Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam, Netherlands, 2013, 113 min)
WUD Film Mini_Indie Film Festival, Union South Marquee Theater, Saturday, April 26, Midnight»
You know when a priest asks for a rifle and then joins a manhunt within the first few minutes of a movie, things could get pretty serious.
The Netherlands’ 2014 entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Jan van Warmerdam’s Borgman is a psychological thriller with far more emphasis on “psycho” than “logic.”
The titlular character (Jan Bijvoet) is seemingly a vagrant, and when he and his compatriots are chased out of a neighboring area, he finds himself moving from house to house looking for a bath and some food. When he comes to Richard and Marina’s door, Richard (Jeroen Perceval) gives Borgman a severe beating, after which Richard’s wife Marina (Hadewych Minis)—whom Borgman seems to know—takes him in to care for his wounds. And that, as they say, is when the real story begins.
Borgman is full of classic thriller tropes: the stranger in the house, domestic tension exacerbated by the stranger’s presence, a young nanny who becomes entangled in the proceedings, and children who are at times more aware of what’s going on than their parents. The film employs these tropes with mixed success, playing like a tug-of-war between tension and tedium.
As Camiel Borgman, Jan Bijvoet puts in a performance of exceedingly ruthless calm; behind his placid facial expressions, sinister schemes abound. The movie is at its best when he and his cultish group of villainous comrades are on the scene, making ostensibly inexplicable moves in service of a greater vengeful plot. These characters move in and out of the story with a bafflingly sinister grace, and the tension they generate is unfailingly genuine. I daresay the film also has one of the creepiest (and perhaps unintentionally hilarious) scenes of body disposal in recent memory.
If only the family drama was as memorable. The performances are adequate, but their characterizations don’t motivate the movie so much as merely enable it to continue. An early decision by Marina in the first quarter of the film exemplifies this notion. While that one decision really allows for the rest of the plot to unfold, the logic behind it is not at all apparent. I figured her motivation might be lying in wait, a secret that would pay off at the optimal moment and tie the movie together, but it never did. Scripts sometimes ride a fine line between deliberate ambiguity and poor storytelling, and in the case of the family’s behaviors, this script is on the latter side more often than not.
The production design is pleasingly modern and minimal, and van Warmerdam’s style is competent, if not overly compelling. All in all, despite my misgivings about the script, Borgman is a thriller worth seeing, if only for its terrifying main character and his eerie misfit crew. WUD Film is screening the film this weekend as part of their Mini_Indie Festival, giving you the opportunity to see several films that have either limited or no theatrical exhibition in the city. And since there are moments when Borgman seems to be operating exclusively on dream logic, there couldn’t be a more ideal time to screen it than at a midnight show.