Stream It Or Skip It: ‘EO’ on the Criterion Channel, a Donkey’s Life Interpreted as Art

EO (now on the Criterion Channel and streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) consists of the many adventures of a donkey, from his point of view. How exactly a donkey sees the world will forever be a mystery to humans, but Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski makes his best interpretive guess in this singular film, a sweet, poignant and surreal effort that rightfully earned a 2023 Oscar nomination for Best International Feature. Anyone with even the slightest appreciation of animal life likely will find their hearts torn in two by the movie – which is an endorsement and maybe a warning but absolutely not a deterrent.

EO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Red lights wash over a girl and her donkey. The animal seems to be in distress, and she seems to be reviving it. The music is dramatic and the lighting matches its tone. We soon realize they occupy a circus ring; they’ve been play-acting, and conclude with a passionate dance, to sparse applause. She is Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), he is EO, and their mutual affection is vast. EO is not just a pampered show pony. We see him attached to a cart that he doesn’t seem to want to pull for the circus’ brutish chief, who cruelly pushes Kasandra away when she spots him abusing EO. Everything in this scene comes to an abrupt halt when protestors and lawyers shut down the circus for exploiting animals and dereliction of payment. EO is among the animals taken away, and Kasandra is heartbroken. She weeps, trembling with grief.

The irony is unmistakable: EO almost certainly will not be loved as much as he was while in Kasandra’s care. He begins his journey in a trailer, watching horses gallop free alongside the moving vehicle. He ends up at a stable, working as an assistant to men taking care of hoity-toity horses. A finicky white Lipizzan rolls in the dirt, and EO watches. The horse is painstakingly bathed, and EO watches. EO doesn’t seem impressed, but that’s just me interpreting his “expression”; all donkeys look cute and vaguely bored most of the time, don’t they? EO has had enough of these pampered beasts, and bolts, a cart trailing behind him. Things crash down, signifying that his usefulness here apparently has expired, because we next see him at a farm with many other donkeys. By day, they play with visiting special-needs children. At night, EO snorts playfully with ants on a fence when Kasandra arrives. It’s only a temporary reunion. It might’ve been less heartbreaking if it hadn’t happened.

EO kicks down the fence and trots away, and I’m not going to say it’s an act of grief, because anthropomorphizing in this context just isn’t wise. But the farm was a place of apparent peace and kindness, and for some reason, he had to leave. We cannot know the minds of animals, can we? He travels down a road where a car bleats its horn at him, then into the woods where there’s intimidating darkness and howling wolves. His adventure continues, to a town, to a soccer match, to a parade, to a veterinarian’s stable, to the trailer of a cross-country trucker, to the care of a man whose stepmother is played by Isabelle Huppert. His life is a series of episodes. But really, whose life isn’t?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The animals were also (almost) purely themselves in The Bear (1989), which featured less human dialogue, and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, which featured significantly more sentimentality. Gunda is another touchpoint, as well (although that one is about a pig).

Performance Worth Watching: Tako and Hola are the names of the primary donkey “actors” here. Four others filled in, Marietta and Ettore and Rocco and Mela. I hope someone out there is loving the hell out of them. 

Memorable Dialogue: We can go with the funny line: “Holy cow, a donkey!” Or the poignant one: “Did I just save you, or have I stolen you?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: EO is a film of intuition, likely made with it and best experienced while fully in its grasp. How else would one assume a donkey’s perspective? Our understanding of animal “consciousness” is limited, and one senses Skolimowski drawing from sources we know exist but don’t comprehend – the core instinctive DNA we share with all mammals, maybe? The filmmaker sure seems to follow his intuition, on tangential flights of fancy between vignettes featuring EO, including a strange sequence featuring a robot dog, or one that we might interpret as EO dreaming he can fly, over a dense forest, and spin in sync with a wind turbine. 

Skolimowski calls himself a poet, and perhaps he’s never been more poetic during his many decades as a filmmaker. The EO narrative is visually driven, with very little dialogue and no plot beyond, hey, how does a donkey experience existence? Searching for the source of Skolimowski’s inspiration, I found an interview in which he shares how he watched a relatively chaotic performance of a living nativity scene, and the donkey stood in the corner, nonplussed by the activity, simply observing with melancholy eyes. We experience that passivity via EO, although he has his share of stubborn moments, stereotypical to his species. That’s a compelling dynamic, a domesticated animal with a will that adheres to no recognizable logic.

And so the film is somewhat about what happens, but more about how we feel while we’re watching it. The somewhat is an overarching idea about humans’ relationship with creatures deemed lesser than us, from EO’s experiences as an entertainer and beast of burden, to what happens in the film’s final scenes. His journey is oddly humorous, whimsical, occasionally abstract and sometimes tragic. (Death is a character here, absolutely.) Skolimowski eases gently from groundedness to surreality, from naturalism to experimentalism, and it flows. Does it make sense? Not in the conventional manner, but it feels like it follows the primal forces of an artist making art, trying to understand the world from a distinct, almost alien point-of-view. The carefully modulated use of sound and color, and Pawel Mykietyn’s evocative musical score help guide us. And what, we may sometimes consider to ourselves, is EO thinking? Nothing. He doesn’t think. But is he feeling something? Almost certainly. Because we feel it too.

Our Call: STREAM IT. EO is a marvel, a singular vision. You’ll poke holes in it, question it, be immersed in it, and you won’t see anything quite like it for a long time.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.