EO is a circus donkey with a close bond to his handler, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), but when new laws go into effect banning the use of live animals in performances, EO is taken to a farm to live out his days as a therapy animal for children with disabilities.  On the night of his birthday, Kasandra visits EO on the farm, but after she leaves, the determined donkey breaks down the fence to his yard and begins his search for her.  The journey will take him all over Europe, meeting a cast of characters; some good, some bad, and some just as lost in life as he is. 

A spiritual cousin to Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO bowed to rapturous acclaim at its Cannes premiere before being distributed state-side by Janus Films.  The nearly wordless trot across Europe was cowritten with Ewa Piaskowska and dynamically shot by Michal Dymek.  With the camera never straying too far out of EO’s point of view, audiences quickly begin to see the world anew, and from this lower level we experience the same fear of the unknown, but also the same warmth of compassion as this lonely donkey bumps his way into equally lonely people. 

It is often said that the best actors are the ones that can listen and react to their surroundings.  It is also said that the most difficult actors to work with, besides children, are animals.  EO, primarily played by a donkey named Tako, but also had five stand-ins for various scenes, makes for an interesting intersection between those two filmmaking adages.  With a performance that relies completely on Dymek’s camera and Agnieszka Glinska’s editing pieces together, a surprisingly moving piece emerges that toys with the inherent “awe, cute” reactions audiences will have to seeing EO traipse his way across the frame or munch on some carrots.  It is, in a word, an effective approach, though those less won over by the general schtick of the film may opt for another word: manipulative. No matter which side of the aisle one falls, EO is very effective at manipulating its audience into caring for this donkey, a feat that is not at all impossible, but ever so slightly more challenging given that livestock are not always as conventionally cute and cuddly as a cat or a dog.      

At only 86 minutes, the film spends a lot of time early on with EO confined on this first farm before his adventure truly begins, and as such, it becomes a little harder than it should to enter into the narrative.  Once free, the donkey experiences a psychedelic night alone in the wild woods which transforms this as-of-yet rather level piece into something much more alluring and trippier.  Pawel Mykietyn’s score becomes inspired by this strange new world, and later when Skolimowski revisits this modern nightmarish motif, and with each subsequent revisit, the world becomes stranger and strays further from the natural eventually culminating into a sequence in which we follow a robotic dog-like creature.  These digressions, while visually striking, seem to stand apart from the rest of the film and do not fit well within the narrative.  They are used to represent points of transition in the story, but EO, to his credit – or his nature – remains the same affable donkey throughout the film without much character growth.  It is a strange thing to knock the script for, almost exceptionally cynical, but when you need to take creative choices to instill a sense of a character arc on your animal lead, it needs to land with 100% accuracy or what results, as here, is a series of confusing yet intriguing sequences that, unfortunately, do not work well in service of the plot.  

At its core, EO is a film about innocence in a not-so-innocent world; a study more than a story.  It is not a new concept, one of the finest examples of these arcs is on display in Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), in which the titular Ivan (Nikolay Burlyaev) makes his way through war-torn Russia, his innocence fading with every step as he tries to prove himself to the powers that be.  EO strips away the pretense of war and instead focuses on the day-to-day perils in life; fans of a losing football club growing violent, the dangerous means of survival taken by the disenfranchised, and the pain an addict unrealizingly inflects onto his family. Not unlike Steven Spielberg’s widely maligned War Horse (2011), EO takes a very segmented approach to the narrative with clearly defined chapters as the titular donkey ambles his way to and fro, but whereas Spielberg’s film leans more heavily on the human characters with Joey, his titular beast, taking more of a supporting role in the various events he plays a part in, EO remains front and center throughout his him, silently observing but seldom intervening. To have such a passive character at the head of a film is a challenge not only in a conventional narrative sense, but also for audiences who, in their investment into EO, find themselves even one step further from the action – a term used quite loosely – of the film and frustrated that as the film winds on, EO himself becomes a bit of an afterthought; cargo in the back of a truck or left to graze in the villa. 

Skolimowski’s film is an experience like little else on the market today, even with the rise of, for lack of a better term, “farm films” such as The Biggest Little Farm (2018), Gunda (2020), and Cow (2021). Notably, Skolimowski takes a narrative approach instead of mounting a documentary, and while it does not take as pointed a stance on animal rights as Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), it is not the cinematic equivalent of a romp through the family-friendly petting zoo that it may initially appear to be. It is a thorns and all examination of the human condition and the range of emotions felt throughout life and how those emotions affect those around us. Skolimowski is smart enough to not try and solve the unsolvable in EO, but his closing remarks of “life is tough, and then we die” can be a tough pill to swallow for audiences who let down their guard for this film in hopes of a little bit of light-hearted escapism after braving through a few trying years and yet with still no immediate end in sight. The film is guaranteed to pull out a reaction from audiences, and while the consensus seems to be a positive one, it is hard to disagree with the woman who made a beeline for the exit as the house lights came up or the man in the back of the auditorium who summarized his feelings with a singular, loud proclamation: “WHAT!?”