Director: Jonathan van Wieren
Writer: Isis Caljé
Cast: Isis Caljé & Selene Caljé
Running time: 11mins
Earlier this month, Indy Film Library named Isis Caljé the Best Actor at our 2026 festival. I have said a lot about her abilities as a performer – and she does not disappoint in Zij. In such a short amount of time, many would struggle to run the emotional gamut in quite the way she manages, as Liva – a woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her sister.
Attempting to barrel her way through a light-hearted sentence addressing ‘Emma’, she proposes a symbolic evening of cinematic revelry with her sister in spirit – brandishing a VHS of the gloriously schlocky Friday the 13th: Part IV. But as she reaches the end of the statement, the gravity of her loss catches and over-takes her – her mind stalls, her voice falters into a sob.
It’s an impeccably observed emotional transition – but on the evidence of Nachtwolken, it’s also not a surprise to see that from Caljé. That comes from the revelation that this time, she is also the film’s writer. That can be a difficult transition for any artist – writing your own lines can sometimes mean any restraint or subtlty of a script quickly disappears, as you look to give yourself an opportunity to really show off your versatility at every turn.
Such an inclination would have been a fatal error for Zij, which suddenly shifts gear from a rumination on bereavment, to an atmospheric horror. But Caljé largely holds back on the areas you might expect other actors to really give themselves the chance to ham it up.
Director Jonathan van Wieren and director of photography Lionel Kuiken both deserve credit for making the most of the space the stripped back script grants, to play around with some of the 80s slasher genre’s most infamous tropes. A thudding at the door draws Liva out of her house, only to be greeted by an empty doorway – as a dimly lit figure flits into the hallway behind her. Faces and bodies seem to loom out of the shadows in her soft-focused periphery, as distinctly 80s horror stings (juuuuust bordering on becoming overwrought and kitsch) give us additional cues as to what we should now expect.
Smartly, Zij then sets about subverting those expectations – in a way which serves up a set of images far more upsetting than any of the tacky Jason-style shocks we have been cued for. Unfortunately, the soundtrack hangs in there to ensure we always know how to feel, and this feels like a mis-step, both in terms of building an ‘organic’ atmosphere with more menace, and leaving the audience feeling a little babied. Even so, the second shift in tone into a nightmarish psychological thriller, feels vibrant and evocative thanks to this contrast.
This is where there will be a small degree of spoiler – so please do not read on if you plan on watching ZIJ (and in October, IFL’s Halloween event will give you the chance to do so).
There are two areas that the film falls a little short, for me. The first is that Selene Caljé – Isis’ real-life twin – turns up in the film’s climactic act. Her performance is fine – but the issue is the way she is used. I assumed going into this that I would be watching one actor play their own double – Adaptation-style. But the fact is, the ACTUAL Caljé twins are never really in a shot where we get to see how real this all is. A distinct distance in each of their interactions means even though it was literally possible for the twins to be seen in the same shot, it still ends up feeling like a practical camera trick – and that is a missed opportunity to buy the film some extra gravity, some earned realism that will really turn our stomachs as the plot progresses.
Second, the film’s retro-aesthetic, its centring on video-nasty horrors from the 1980s, and its examination of familial trauma – specifically a deceased sister, whose death the protagonist (rightly or wrongly) feels responsible for – will put audiences who have seen it in mind of Censor. That is not inherrently a bad thing – the Netherlands has its own culture of shock-cinema, and backlashes to it, which films like Zij deserve the chance to draw on. But in its own performance of this arc, ZIJ doesn’t seem especially interested in the genre of gore-fest it centres on, or examining how it reflects, contrasts or informs attitudes toward its own characters or their communities.
That is probably because ZIJ only has a little over 10 minutes to get that job done – something had to fall by the wayside. But it does also leave the door open for a longer exploration of this world and its themes – and on the evidence of this outing, the team behind ZIJ have the talent and intelligence to pull that off, should they choose.
As the annual IFL Festival fades to memory, my mind always turns to the mad scramble for short horrors in the lead up to our October event. It is always difficult to find good short horror – not because nobody is making it, but because nobody is sending it to me! I am grateful for ZIJ – whose producers have just made my job a whole lot easier this Halloween.