cruelty and a bankruptcy decision. EO is hauled away in a trailer on the start of a trek that sees it in possession of others, on its own in the wild, and hurt or helped by various strangers along the way.

If we just look at EO exclusively as a donkey and nothing else, the movie reveals pointed ideas and contradictions about how humans treat animals. Take the creature's first stop, which is to a newly opened horse ranch. There's plenty of celebration for the place's opening, which stands in stark contrast to the crowd of protestors surrounding that circus.

What's the difference between these places, really? Skolimowski makes that question clear by repeating an overhead shot of a ring: one where EO performs and the other where the horses are forced to trot in a circle by some mechanical contraption. One show is perceived as a kind of abuse for the animals, but this one, apparently, is perfectly acceptable. Either way, EO's treatment hasn't changed, except that it's now exclusively a worker, and there's an ironic shot of a horse being gently bathed in a stall right next to EO, as the donkey looks on with a face that one might translate as expectation and, soon after, disappointment.

There's the suggestion of some kind of social hierarchy for animals. The horses are treated well enough. When EO wanders into the woods after escaping from a farm on its next stop (after escaping from the ranch, while knocking over a trophy case in an act of accidental or intentional defiance), a frog, an owl, a spider, and some other creatures are left to their own devices, but laser sights fill the night air for hunters to shoot every wolf that gets in the path of a green-glowing line. At one point, EO ends up in yet bigger trailer, filled with horses, on a road trip across Europe, and it catches a glimpse of a different trailer filled with pigs, the fate of which we probably don't need to be told.

This element of the material is intriguing and certainly clear enough that the movie doesn't need its closing disclaimer, proclaiming that the filmmakers love animals after asserting that none was harmed during the production. In the early sections, humans in this story exist more as an idea than anything else. It is, then, a bit odd to see some beyond Kasandra, standing in as an ideal specimen for her tenderness and one attempt to find EO again, come into sharper focus as the screenplay's ideas for the donkey's story start to run thinner than they already are.

We briefly meet Mateo (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), a trucker driver whose tale meets a sudden end, and Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), traveling home and taking an abandoned EO away with him. Isabelle Huppert appears, in a distracting piece of casting, as the traveler's stepmother, and since this isn't a human story, the dangling thread of whatever is happening between them is simply confounding.

The big, inescapable assertion of EO, though, is that this donkey is no mere donkey. It has feelings and memories, represented by actual flashbacks in which EO recalls its time with Kasandra, and its journey is one that reveals some kind of sentience and decision-making. It's a kind of fantasy that, ironically, keeps our ability to sympathize with an animal as an animal at bay.

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