Waar thuis was (2023) – 4 stars

Director: Youri Smaal

Writer: Youri Smaal

Cast: Amber Mann, Xander Lenders, Eline Havenaar, Torsten Colijn

Running time: 30mins

I am a natural born worrier, and so naturally there were many things which terrified me in my childhood. But for all the nonsensical fears I had inspired by books I was probably introduced to a mite too young – including ancient demon dogs, escaped panthers roaming rural England, or the emergence of a modern pandemic (imagine that) – the scariest moments were found in mundanity. They were the moments when, rather than dismissing my fears as bizarre paranoia, my parents would skirt around something, and try to shift conversation. Accidentally touching on something that scared them too – something real – was a sensation no ancient horror from books or films has ever quite touched on since.

Waar thuis was is a film which hinges upon precisely this fear – with a mother and father doing an increasingly poor job of concealing a mounting problem from their daughter and son. Exactly what that problem is gets left to our imaginations, which doesn’t always work to its advantage, but ultimately succeeds by the strength of two central performances. The young Linde (Amber Mann) and her on-screen mother Marinda (Eline Havenaar) carry what is otherwise an extremely loose-hanging story, taking place in a self-contained world of magic realism; injecting a kind of real-world horror into proceedings, which takes the audience along for the ride, however weird things get.

Acting like you are acting is a big ask – and it can lead to some off-puttingly hammy exchanges, when a performer really leans into coming across as a fake. To pull it off in the way Havenaar does takes real skill – convincingly presenting a calm and cosy face to her daughter, before faltering in ways she might believe her daughter wouldn’t pick up on. Every faltering silence tells a story all of its own, every hurried reassurance that things are normal primes us for worse to come.

At the same time, as Linde, Mann does an excellent job of gradually picking up on the changing mood of their apparent familial bliss. Again, there is a danger of pantomiming this transition – but Mann’s performance hinges on subtle change throughout the story.

Every night when she goes to bed, stones begin to hit her window. When she brings this up to anyone else, she is met with silence, with characters moving away to investigate alone, or ushering her away from the glass quickly, and priming her to think about something else. For example, Marinda asks her daughter to help out in the garden the following day – something which she asserts will be gezellig (cosy) – but Linde’s mind is not at ease. A look of consternation creeps across her face, as she finds a small, dark rock outside her window, while fetching water for the vegetable patch. Sneaking back to the garden, Linde checks that the coast is clear, before burying the stone amid the herbs.

Things escalate from there – with the rocks colliding with the house growing in frequency and size. It is as if that small stone represented Linde’s early perceptions at things being less than perfect, despite the assurances of her parental figures. As they have refused to address those concerns, a seed has been planted, and the worry surrounding them is growing – and making an even greater impact on Linde’s welfare in the process.

This is one of several sets of images, or themes which Smaal serves us as food for thought from this strange, disjointed picture-book world. It is clear from the opening shot that nothing here is supposed to be a literal depiction of something which could happen, but rather a set of concepts to draw on and consider in our daily lives. That first shot is of the family house, which is a standalone cottage on a hill – and there aren’t many of those in the Netherlands. It feels like it could be a miniature from a Wes Anderson film, symmetrically placed in the centre of the shot, flanked by leafy trees on either side, the sky above and grass beneath. For all intents and purposes, it is a stand-alone world in its own right, in which life occurs in a hermetically sealed bubble.

This makes the gradual encroachment of crises on the isolated residence more traumatic, and more severe, than they would otherwise have been. That is good in some ways, because it paints a dark picture of what holding together a marriage ‘for the sake of the kids’ might do to the kids in question. As a very light-touch narrative unfolds, and the rock-storms escalate, the fact the parents are hiding their concerns from their children becomes clearer – both children start learning to do it themselves – each taking to flinging stones into the ground outside their home. In turn, each of those stones adds to the number of stones hurling themselves back at the house later.

To an extent, this works well as a discussion of family trauma – particularly when the vegetables in the garden are also found to have petrified. This is no longer an environment where life can flourish – and where things that should grow into things that nurture us are stifled and replaced by the weight of our troubles. Smaal seems in this case to be prompting discussions over whether the institution of the nuclear family is worth hanging on to. Without spoiling it, the finale sees the characters think about how they might be better off freeing themselves from the toxic environment they have clung to out of ideological instinct.

However, Smaal’s metaphor also brings to mind another set of very real and traumatic imagery. In a scene just before the final third, as the family cower on the floor, while their previously idyllic dining room is ripped apart by a storm of rocks, we are also primed to think about the parts of the world where people are having to disguise horrific truths from young children for very different reasons. The isolated house on the hill could just as easily serve as a stand-in for a nation state, the borders of which are now closed tight as the horrors of war unfold within its boundaries.

In Palestine – even before the current wave of ethnic-cleansing occurring in the Gaza strip – decades of family life have consisted of parents trying to calm their children, and present a picture of calm stability, with the awareness that there are huge problems looming above them, that could tear their world apart at any second. In war-zones from Damascus to Donetsk, parents attempt to put on the same brave face for their children – while wondering if escaping from the hell around them is possible. Often it is not.

It is hard to tell if these are issues which Smaal actually hoped to touch on in this film. If they were, they would work very well for a hard-hitting short of a different ending, but they do not sit especially nicely alongside the film’s conclusion – which seems to be a better fit for the previously mentioned narratives of family breakdown. If this was all deliberate, the director might have been better advised to pick a lane. If not, then it probably requires a little more awareness of how the footage this project assembled might come across to other viewers.

Instead, it seems to me there are two very good films competing for space in one pretty-good film. I would argue if a metaphor about war is going to come into play here, the sense of whimsy that the setting evokes needs to ultimately give way, and allow for a sadder, more horrific ending. Meanwhile, delivering a quirky theatrical take on family drama might work better if a sizeable portion of it didn’t feel like footage of civilian homes being shelled. As it is, however, putting both side by side means the conclusion feels too flippant for a potential war angle, while the family angle might be undermined slightly as a source of trauma when compared to the horrific impacts of modern conflict.

With all that being said, Waar thuis was is a very impressive piece of work. Smaal has a fantastic eye for visual storytelling, while he has assembled a cast whose performances make an odd, minimalistic story come to life, and resonate with us in the real world. A small amount of tonal dissonance, possibly emerging from over-ambition to build a huge climactic scene, is easily forgivable in that context.