“Eo” allows audience to empathize with a donkey

Even if the story is far from the tightest thing, “Eo” manages to be a show of colorful, expressive filmmaking. 

“Eo” is the latest film from Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski. The film is told through the eyes of Eo, an eternally innocent donkey recently freed from the circus. Eo wanders around the Polish and Italian countryside, encountering a wide array of people and experiencing humanity at its cruelest and kindest.

While the average consumer might assume that “Eo” is animated, the film is actually entirely live action. It may be a surprise, but there is a precedent in art house cinema for using donkeys as points of universal empathy. Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” is a classic film from 1966, which served as inspiration for “Eo.” Other films, like Todd Solondz’s “Wiener-Dog,” have even parodied the concept.

There are a few stray human characters in “Eo,” like Kassandra (Sandra Drzymalska), the donkey’s trainer at the circus, and Mateo (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), a young drifter with a sordid past, but ultimately, the film’s star is Eo. 

The film is told from Eo’s perspective, meaning the cinematography, editing and sound design have been warped around suturing the audience into this animal’s point of view. One of the best examples of this comes early on in “Eo.” 

While riding in the back of an animal transporter, the shot starts with Eo in focus and a lush, green pasture in the background, slightly out of focus. The shot’s focus then rakes from Eo to the pasture to reveal a herd of horses, running free. This simple shot conveys to the audience Eo’s desire to be unbound from his human shackles in a beautiful, wordless manner.

When the film conveys the deep trenches of human brutality, the color palette switches to harshly tinted black and red. During these sections, the filmmaking and visual metaphors can get even more extreme.

Additionally, Pawel Mykietyn’s dramatic score helps to heighten the intense emotional stress of these scenes. The sound design manages to be mostly immersive, the audio being stylized around jumping from quiet to ear-splittingly loud, creating an oppressive and uncertain atmosphere for the audience to share with Eo. However, there are more issues with the sound design than with the cinematography. 

There are a number of ridiculously cheesy stock sound effects used throughout the film, some of them including a wolf howling and a bolt stunner. These sound effects are a detriment to the film because they sound noticeably fake and detached from the rest of “Eo,” leaving these brief moments feeling completely un-immersive.

Although, the main problem with “Eo” is definitely the story. The first act of the film has a very smooth, natural flow, but past a certain point, scenes feel like they could have been placed in just about any order. The film stops feeling like a continuum and more like an arbitrary sequence of events. Granted, the audience will still end up getting the intended emotions from “Eo,” but the film would have been even stronger with tighter focus. 

In conclusion, even though the film’s narrative may be messy in places, I would not want to see it done in any other way. The spectacular mess that “Eo” ends up being is just the right blend of zany filmmaking and concise storytelling. I give this film a 7/10.

Ultimately, “Eo” asks its audience what truly separates man from beast, and why should we treat them any differently from ourselves? I would recommend “Eo” to anyone who is willing to challenge themselves and test the upper limits of human empathy.

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