Director: Sando Heijnen
Writer: Hannah Fleer
Cast: Susanne Middelberg
Running time: 7mins
Director Sando Heijnen and writer Hannah Fleer have established themselves as specialists in a niche brand of disorientating and upsetting cinema. In Doe Eens Mens (named Best Film at IFL’s 2023 Halloween Showcase), they told the story of a mother and son being subjected to the same kind of nonsensical and damaging ‘experiments’ that humans have historically inflicted on animal test-subjects.
In some ways, it feels like Heijnen and Fleer have pulled us into that nightmarish world with their follow-up film, pushing their disorientating and disturbing formula to its Nth degree, seemingly just to see what would happen to us. Throughout its seven-minute run-time, Een Doodgewone Dag [An Ordinary Day] feels as though it has explicitly been designed to up-end our senses and confound our expectations – and it isn’t a bit sorry about it.
To an extent, that works in its favour. The film follows Kris (Susanne Middelberg) as she attempts to navigate the trappings of a deceptively banal set of life-or-death choices. Framed like a first-person video game, we see the world from Kris’ perspective as she tries to decide whether she ought to have a drink of water; whether she ought to have a hot or cold shower; and whether she might stick a tiny solar-powered lamp in her garden, or not. While they seem random and disconnected, other characters who float in and out of proceedings seem to imply these ‘choices’ are responsible for all manner of horrors being inflicted on Kris/us – from her surly son severing contact with her, to the Dutch government presenting our helpless protagonist with a six-figure fine for “installing solar panels without a license”.
As they did with Doe Eens Mens, Heijnen and Fleer again deploy that most fearful avatar of everyday tyranny – the man in the suit – to chilling effect. As the nameless gemeenteabtenaar (council officer) Matthijs A. P. van Bree does very well to straddle the comic and the horrific in very little time. First he presents Kris with a Pythonesque level of bureaucratic absurdity, before taking it in the distinct direction of a Terry Gilliam solo-project, where that nonsense is underwritten by a very real physical threat. In the Netherlands and across Europe, the idea that government officials might start enforcing seemingly ridiculous laws to penalise people for even the smallest ‘green’ thought no longer seems as comfortably remote as it once did. At the same time, the idea that the other people we count on for support might be going down a similarly dark path is played with, when Kris’ son Boris (the voice of Heijnen) angrily suggests he never wants to talk to her again for the same solar garden light.
The result is a film in which we live first-hand through a series of distressingly ordinary nightmares. You know, the ones which we do our best to ignore in our daily routines, or we start to crack. There’s the fact that most of us are at most one pay check away from sleeping rough. Even if we do keep ourselves afloat, there is always the fear that some arbitrary tax loophole or vindictively punitive change in the law might be aimed at us, and land us in the gutter. There’s even the possibility that just as we might need their help, we not really know those closest to us; and the chance that we might suddenly find them irreconcilably opposed to our political outlook. And under it all, there is also the ultimate fear of losing ourselves in the noise – whether through degenerative disease or repeated trauma, being unable to remember or understand what is happening to us, let alone fight against it.
In this setting, the decision to do as much as possible to discombobulate the audience is justified in my opinion – although it does not make Een Doodgewone Dag an easy watch for many viewers. To an extent, that is very on-brand for Heijnen in particular – who is resistant at all times to holding anyone’s hand as they walk through his visions. The difference here, and where this project gets into difficulties, is that it lacks some of the focus of his previous efforts.
COMPLEX, for example, is another film which leans heavily on a particular set of technical tricks to tell its story. A dual-shot sees one unmoving camera never leave a couch, where two people are sitting messing about with a microwave, while an unwitting electrician goes to work in a second screen – and is brutally impacted by their indifference to his presence in the building. The format is consistent only until the very end of the film – meaning that while it is difficult to follow, by the end we have adapted to it, and get a distinct set of feelings to take away from the experience.
In contrast, Een Doodgewone Dag does not manage to stick to its initially intriguing visual premise. Very early in the story, we start seeing SnorriCam shots of Middelberg as Kris. While Middelberg is great here and her reaction shots reinforce how increasingly confused and distressed her character, they also undermine our feeling that this is us. We are removed from the most powerfully startling aspect of the film – where the world of escapism we associate with video gaming is only repurposing the real-world horror we sought to escape from – and as much as Middelberg’s performance adds to the character, then, the decision to deploy second-person shots detracts from the film as a whole.
At the same time, the video game aspect – with on-screen choices prompting the viewer/player to consider a multitude of different decisions – is not involved regularly enough throughout the film. It vanishes at key moments, including one moment which might have been a ‘game over’ screen, before an earlier save is loaded to correct an earlier mistake. At the same time, Might have liked to see a little more to show us in the second playthrough that actually there are no right choices – and there is nothing that the player can do to definitively save themselves from the social, political and economic pressures they are exposed to. But that’s just me – many other people might take or leave that angle.
What others are probably less likely to forgive is the feeling that this film is in itself a learning curve. I should note that, as is the case with COMPLEX and Doe Eens Mens, this is a 48-hour project – part of a challenge that filmmakers often set themselves to see just what they can achieve with no time at all. This can be a useful medium for artists to experiment and develop new skills for future projects – but it also can result in films which can be difficult for audiences to approach as a conventional movie.
I feel like Een Doodgewone Dag is the most pronounced 48-hour film from Heijnen’s catalogue that IFL has been sent. There is the potential for three or four interesting films in here – and they don’t all work as part of the same great whole. Good ideas come, and go, and are replaced by other thoughts which never quite come to fruition either. That’s the beauty and the danger of the 48-hour format.
Having now seen three films from this director, this is by far his most confusing spectacle yet. At times, that works in the story’s favour, and Middelberg, Fleer and Heijnen each deserve credit for capturing the relentless, unspoken panic that we deal with in our everyday lives, in just seven minutes – let alone in a production of just 48 hours. But there are also areas where this feels like a show-reel, highlighting lots of cool individual things that the artists can do; rather than a single, cohesive film.