88 min | NR | November 18, 2022 | Sideshow / Janus Films
A gray donkey named EO is taken from a Polish circus and pushed through the machinery of the human world. He passes through fur farms, soccer hooligans, truckers, and a crumbling Italian estate. Jerzy Skolimowski points the camera at the animal and dares you to look back.
EO is a film told from the perspective of a donkey. He begins in a traveling circus where a performer named Kasandra treats him with tenderness. Animal rights activists force the circus to release him, and EO enters a journey across Poland and Italy through a chain of human owners who use him, ignore him, or pity him. The film refuses anthropomorphism. It is not about what the donkey thinks. It is about what the world does to a creature who cannot consent to any of it.
Sandra Drzymalska plays Kasandra as the one human who sees EO as something more than livestock. Her early scenes establish the bond that the rest of the film spends measuring loss against. Isabelle Huppert appears late as the Countess in a brief, strange interlude inside a decaying villa. She plays the role with brittle theatricality that reads as a human world collapsing into its own private drama while the animal stands outside it. The supporting humans, including Lorenzo Zurzolo as Vito and Tomasz Organek as Ziom, function less as characters than as forces that pass through EO’s life and leave marks.
Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska build the film around the donkey’s eyeline and the donkey’s body. The cinematography saturates entire passages in pulsing red light and tilts the camera into disorienting angles that approximate an animal’s confusion. Drone shots sweep across forests and wind farms to remind you how small EO is inside the landscape. Pawel Mykietyn’s score surges and recedes with an almost physical force, turning a donkey walking down a road into something monumental. The sound design isolates the breath and the hoofbeats until the animal’s interior life becomes the only thing in the frame.
This is a film that asks you to extend your attention to a creature that cinema usually treats as scenery. EO never speaks and never explains, and Skolimowski never cheats by inventing thoughts for him. The cruelty and kindness that EO encounters belong entirely to the people, and the film holds them accountable for both. It is a formal experiment that lands as a moral one. By the end you have spent the whole film looking at an animal, and the discomfort is the point.