Director: Richard Dijkema
Writer: Richard Dijkema
Cast: Carlijn van Rij, Joy Douglas
Running time: 45mins
Not every filmmaker discloses how much their production costs when they submit a film to Indy Film Library. But of those who do, since 2019, we have given 14 films with a production budget under €10,000 a 4.5 or 5-star review.
In the last two years, that has included some really breathtaking projects, like L’Audition de Jeanne, Pick You Up at 6: Be Here, and Narcissus. Each of those contends with some extremely complex social and emotional issues – and often via a creative, abstract audio-visual language – in under 20 minutes. The key to their success, in every case, was understanding what the most innovative and important factor of their story, and being willing to strip back anything that was not necessary to the world they created.
The reason I detail this, is that Richard Dijkema’s Stuk/gemaakt [Broken/Healed] arrived in IFL’s inbox with a disclaimer. In the submission through FilmFreeway (where our rules clarify that every film will receive a public review), IFL was humbly asked to consider that this project had “a limited budget of 10K”, and “therefore could only afford 9 production days” when weighing up its achievements. To that end, it is hard to get past the fact that I have seen many films over the years, which cost the same or less – but clearly made better use of the resources at their disposal.
One of those resources is the extraordinary talent of Carlijn van Rij. She plays Anouk van Noort – a scientist who is heading up an impossible programme, deploying time travel to foil sexual assault before it happens – and brings an emotional authenticity which has the power to ground even this unbelievable sci-fi premise in reality. But while the reveal of her own character’s backstory, and her motivation for this ground-breaking scientific advance, are impeccably played out by Van Rij, it is hard to escape from the feeling that this character is who the whole 45 minutes should have been devoted to.
This is an arc that should feel earned, because after all, it underlines the most important (and obvious) paradox at the heart of this slightly laboured metaphor. We can never go back in time to stop the trauma in our lives from happening – but we can learn from it, and use it to help build a better world, where others are spared the same experiences that will scar us.
In that case, gradually drawing out the trauma in the Anouk’s backstory, and hanging everything on two or three set-piece monologues where Dijkema’s (admittedly well-written) speeches would have made much more sense, in order to deliver the impactful narrative this film’s worthy social topics deserve. And it could have opened up more time and space for Van Rij to really grow into the character, and make the most of her impeccable emotive talents in front of the camera.
Sadly, this is not where Dijkema’s priorities seem to have fallen. Instead, taking up valuable time and money, we receive an excruciating grounding into the logistics and risks of ‘leaping’ into the past. There are multiple jokes about teleporting into a brick wall and breaking someone’s nose, there are long and non-committal sequences where the scientist’s willing volunteer prevents some horrific historic abuse from taking place, in surprisingly underwhelming fashion. And there is a B-plot in which one of the team becomes gravely ill due to the effects of time travel on the human body – which falls completely flat, after no attempt is made to build them up as a three-dimensional character.
All this is to say, with the same budget, focused into a run-time of half the length, I can see a film which works here. A version of Stuk/gemaaktwhich simplified its themes into Anouk – as a brilliant scientist, driven to the brink of physical and mental destruction by her desire to avoid addressing her own trauma by obsessing on others; who eventually has a cathartic reckoning with her past – could have carried the audience with the story, however implausible it seemed. We are willing to suspend our disbelief for the right story – without the need for extensive set-dressing, side-plots, or ungainly sections trying to ‘explain’ the science supposedly enabling things.
Indeed, the more time Dijkema devotes to living up to certain standards of the genre, the more attention he calls to the shortcomings of the production. The set where the time-machine sits, for example, is decked entirely in what appears to be tin-foil and hazard tape. It is needless, in the sense most of us have already seen the inside the bland, sterile walls of some kind of medical facility, and do not need to have futuristic set-dressing like this to convince us science would take place in this venue. And by doing it, attention is called to the cheapness of the aesthetic, which screams of 70s Doctor Who, rather than modern sci-fi drama.
When a documentary crew arrives to interview Anouk for some exposition, meanwhile, the idea a camera crew would be allowed into this facility at all raises way more questions than it allows to be answered. The session reveals that this facility has some kind of funding behind it – but whether that were public or private investment, whoever was paying for research into time-travel where changing the present is a possibility, those interests are unlikely to be as benign as the ones driving Anouk. As minds wander towards this likelihood that is never addressed, the importance of what we are being shown diminishes. At the same time, it seems unlikely that a camera-crew would be allowed in at all, given that the idea time-travelling justice warriors might be about to disrupt any number of powerful, Epsteinish individuals – who notoriously do not take threats to their networks of control and abuse well. Just carelessly announcing the identity of the scientists and the location of the facility apparently held together with hazard tape would inevitably make them targets – and their extremely important discovery either destroyed, or stolen.
At the same time, there is no room to address the most interesting point the film’s concept strikes upon. That is to say, that when the project foils a paedophile, expecting the past of the child he was targeting to suddenly be great, the victim of historic abuse does not simply vanish from before them like he never needed to ask for their help. That’s because while the teacher who was targeting him was sacked, he was still in the same set of power dynamics as before, and another predator at the school simply stepped in to take advantage of that instead. The shortcomings of simply treating concepts of sexual abuse and exploitation as individual woes is suddenly are so briefly touched upon – and a debate about the need to transform society and its power dynamics in a way that might seem even more difficult than time travel seems to be on the cards – but with that superfluous B-plot having to press on, we immediately forget about it and move on.
One final issue is that while Stuk/gemaakt does make inventive attempts to address important social issues, it often feels slightly tone-deaf on those topics. In the title crawl, text rightly points out that some men also suffer from sexual abuse. The thing is, the number is smaller than for women. And on the other end of it, those who perpetrate such crimes are more likely to be men – while the current power dynamics of society and the economy mean that they often get away with it. The story is open to criticisms on this basis, as it comes from a male writer-director, who arguably projects a kind of nobility onto one woman’s suffering. That is surely unintentional, but even so, a story in which someone resolves that her horrific memories would be in some way necessary in order to help other people, is a sacrificial trope which will likely make some viewers feel very uncomfortable. And again, a more focused use of the film’s limited resources could have helped here. Because considering that character’s journey is so often battling to be heard among other plot lines, I also feel put off by the way things ultimately played out.