Director: Vadim River van der Vlugt
Writer: Vadim River van der Vlugt
Cast: Djinny Johanna Maria Niesten, Vadim River van der Vlugt, Nynke Kooij, Theo Wesselo, Jasper Raming
Running time: 30mins
Confrontational, abrasive, Zeevonk doesn’t so much as tell you a story, as assault you with it. Every sense available feels like its coming under attack: pointedly low-fi digital imagery leave us straining for information amid bizarre landscapes; screeching variations in volume refuse to let us drift through this strange world; sudden strobing title cards make our heads throb; if there was some way to inflict the stench of rotting fruit on our nostrils then writer-director Vadim River van der Vlugt would undoubtedly have deployed it as well.
That might not sound like a pleasant experience – and in many ways it is not. But in many more, I find it oddly courageous. This is a film which its creators must have known will not only divide audiences, but make some actively hostile – yet it never shies away from calling your consciousness back from the void. The aim isn’t to provide some abstract space for internal contemplation, this is not to give us a respite from the eternal nagging of the modern world, but to emphasise and the nightmarish collage of goldfish-brained interactions existence now consists of.
Here I think the term ‘magical realism’ is entirely appropriate in the film’s marketing – because it uses aspects of fantasy to underline the way our own lived experience has shifted. Clair Luv (the suitably bemused Djinny Johanna Maria Niesten) finds herself cut adrift by a curse placed upon her by her late husband. Before being executed, possibly for practicing black magic, he has doomed her to teleport around the Netherlands any time she obtains someone’s romantic attention. She is informed of this peculiar fate via a letter from the Gemeente, which tells her how she might counteract the spell – but typically stops short of offering any assistance in doing so.
Alienated from a strange and constantly shifting world, Clair’s life begins to resemble a churning highlight reel; either of the social media hellscape, or – thanks to the wonderfully noisy digital film, shot in 4:3 on some ancient camcorder – one of those nonsensically eclectic music videos from the 1990s. She finds herself leaping abruptly between disconnected interactions, contexts and environments in a way many of us can relate to: sporadically spacing out during our commute, our lunch breaks, our strange impersonal conversations with colleagues or acquaintances, and even in our noisy ‘escape’ into the similarly discombobulating realms of social media, or a churning nostalgia of a fictional past.
We find ourselves trapped in a daily cycle of deceptively simple questions: what was I doing, how did I get here? Rather than provide guard-rails against our disruption or exploitation amid all this, the state has been stripped back to the point where its only consistent service is to remind us how screwed we are, and offer minor amounts of advice. Meanwhile, at every turn there are odd, arbitrary rules which we may not understand even with all the context, but we will not understand if we are not constantly prompting ourselves to rewire our brains, re-focus our attention.
Zeevonk continuously disrupts the flow of its narrative along these lines, tempting us into a false sense of security, before berating us for trying to watch casually. Longer sequences – where Clair and her helpful brother-in-law Charlie (Van der Vlugt, doing a passable job of acting under his own direction) meander through the woods singing to themselves, or stop to get ice-cream, or take in the sights of a desolate coastline – suggest there is room for us to think, before suddenly we find ourselves panicking somewhere else. In other films, that might feel like a problem, but with the constant stinging reminders which follow these shifts, it seems to be a deliberate comment on our over-stretched mental capacities.
Are you confused? Did you miss something? WELL THIS SCREECHING, STROBING TITLE CARD SHOULD HELP WITH THAT. AND SUDDENLY DISPLACING OUR SCREAMING PROTAGONIST INTO THE MIDDLE OF A DESERTED COUNTRY ROAD. THAT SHOULD HELP WAKE YOU UP.
Whether the story itself is rewarding enough to endure this onslaught is open to debate. Considering the prologue and epilogue seem to entirely contradict each other, concluding the journey Clair undertakes with Charlie does not carry much satisfaction for me. If I’m going to be put through this experience which serves to remind me of the stress and confusion of my daily routine, I already have free and easy access to those feelings. I need something else, a reason to do this to myself – even if that is a simple message about the solidarity of fellow-wayfarers helping to live with the noise. That doesn’t seem to be present, though.
At the same time, some of the charm, the comedic edge of the film, will be lost in translation during that epilogue – as Zeevonk becomes the latest Dutch film to carelessly toss the slur “retard” around. There is a cultural difference, in that Dutch equivalents are more socially acceptable in conversation than in UK or US English. When a character uses the term now, it reflects negatively on the character that uses it – it is not treated as a piece of cheeky banter, and if it is deployed as such, it reflects negatively on a production. This is something which, if you are going to subtitle a film into English to distribute a film to another geography, you need to make yourself aware of.
That is perhaps the one foible I wish Zeevonk had been a little more timid about, or better still, had been more creative when writing jocular dialogue for one of its least consequential characters to suddenly below. It does a disservice to a film which otherwise is hellbent on unapologetic, adventurous weirdness from start to finish. Overall, there is something refreshing going on here artistically: a story which makes bold choices, and determinedly beckons you to pay full attention to them, whether you like it or not.