Get Away (Steffen Haars, 2024)

Dutch filmmaker Steffen Haars' sophomore picture Get Away sees the North Brabant native reunite with Nick Frost, who starred in Haars' feature debut Krazy House.  Frost—who also penned the script—and Aisling Bea play Richard and Susan Smith, an Anglo-Irish couple who embark on a Swedish summer holiday with their reluctant teenage children, Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres).  After an unnerving encounter at a café on the mainland, the family head to the island of Svälta, which is chiefly known for a 19th-century episode of cannibalism; an ominous title card denoting the other meaning of Svälta— "to starve, to famish"—sets the stage for the mock-sinister atmosphere that permeates the film.

The family's visit coincides with the annual Karantan festival, which has as its centrepiece a performance of a bum-numbing eight-hour play based on the island's bleak history of survival during a flu-induced quarantine.  As expected, the island's inhabitants are less than hospitable and do their best to encourage the Smiths to leave on the next available ferry.  Undeterred, the family head to their holiday rental, which is owned by the rather more welcoming—if decidedly creepy—Mats (Eero Milonoff), who informs the guests that his mother met her grisly end in the house's living room.  Not long after they've settled in, the Smiths receive a threatening nocturnal visit from a mob of torch-wielding locals.

Despite the ongoing spoiler tactics of Svälta's permanent population, the family doggedly persist with their holiday and plan to attend the production of the mysterious play; as in The Wicker Man—in which an island visitor becomes an unwilling participant in esoteric May Day celebrations—there are strong hints that these guests are destined to be more than mere spectators of this lengthy performance-cum-ritual.  As a comic riff on Ari Aster's Midsommar—by far the most obvious reference point here—Get Away possesses a ragged charm, and for the most part it's generally watchable, if a bit undercooked.  But at around the two-thirds mark there's a quite brilliant twist that sets things up for a riotously gory finale.

Any horror comedy—Krazy House also falls under the same subgenre—starring Nick Frost is going to contend with unfavourable comparisons to Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, and Get Away is no exception.  Like Shaun, Get Away explicitly references more than one straight horror film as it goes about its business, and there is a sense here that Frost actively embraces his legacy as part of Wright's fondly remembered cult movie; he's a likeable presence, but Aisling Bea, herself better known as a comedian, gives the most eye-catching turn in the film as the cheerful, witty Susan.  The uneven Get Away largely treads water for its first hour, but the mayhem that unfolds in the final stretch is worth sticking around for.

Darren Arnold

Images: IFFR

Julie zwijgt (Leonardo van Dijl, 2024)

Kortrijk native Leonardo van Dijl's feature debut Julie zwijgt (English: Julie Keeps Quiet) is a solid, if occasionally ambiguous, psychological drama that delves into the vagaries of human emotion and the strength of silence.  This nuanced film, selected as Belgium's entry for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards, was written by the director and Ruth Becquart, and stars Becquart, Tessa van den Broeck and Laurent Caron.  Its narrative is set against the backdrop of an elite Belgian tennis academy, where the protagonist of the title (Van den Broeck) faces a moral dilemma when her coach, Jeremy (Caron), is suspended.

The dedicated, driven and solitary Julie is quite clearly the best tennis player in the current cohort, but her life is upended when allegations surface against the oily Jeremy, whose conduct may have spurred the suicide of another highly promising student, Aline.  When the rather inscrutable Julie's classmates come forward to speak out, she—as per the title—opts to keep quiet.  This key decision forms the nub of the story, which explores themes of peer pressure and the isolating weight of silence.  Julie zwijgt is a film that invites the viewer to reflect on the power of their own voice, and how they might choose to use (or withhold) it.

Julie zwijgt's production journey is an interesting one: the film's genesis lies in Van Dijl's 2015 short Umpire, which was awarded a VAF Wildcard; the feature was announced in March 2023, and the project quickly gained momentum with the involvement of the revered Dardenne brothers—who co-produced the film through their company Les Films du Fleuve—and Cargo director Gilles Coulier.  Playwright Florian Zeller and tennis player Naomi Osaka served as executive producers, with the collaboration between these luminaries from very different fields adding an extra layer of authenticity to this well-rounded film.

Julie zwijgt throws light on the hidden battles many face in their daily lives, and it presents viewers with the stark calculus of the consequences that come with walking the path of the lone wolf, which in this case involves facing extreme adversity; moreover, Van Dijl's film forces us to consider the cost of silence and the scars it leaves behind.  As a drama that tackles real-world issues and examines the human psyche, the assured Julie zwijgt is a timely exploration of a thorny subject matter; the film's success on the festival circuit and the fanfare surrounding its release suggest that it will ignite debate for some time yet.

Darren Arnold

Images: Flanders Image

Maldoror (Fabrice du Welz, 2024)

Despite his Belgian nationality, Fabrice du Welz has often been linked with the New French Extremity, as has that fine performer Laurent Lucas, whose extensive work in the movement includes Leos Carax's Pola X, Julia Ducournau's Raw, Marina de Van's In My Skin, and a trio of films for Bertrand Bonello.  Maldoror sees du Welz once again reunite with Lucas, who previously starred in the director's films Calvaire, Adoration and Alleluia.  As with du Welz's feature debut Calvaire, Maldoror pits Lucas against a quite diabolical character played by Jackie Berroyer, an actor who has never been more sinister than in his work for du Welz, which also includes a turn in Inexorable (pictured below), whose female leads Alba Gaïa Bellugi—sister of Galatéa— and Mélanie Doutey both have roles in Maldoror.

While Du Welz's longstanding fascination with the macabre is present in the riveting Maldoror, what is conspicuous by its absence is the streak of jet-black humour normally associated with his work; given that the film focuses on the case of Marc Dutroux, Belgium's most notorious child killer, this seems wholly appropriate.  Many consider the string of abduction murders carried out by Dutroux to be the worst crimes in Belgian history—indeed, the impact of the case was so profound that one-third of Belgians with the surname Dutroux sought to change their last name.  Prior to the Dutroux affair, the Charleroi suburb of Marcinelle was best known for a 1950s mining accident that killed 262 people; that this disaster has now been eclipsed says much about these brutal murders' terrible legacy.

As such, du Welz needed to take a most cautious approach when preparing his film, which features some fabricated elements in order to provide a sense of justice that many Belgians felt was lacking from the real-life case (the director has cited Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood as a key influence in this regard).  The names of the characters have been fictionalised, with Sergi López's skin-crawling Marcel Dedieu serving as a proxy for Dutroux as Anthony Bajon's young police officer Paul Chartier becomes obsessed with linking the suspect to the disappearance of two young girls.  The impulsive Chartier is largely hamstrung by both his jobsworth boss Hinkel (Lucas) and a system in which, à la David Fincher's Zodiac, three separate police services are rarely on the same page.

Maldoror is a police procedural that has much else in common with Fincher's touchstone of the subgenre: each film runs to over two and a half hours and features a protagonist whose monomaniacal devotion to cracking a serial killer case results in the loss of their job and family.  In choosing to focus on the investigation as opposed to the crimes, du Welz handles the material in a subtle, tactful manner—yet Maldoror remains a queasy spectacle, one that will prove too strong for some.  It is now almost 30 years since Dutroux was apprehended—he was caught in 1996, the same year the death penalty was abolished in Belgium—but this dreadful episode remains a highly sensitive matter for many of Fabrice du Welz's compatriots, as does the topic of his next film: the rubber trade in the Belgian Congo.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI