Director: Xousha Eisenhardt
Cast: Sara Calmeijer Meijburg
Running time: 17mins
In the thick Amazon rainforest, wallowing in self-inflicted misery amid the hellish shoot for Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog famously bemoaned that some of his collaborators project an anthropo-centric romance or eroticism onto the carnage of nature. Summarising his notoriously nihilistic views of the natural world, he instead contended that rather than seeing “anything erotical here”, he instead witnessed “fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and… growing and… just rotting away.”
The further I got into Xousha Eisenhardt’s short experimental film Laggerdij, the more Herzog’s infamous musings on the “misery” of the trees and birds around him came to mind. It is a short experimental film about the nature of life of Earth, but it could just as easily serve as a wordless prequel to The Thing.
Be aware, to discuss this film and its themes in detail, there may be some spoilers ahead – though they are based on interpretation rather than definitive fact. I went into this film with no knowledge of what to expect, and I’d hate to deprive anyone else of that experience.
What I love most about that, having gone into Laggerdij blind, is that it lulls you so utterly into thinking it will be a completely different film. The opening shots place us in a womb-like state, where Emma Claire Sardoni has animated strange, woolly blobs that shift and warp through an echoing darkness, amid the comforting rush of a steadily pulsing heart. It seems we are tuning out the insufferable clamour of modern life, and being primed for a quarter-hour of peaceful, guided meditation – something I have been known to relish when it comes to reviewing experimental cinema.
Not so.
After forming into a red ball, the wool emerges into a grey forest glade, in what appears to be very early spring. The trees are bare, save a few very early signs of budding life, while the forest floor is strewn with dead leaves and mud. It is here we are introduced to our nameless lead, played by Sara Calmeijer Meijburg – who deserves as much commendation for her commitment to this student film as her incredible physical performance here.
The camera finds her laying in a state of undress, next to a particularly swampy patch of land in what could be National Park Hollandse Duinen – a stretch of wild sand-dunes on the West coast of the Netherlands, and home to a population of Konik horses. As the wind rushes through the trees, Calmeijer Meijburg awakes to find the strange red ball from the opening sequence. Her lack of clothes and rudimentary sleeping arrangement suggest that she may be representative of early humanity, living close to a state of nature – so perhaps it is slightly more forgivable that she does what every sci-fi horror enthusiast watching would scream at her not to; and immediately approaches it.
Stumbling haphazardly through the presumably freezing water to reach the ball, her excitement turns to a creeping dread, as tendrils of red stretch-fabric worm their way out of the mass – and begin hauling her inside them. Calmeijer Meijburg is, in reality, fighting with strands of inanimate textile here – so the fact this genuinely seems like a life-or-death struggle, and the mounting terror etched onto her face as she is hopelessly sucked into the ball, are particularly worthy of praise.
Once inside, the film moves ahead with her in a red body-stocking – her limbs cloaked mostly in tight-fitting material, but occasionally also draped in ragged woollen fibres, which are prone to catching on surrounding shrubbery. Initially in this state of being, her facial expressions – compressed behind a thin layer of nylon, like a bank robber – seem to suggest that she is actually not having a bad time. Gone is the expression of terror, and now something approaching pleasure seems to be creeping over her instead. Backing this up, she begins moving in a kind of rhythmic, free-form dance – her formerly clumsy figure gliding about the surroundings, wrapping itself around trees, caressing the landscape while seemingly in a state of bliss. At the same time, the ragged wool catches on the surrounding plants, as if the organism she has been subsumed by cannot get enough of the world either – and wants to take it all in.
But harmonious as this symbiosis might seem, it soon gives those of a more Herzogian world-view cause to gloat I told you so! Like the nightmarish cordyceps fungus, which pumps insects playing its host with hallucinogens to encourage movement, the ball of parasitic cloth seems to have ulterior motives. Again, Calmeijer Meijburg uses her body to full effect, showing a transition between wilful movement and a gradual, despairing loss of control. As warping woollen strands grow out of her, her movement slows to a crawl, and she comes to a stop at the peak of a sand-dune. Frozen in a particularly uncomfortable position, hunched forward, another stop-motion sequence encases our helpless protagonist in a tent of cloth – complete with grotesque, rupturing fruiting bodies of red wool.
Her job is done. Our lone human has been used as transport in one of nature’s most disturbing cycles of birth, growth and rebirth – providing both passage and nourishment for a new generation of horrors, which will begin again next spring. But in one last, grim twist, unlike an ant, Calmeijer Meijburg is capable of emoting throughout her journey – and at its end, she still appears conscious and aware of it, her face frozen in horror, jutting out from the side of the pore-pods even as they sink beneath the sand.
There are some slight short-comings amid all this. In particular, the sound-design stands out amid a technically immaculate production. At times, Moos Springer’s work develops the kind of electronic hum that drove the soundtrack of Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s work in The Girl With All The Gifts (fittingly, considering the nature of that film). But in key moments it falters, as though the booming synthetic instruments he has deployed have run out of air.
This is particularly conspicuous in the film’s climactic scene, when what feels like it should be one endless, baritone note of augmented throat-signing abruptly stops and starts again. That might be a small note in the scheme of things, but in a film where – like the strands of red wool desperate to cling to the branches of neighbouring trees – almost everything visually feels intricately connected, the sound-arrangements do not feel like they have been delivered with the same holistic care.
At the same time, Eisenhardt seems to have been a little too enamoured with the footage cinematographer Sangiorgio Dallajee Blonk captured of those previously mentioned Konik horses. Majestic as they are, in the windswept framing of the desolate dunes, the admittedly beautiful images don’t always fit with the story being told. The horses are never in frame with Calmeijer Meijburg, so their presence seems a little like padding.
Both of these notes are nit-picking in the grand scheme of a film which is has been so magnificently realised, from Eisenhardt’s concept to completion. And while I might have read into it as a team of students depicting the cyclical suffering at the grisly heart of nature, the fact they have done it with such invention and rigour makes me very happy indeed. Maybe nature isn’t just misery after all?