Eva

Evil is never radical; it is only extreme.
— Hannah Arendt

The landscape becomes metaphor: a refuge for the soul, a primordial womb, a space of exile and of possible redemption.

And yet this powerful symbolism of nature — which might evoke rebirth, regeneration, or a return to an authentic origin — paradoxically resolves into a context of alienation and destruction: Eva’s “mission” does not fade, and her suffering finds no catharsis. The idea of nature as a “saving womb” collapses.

In the film, nature is a neutral witness — neither compassionate nor redemptive. And this neutrality is as unsettling as it is coherent: it conveys the sense that no automatic salvation exists, no innocent reintegration, only an eternal wandering.

The landscape, in short, remains an aesthetic of pain rather than a metaphysical support — and this is partly the film’s limit: the tension between solitude, nature, and the possibility of salvation largely remains a fragile symbolic architecture, unable to make rebirth believable.

Eva as a character, with her ambivalence — both victim and perpetrator, potential mother and abductor — promises to be fertile ground for a reflection on the abyss of the soul, on trauma, on fractured motherhood, on the radical transgression of social rules.

The film seems unable to fully account for this ambiguity with sufficient depth. Eva’s “mission” appears as a given, almost mechanical, lacking the psychological exploration that would make it even partially relatable.
 The film tends toward a radical dramatization of evil, without constructing an architecture capable of sustaining the screenplay.
 The attempt to create a tragic figure — a “wild mother,” a wandering woman, a soul in fragments — remains largely incomplete.

According to the director, the film aims to “blend various genres: family drama, thriller, even sci-fi” to represent the complexity of our time.
 Such hybridization — legitimate and potentially fruitful in itself — risks dispersing the focus. In Eva, this mixture generates contrasts that, rather than enriching, end up weakening the narrative cohesion: Eva’s dramatic mission finds no full harmony with the register of the thriller, nor with the psychological-existential mode, nor with the idea of intimate rebirth.
The film’s symbolic potential is thus, in some measure, diluted by the multiplicity of registers, which prevents deep immersion in any of them.

In formal and aesthetic terms, the balance between realism, atmospheric suggestion, and symbolic tension is rather precarious, despite the ending shedding light on many unresolved questions.
 Thus, the choice to “kidnap children” — a monstrous, ethically unacceptable act — is explained only at the very end by that psychic abyss that shaped her actions and the ensuing descent.

Eva, in its ambition, proposes itself as an inquiry into the abyss of the soul, into the wound of abandonment, into the desire for salvation. But — at least in the part that can be assessed before the finale — the operation seems to halt at symbolic dramatization, at a provocative and unsettling image of individual pain transformed into an extreme gesture. The character remains to a large extent a bodiless enigma, a hollow metaphor.

This critical distance — in some way coherent with this kind of sensibility, which privileges structure, form, symbolic rendering — makes the film interesting as an act of rupture, yet ultimately an aesthetic proposition unto itself.