Van Warmerdam is my favourite Dutch director. He makes films that are quintessentially Dutch in their tone and touches upon Dutch sensibilities with confounding and intriguing absurdism.

Borgman is a step away from that in so far that this is a more universally themed film, but it is still imbued in that trademark van Warmerdam style. It is a film that is very difficult to grasp and I feel attempting to make sense of it is missing the point. This is a visually striking mood piece, focused more on conveying a sensation rather than recounting a story.

Borgman is about evil. Evil we, adults, call upon ourselves, invite into our homes, driving our self centred lives. As heavy as this…

Borgman is a very playful, intriguing and exciting piece of film from the Dutch veteran Alex van Warmerdam (starring in a smaller role as well, as he usually does).
Borgman flings us into the action with a riveting chase between a priest and his lackeys and a group of men hiding underneath the forest soil.
One of these men turn out to be Camiel Borgman.
After Borgman warns his compatriots of the impending danger, himself having barely managed to escape, he enters a fashionable slice of suburbia and tests the inhabitants' will to let an unknown, unkempt man have a bath.

After instigating an altercation with the man of one of the houses, he manages to instill a bit of…

“And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks.”

With the utmost confidence and command, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman opening scene sunk it's hooks in deep and refused to let me go for the remainder of it's running time. A Priest and a lynch mob of sorts hunt down a nest of (literal) underground vagrants and send them scampering for safety out of the woods and into palatial suburbia, and from this dizzying and disorienting (and one of the most exhilarating cinematic moments I have experience of late) set-piece we are flung into the world of the sly and seductive Camiel Borgman.

A film that would seemingly fall into the expanding 'home invasion' subgenre of cinema, Borgman eschews categorization…

I don't want to say too much about Borgman if you're going to watch it, because it's the strange kind of film that's best to go into somewhat cold. I will say though that it's a deeply dark and downright unpleasant work of cinema filled to the brim with enormously flawed and unstable characters that angered me to my very core. Of course, this was the director's intention.

One might think the primary theme of this film is betrayal, but I would argue that the amount of manipulation that this film contains - manipulation sometimes bordering on the point of mind control - overshadows the betrayal and sort of renders it void. There were times when I felt certain characters…

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

If Pasolini's Teorema and Haneke's Funny Games had a less successful child it may be Alex van Warmerdam's surreal, horror...home invasion thriller?? Now, don't get me wrong Borgman is not a bad film. It's just missing that little, often intangible, elusive, "something." It stars Jan Bijvoet as the enigmatic, cunningly evil, Camiel Borgman. The film is precisely directed and photographed, along with strong performance from Bijvoet and Hadewych Minis in particular. There is not a shot wasted, soaking in all of the natural beauty of the secluded area of The Netherlands where the film takes place. Aesthetic beauty flows from every shot, even the violent scenes, which is an impressive accomplishment. The story…