Director: Ruwan Heggelman
Writer: Jasper ten Hoor, Richard Raaphorst & Ruwan Heggelman
Cast: Moïse Trustfull, Duncan Meijering
Running time: 6mins
The myths and legends of a place can provide a great insight into its people – what makes them tick, and where friction may arise. Since moving to the Netherlands, a long-term ambition of mine has therefore become writing a compendium of Dutch ghosts and ghouls.
It’s intriguing to me that so many Dutch residents already bristle with unease when you even ask tentatively about their folklore. On one occasion, when I asked if a book store had a mythology section, the response was a mixture of disbelief, and mild concern – as if the staff were unsure whether to laugh it off, or refer me to a psyche ward.
But of course, the Netherlands has folklore – and parts of it are indeed still permitted in everyday life. The telling part, returning to my earlier point, is which figures are deemed acceptable, and which are weird and dangerous. Not including festive saints, there is one which regularly appears in daily life across the Benelux. The kabouter.
In Dutch and Flemish folktales, a kabouter is a small earth-being, akin to a brownie, or more famous gnome. A kabouter usually lives in or near houses, stables, hills and heathland – essentially serving as an unpaid night labourer of the Low Countries. In exchange for somewhere to live, food, and a blind-eye turned, kabouters complete chores, and supposedly can work a farm faster and better than any human; with the caveat that the people keep their side of the bargain, of course.
What seems to gel most between the modern residents of the Netherlands, and this particular imagined being their ancestors dreamt up, is how neatly it can be tied in to the protestant work ethic. Partially-secularised Calvinism remains the national ideology, with hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, painted as the only path to eternal salvation/not dying in a homeless shelter.
If you have a young child in the Netherlands or Belgium, then, you will almost certainly hear all about kabouters – especially around the autumn. Pre-schools and schools use them to teach kids cutesy lessons about graft and respect, while TV shows (including the infernal Kabouter Plop – a crap Smurfs – where the titular Kabouter Plop is the wisest and most responsible gnome) continue the indoctrination beyond the classroom. Images of the gnomes can be found lurking on walking paths, adorning parking garages, and even wielding a gigantic sex-toy in the middle of a city (though this is not the sculptor’s intended meaning).
But is this entity really the innocent and helpful figure they are cracked up to be? Dutch independent filmmakers don’t seem so sure.
Some seven years ago, we reviewed Korte Kuitspier – a film exploring the ways gnome mythology could be deployed in a hateful and repressive, to exploit and dispossess human beings. Now, we see another nightmarish examination of the ideology at play, from Ruwan Heggelman’s splatter-fest, Gnomes.
Working with co-writers Jasper ten Hoor and Richard Raaphorst, Heggelman strips the folklore back to its core ideological component, and takes it to its naturally horrific conclusion. If these kabouters really are the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic turned up to 11, if they really share the human ambition to farm and to harvest, and to bend the world and its creatures to their every whim, then why on Earth would they be interested in peaceful co-existence?
Over the course of just under six excruciating minutes, Heggelman shows us every hideous, gore-strewn detail of the industrial process this results in. A big part of that is the special effects of Raaphorst, Jesse Tamerius and Stephan Vos, which drag us to hell and back. Wrenching a hapless jogger into their underground abattoir, the kabouters essentially subject one of us to the same grim process as commercial whaling – an industry which, in the Netherlands, first commenced during the so-called ‘Golden Age’.
Embodying the industrious spirit of that era to the nth degree, the idea of kabouters teaching your kids lessons about hard work might seem less unappealing. As every last scrap of viscera is extracted, and put to use with ghoulish zeal, by the hard-working little demons, we witness a grotesque world-turned-upside-down, and are given a chance to consider how humane our modern productions of food (particularly meat) really are, too.
The janky nature of the kabouters (they are largely static figurines of absurd caricatures) is forgivable. In part that is because so much effort was then able to go into articulating the film’s gore, rather than puppets. But also, it works because in some contexts, the kabouters still resemble those kitsch little statues so many people still keep in their gardens; so, the horror can follow us home.
There are still two things may split audiences, though. The first is the tone – which sometimes veers just a little bit too far towards comedy. And the second, is the lack of a backstory for the jogger. All this means things feel just a bit gratuitous – in a way that makes it a lot harder to stomach.
There are some aspects of this concept which are naturally ridiculous, and admittedly, the film would suffer for playing them straight. But its ungainly, Danny Elfman-like score plays everything that unfolds as a piece of quaint fun, or a bit of mystical magic.
At the same time, the terrible things that befall Moïse Trustfull happen in a narrative vacuum. Arguably, this can be justified on the basis that an industry of this kind would not care about a backstory, good or bad, for its target. No whaler ever stopped to ask whether their quarry had a family, thoughts, or feelings. However, it would have at least been best practice to give Trustfull the chance to show off some acting credentials, besides screaming in agony. And in a genre already beset by images of gratuitous violence against women, simply having her show up as a generic stand-in for everyone, and get torn apart while whimsical or comedic music cues up the audience to laugh, things feel a bit gross… not in the way the artists involved hoped for, either.
There is another anonymous man who shows up, to suggest this indiscriminate process will continue – giving the gross angle a fig-leaf of coverage at least. And perhaps feeling gross in every sense is actually appropriate here – after all, the alternative would be to let us feel comfortable while consuming this grotesquery as basic entertainment. It does, of course, deliver on that front, as a riotous celebration of practical effects, but Gnomes’ greatest success is that it feeds us some spectacularly grisly food for thought, until we are fit to burst.
