Director: Ronald Kerkman
Writer: Ronald Kerkman, Martijn de Boer
Cast: Yulia Göbel, Joy Maarman, Mandy van Silfhout, Anouck Emma Linders, Samuel Bakker
Running time: 14mins
When I reviewed Sharp Point in 2019, I was keenly aware of the emotional minefield I was about to try and navigate. Personally, and I did not know whether they, or someone close to them, had suffered the havoc knife-crime can wreak on the lives of innocent people. I was therefore clear in saying, while I did not think they did a good job of making a film about it, that should not be taken as any reflection on their conviction to this issue. “Their hearts were clearly in the right place.”
I would like to start my review of What Goes Around on a similar note. For all I know, Ronald Kerkman and Martijn de Boer may have personal reasons for wanting to tell a story about high-school bullying – and whether or not I think they did a good job of producing a short film on the topic, it is something worth talking. With that said, it is much more of a stretch to say their hearts were clearly in the right place in this case.
The story they have written is what might be generously called clumsy in its handling of a very serious topic – and it might more bluntly be labelled exploitative.
The film opens with school bully Yena (Joy Maarman) skipping through the empty halls of a Dutch high-school with her lacky – looking for someone to pick on. When they happen upon Lizzy (Anouck Emma Linders), they waste no time in running through the cliché Hollywood bully playbook, before holding her head under a running tap in the girls’ toilets – and posting a video of the incident on social media. The unnervingly childish acting of the performers who are clearly older than their characters, the logistical inanity of the entire school being deserted except for three characters, and the dialogue conspicuously written by two middle-aged men might all have been forgivable (to an extent) if this was building toward something worthwhile. If the message of the conclusion was about how you can find support if you are a survivor of bullying; or about exploring the feelings of victims, why bullies bully, or how and why institutional failures mean they get away with it; or at least how you might get justice for the literal crimes someone is willing to admit committing over social media, this could have worked. (For example, it’s worth pointing out that even if the adults at the institution are unwilling to tackle the abuse with the support of video evidence, waterboarding is generally considered legally actionable – even in schools.)
What happens instead, is that Sophia – Lizzy’s sister – finds out about the extra-curricular torture session via her friend Dylan (Samuel Bakker), while she happens to be standing alone in the gymnasium, brandishing a butcher’s knife. After an extraordinarily uncomfortable scene in which Sophia and Dylan (both played by adults) corner Yena in the deserted library – Dylan physically restraining her while Sophia punches her in the gut – the pair drag her through more vacant corridors, and into an uninhabited changing room. While Dylan watches the door, Sophia erratically shakes her blade at Yena, and orders her to undress. For fairly obvious reasons, the production team mercifully stops short of actually going through with that – but the confrontation still takes a darker turn, when a brief struggle ultimately leaves the ‘bully’ bleeding to death from a stomach-wound.
As the stoney-faced survivors walk hastily away from the scene of the crime, the camera leaves them to instead settle on a conveniently placed sign pinned to the door. Considering there are so few students enrolled in this school (and even fewer now) it is unclear who the invisible teacher from Peanuts was trying to reach with the “Stop Bullying” poster – but I get the horrible feeling that it may be for us. Not so much because the filmmakers believe it will change our opinions on bullying. Everyone has a pretty well-defined opinion on abuse – including abusers – which means such a non-committal piece of messaging has essentially no value, beyond the covering of one’s own behind.
Usually, when a school actually posts something like this, it’s a bid not to be held legally accountable for the things that they turn a blind eye to. “Look, we told the kids not to bully each other. What more could we do?!” Here, though, it feels like a moment of embarrassing realisation, where director Kerkman and his co-writer De Boer have suddenly regained their adult faculties, and thought about just how bad it would look for two grown men to make a film about high-school that tells kids the easiest solution to being picked on is to have your older sibling torture and murder your bully… Unfortunately, this moment of clarity seems to have come at the end of the production – and so the band-aid of the poster has been used to cover a literal knife-wound.
The early moments of the film are deceptively well shot. The establishing shots of the school – some of which come from a drone – are quite arresting. But as soon as the action gets underway, they have primed us for a completely different production, and if anything, serve to highlight just how badly everything else went. At the same time, the actors are passable, considering what they were working with – and it would be unfair to blame them for being unable to rise to such an underwhelming occasion. But Kerkman and De Boer have a lot to answer for here – having supplied some poorly thought out, and exploitative storytelling, masquerading as extremely dangerous advice.