La Peau de Bax

I would also need some of that shit Alex van Warmerdam was constantly smoking so that I could get on his level. But on the other hand, I would be lying if I said I expected something different from Alex. In all the time I have known him, I wouldn’t expect him to make a regular story about the regular life of regular people. It may be a shame that everyone here acts as if nothing serious was going on. If I were immune to dark humor, I wouldn’t even notice it here at first glance. (18/12/2016)

A fragmented two-hander, in which a third laughs, in this case Maria Kraakman as Francisca. While Schneider is an nondescript antagonist and Bax a charismatic one, I entirely believe that for the daughter of the latter growing up in this family must have been a nightmare. The genre ambiguity, however, complicates the path to the characters anyway, because just when I start getting tense, there's an incomprehensible darkly humorous vignette, and just when I start feeling comfortable with the lighthearted part, monologues about lifelong mental problems come to the fore. It's a pity, because you can never get enough uniqueness, but here, with an honorable exception, it becomes unnecessarily self-serving with the exception of the final scene (and therefore the salvation of the entire film). 50% (02/04/2016)

Once something started happening in the film, I started enjoying it. There’s an interesting plot with an interesting denouement, but the intro seems to go on forever. The first half of the film is incredibly draggy and reminded me of Vietnam war movies (mud, reeds, mud, reeds, reeds, mud, reeds...) only without the war, so it’s really just long shots of Dutch mud. I'm not strictly an action movie fan, and I don’t mind films with a calmer pace, but there should be something going on other than just the rippling of reeds. The 3 stars are for the second half of the film. It could have been 4 had it not been for the unfortunate reeds... (12/07/2016)