Director: Alan Smithee
Running time: 1hr 13mins
Noordzeekanaal (North Sea Canal) is a difficult film to review. It is very clearly the product of adults. The director has a gift for image construction – and some of the nocturnal shots on lonely dim-lit roads, or amid dunes dancing with the flickering light of a camp fire are positively Lynchian. But as strange as the plot is, it is a long, long way from that same lofty standard. Instead, it feels like watching a make-believe game invented by a child, constantly changing the rules on the fly to suit their own interests in that moment.
The story begins with a surfer, who stumbles upon an all-powerful drug/soul-sucking device in a briefcase in the dunes of a desolate Dutch beach. Contact with the material leads him to let out a bestial scream, and causes him to limp/shuffle around on all-fours. The mafia, who realise he has stolen their drug/soul-sucking device, send a hitman to kill him and reclaim the briefcase – but the surfer bites his throat out and runs off.
Another henchman finds him at the beach, crying into the sand, and takes the surfer into custody without incident. “You work for me now” snarls the pre-pubescent mob boss – hiring the surfer as a hitman, whose first assignment is to assassinate a journalist. But the journalist convinces him to kill the mob boss instead. Oh, and I forgot to mention, on the way to kill the mob boss, the surfer comes across a gang of other men at the beach, who are similarly afflicted with animalistic traits, who scream at a campfire before charging off into the sea. But that comes to nothing.
In their director’s statement, the filmmaker noted that he wanted “to allow true freedom on set”, adding that as filmmaking is now “more accessible and affordable than ever”, he saw “no reason to stick to the traditional approach” of filmmaking, with “rigid roles within the crew”. Having sat through this resulting story, I can think of a few reasons why those “rigid” roles persist when it comes to telling a story. Most importantly, having an actual script in place, rather than the barely-there draft Laucke’s cast were asked to work with, might have led to something more direct and impactful than the feverish and meandering mess currently on display.
Having a more coherent plan in place might also have helped everyone involved play to their strengths, and deliver something more consistent in tone. Noordzeekanaal does not seem to take itself very seriously at all – there are plenty of silly moments which will (intentionally, I think make you laugh). The actors playing the mob boss and the surfer seem to be on two different sets, though, in terms of what they think they should be doing – leading to both performances feeling wasted.
Apparently sitting atop a drug empire, the mob boss is played as a pantomime villain, chewing the scenery with an edge of irony to his delivery – knowing that everything he says sounds like a cliché, but snarling his way through proceedings with aplomb regardless. Meanwhile, the actor as the surfer is delivering raw, and occasionally hazardous emotion. In the scene where he collapses in despair at the beach, he begins sobbing into the sand face-down, rubbing the grains into his eyes, ingesting and inhaling it in copious amounts – during a scene which lasts much, much longer than it needs. And in the scene where the other crazy men pull him into the dunes to chant around the fire, every one of them basically sticks their face in the flames, several appear to pick up burning debris with their hands, and one finally aims a bare-footed kick square through the blaze, sending cinders flying around them. It is a spectacular display of physical commitment delivered for the sake of a film which is being delivered as a tongue-in-cheek production.
In the end, Noordzeekanaal desperately needs to pick a lane, then. As it is, the film has two energies which do not sit well with one another, and could have been directed to individual – and successful – projects. Had they seen fit to direct in the ‘traditional’ sense, the director had the skills and the cast to deliver an intense experimental horror – if they could stand to lose the crime-movie subplot – featuring the surfer and his committed band of animalistic drug addicts.
Or, they could have zeroed in on the silly, but admittedly enjoyable, story about an incompetent crime lord, whose antiquated methods of transporting product keep leading to more trouble than they are worth – while taking out the extended cinematic shots of the moody Dutch coast, which take all the momentum out of the comedic elements in this story. Whichever direction the production eventually went in, that could have yielded something much shorter – and a great deal more watchable.
There is fun to be had in Noordzeekanaal – in a so-bad-it’s-good sense, at least. But those moments of brilliant insanity are too few and far between. But there are glimmers of potential for something much more fulfilling than that – should the director decide that their next project is one where they dare to take a bit more of a decisive stance in what they are making.