Director: Joachim Huveneers
Writer: Joachim Huveneers
Cast: Lukas Buys, Samantha Fadahunsi
Running time: 12mins
Joachin Huveneers’ short thriller often feels like it is at war with itself. To an extent, that works. This is the story of two people losing their grip on reality, while their power dynamic becomes increasingly ambiguous – ratcheting up the tension in the process. But in many ways, the ominous atmosphere that could make this movie so effective is undermined by some ill-fitting post-production decisions.
Starting with the positives – and there are quite a few – Lukas Buys and Samantha Fadahunsi are absolutely at the peak of their powers as the only actors in this picture. However good the script is, it takes a hell of a performance to make a single-scene conversational into a compelling visual narrative. But Huveneers’ dialogue is minimal, and does not deliver either performer with a lot of room to develop their sparring relationship verbally. Instead, a lot of the shifting power dynamic between Fadahunsi (Dr Isabelle Janssens) and Buys (her newest client, Mauro) is reflected by gradual shifts in body language and facial expressions.
The doctor begins the interaction sitting comfortably back in her chair, looking directly at the nervous patient who is hunched forward, avoiding eye-contact. However, as the session progresses, and Buys recounts a disturbing dream sequence, he seemingly grows in confidence, shooting a steely gaze directly at his psychiatrist. Meanwhile Fadahunsi wilts, and shrinks back into her chair – sending a thousand-mile stare the direction of a blank wall, like a teary-eyed rabbit in the headlights.
Director of photography Wesley Versteeg also deserves a share of the credit for helping tell this story through visual cues. Choreographing a camera to lay a shifting power dynamic bare has been well documented before – perhaps most famously in the first meeting between Clarice and Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs – and Versteeg seemingly means to do the same thing here. The lens begins at a low-ish angle with Fadahunsi in its centre – suggesting she is comfortable and in control at the beginning of the meeting. But as the situation progresses, both she and Buys are filmed from a claustrophobic high-angle, as they both grapple with a situation they have become uncomfortable with. When Buys’ character emerges from that state first, and looks to assert his power in the situation, he is shot from a low angle, towering imperiously above his frozen psychiatrist – who is now depicted from a wider high-angle, isolated and afraid.
This is some genuinely excellent stuff – but it is made slightly underwhelming on a couple of fronts. As mentioned, the script provided by Huveneers does not present the two individuals with a lot of room to grow into the scene, or to inform us about who they are prior to this encounter. It may be that Huveneers felt this was unimportant, because it seems likely that a film named after a phrase which reads the same backwards and forwards was always going to present its two characters as interchangeable. But there is a thinly-veiled horror at play here – the idea that someone’s individuality, everything that makes them who they are – could be subsumed into some amorphous vacuum. When that arises, a lack of knowing what was lost in that process means the impact is slightly lessened.
At the same time, Versteeg’s cinematography withers away in the harsh daylight of the dream scene. Despite purportedly taking place after dark, the milky-grey sheen over the lens gives us a not-so-subtle sign that this was shot day-for-night. Day-for-night invariably looks terrible – but sometimes the scheduling and budgetary restraints of indy production mean it is a necessary evil. In another film, it wouldn’t be something I would even care about. But since the ‘droom’ in Palindroom is a play on words, because it means ‘dream’ in Flemish, the dream sequence is of core significance to the story, and an important source of the film’s menace. In that case, I think the production very much needed to go the extra mile of filming after dark, and sourcing proper lighting – and looks silly in absence of that effort.
Worst of all, though, is the soundtrack. The overbearing and misjudged soundtrack credited to Brian Clifton is not inherently bad. But does not complement the on-screen drama remotely. Here it feels increasingly as though Huveneers wanted to deliver less of a conversation-driven psycho-drama, and more something you would find in a Christopher Nolan film – long scenes of high-minded pseudo-science, perforated by sudden, explosive moments of action and violence. Even at its most intense, however, the film’s ‘action’ is much too understated to warrant the repeated gusto of Clifton’s music. And in the moments in which festering tension is bubbling away between our two characters, the orchestral bombast of his overtures rides roughshod over any atmosphere crafted between those two remarkable performers.
In some regards, the soundtracking feels emblematic of Huveneers perhaps having ambitions to create something with a bigger scale, and with more action than he had the time or resources to deliver. And rather than paring things back to suit the excellent resources that were at his disposal, and used very well, he has put together a final edit that undermines them. For me, that’s a big shame – because there are bags of potential here.
Does Palindroom want to be a conversation-led shrink-drama in the style of The Sopranos or Hannibal – centring on the absorbing chemistry of two characters playing mental chess with each other, but with an underlying threat of extreme violence simmering quietly under the surface? Or does it want to be a Christopher Nolan intellectual blockbuster; ready to move beyond dense exposition to dive two-footed into a bombastic action scene at the drop of a hat? It never quite manages to pick a lane, and whether or not it works as a synthesis is debatable.