Director: Lisette Vlassak
Writer: Lasse Feijen
Cast: Frieda Barnhard, Daniël Boissevain
Running time: 7mins
The stereotypes which both England and the Netherlands live up to, are their society’s positions on polite rephrasing. English is a language built to obfuscate and understate, so English people have a hard-earned reputation for going around the piss-pot to get to the handle; meanwhile Dutch people have a reputation for being cold and blunt, because their language is more muscular and direct. In social situations which call for finesse (birthdays, weddings, funerals) that is to the language’s detriment. But in others, where something sinister is being masked by double-speak, it offers an opportunity to strip back the ideological window dressing in the things we say, and quickly get to a raw truth at the heart of a situation.
One of those moments comes in Onderaards (which has the English title of The Beneath). Lone (Frieda Barnhard) is a 30-year-old model in the Netherlands, who finds herself on the set of a particularly difficult photoshoot. After being dressed, undressed, arranged and rearranged like a breathing mannequin, skeezy agent Casper (the appropriately slimy Daniël Boissevain) demands her contact lenses be removed at the behest of the klant.
In Dutch there is no euphemism for a difference between a client and a customer – klant covers it all. So, while the English subtitles attempt to dignify Lone’s position – offering a linguistic fig leaf where we can reconcile her as a rational individual engaged in an exchange of services for payment – the original text lays bare her status: a product, a commodity made of flesh and blood, to be poked, prodded and shaped according to someone else’s tastes.
As blaring electronic music by Max Abel pulsates through the cavernous studio, there will be inevitable comparisons drawn with The Substance, as a gaggle of leering ghouls snarls orders at a woman they see as an expendable resource, oblivious to or uncaring of their own grotesque appearance. While the men loudly offer encouragement to Lone about her looks and performance on the shoot – the loathsome Casper is chief among them – they undercut every statement with a stage-whispered criticism, scything Lone’s self-esteem down at every opportunity.
We’ve all submitted ourselves to things that we should say no to, while chasing compliments and the intoxicating dopamine rush which they can trigger. In her own such quest, Lone sits placidly while the final order to remove her contact lenses effectively blinds her. It might be the most unnerving of all the moments in Lasse Feijen’s script, which (also like The Substance) transitions to more conventional horror in its second half.
Director of photography Ruben van Weelden is suddenly presented with a very different set of challenges, as Lone regroups at her idyllic farmhouse. As she tends to her vegetable garden, Van Weelden – who had the hollow carcass of a photo studio to leverage for dramatic effect – now has to find the eery side of sun-kissed grass and blue skies. To his credit, his imagery pulls this off – making the most of a looming, skeletal wood on the perimeter of the property to suggest that some malignant force might be lingering over Lone’s shoulder, even here.
In the end, though, as the title suggests, the threat comes from within Lone’s sacred space. Something is eating her vegetables, devouring them from the inside out – and churning great, Tremors-like mounds of earth behind it. But this ‘worm’ is strangely well-manicured – and as the segment comes to a head, it begins to overlap with Lone’s earlier experiences at the photoshoot. It becomes clear that whatever we are witnessing, whether it is literal or a figment of Lone’s troubled mind, she will need to learn to live with her inner-demons if she is to survive, and cultivate a brighter future.
As Lone, Barnhard does a fantastic job in conveying a woman whose self-confidence is ebbing away, as the ground shifts from beneath her feet. In both environments she manages to present as a fierce and determined presence, someone who knows what they need and how to get it – but sees that façade evaporate the moment she is challenged on anything. Pushed to new levels of subterranean desperation in the film’s conclusion, however, she manages to wordlessly illustrate a rebirth, as someone unwilling to cede ground to anyone else’s exploitative ends.
With a beautiful farmhouse and luscious garden to fall back on, there is a slight class-blindness here that might make a few people in the audience snipe, “well, that’s easy for her to say.” But the fantastical, allegorical mode of storytelling here mean I don’t think Onderaards really needs to stand up to that level of realist debate.
A bigger issue for director Lisette Vlassak is that (again, like The Substance) one of her film’s biggest assets also undermines its effectiveness as a piece of genre. Nothing in The Substance ever manages to be as disgusting as Dennis Quaid and his bowl of shrimp – which on the one hand, is a powerful condemnation of patriarchal power, but on the other means a film billed as being a body horror underwhelms on its most central promise. In Onderaards, meanwhile, the terror lying just beneath the peaceful surface of Lone’s garden never makes our skin crawl in the way that the odious men belittling and berating Lone in her workplace.
It’s tough to offer advice on how to improve that balance – because I do still like the idea that the real monsters are just men – but perhaps Vlassak might have dug a little deeper to offer us some more visceral scares than she finds space for in this (admittedly very brief) window of time. Fortunately, in this case, the film’s ending does compensate for this slightly – delivering a more empathetic arc for Lone than Elisabeth or Sue ever gets, and meaning the horror element falling a little flat doesn’t leave us feeling unsatisfied with the conclusion.
There is a lot to love about Onderaards. It is allegorical, but still manages to be unapologetically direct in its delivery, giving us food for thought alongside some genuinely unnerving horror beats. And while it might have packed an even greater punch than it mustered, everyone involved has given a great account of themselves here – as part of an emerging generation of talented and original filmmakers that should be making cinemagoers in the Netherlands very excited.