THE STORY – When an elderly reed cutter discovers the body of a young woman on his land, he sets out to investigate her murder, driven by an apparent sense of guilt.
THE CAST – Gerrit Knobbe, Loïs Reinders, Anna Loefen & Zola van Zoggel
THE TEAM – Sven Bresser (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 112 Minutes
Premiering in the Critics’ Week section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, this existential thriller marks the feature debut of Dutch writer-director Sven Bresser. As such, it’s an intriguingly ambiguous blend of fantasy and reality that plays compelling games with audience expectations.
Opening and closing with images of black smoke and fire, the story centers on 60-something reed cutter Johan (non-professional actor Gerrit Knobbe, a real-life reed cutter), who lives and works in a small, rural town in the IJsselmeer district in Holland. When he discovers the body of a young woman on his land, Johan sets out to investigate her murder, driven by an ambiguous motivation that could be guilt or something else entirely.
Given that Johan frequently looks after his young, adolescent granddaughter Dana (Loïs Reinders), it’s entirely possible that he’s simply motivated by a desire to protect her from a similar fate, especially since the murder victim was raped – a fact that is never mentioned in the script, but is evident from the way the body is discovered. Johan’s suspicions quickly fall on the motorbike-riding son of a rival farmer, but his somewhat clumsy attempts to investigate – sneaking into their barn to look for the motorbike – escalate preexisting tensions to a dangerous degree.
The murder case is complicated further by the fact that the woman turns out to be an illegal immigrant, part of a group of foreign border crossers referred to locally as “Trooters.” There’s already a high degree of anti-immigrant sentiment in the town, but is her death a hate crime or something else?
Bresser’s central theme echoes David Lynch’s work in that it excavates the evil that lurks beneath the surface of small-town suburbia. Bresser himself isn’t above a bit of on-the-nose symbolism in this regard—at one point, Sven discovers reserves of tar on his land (literally oozing visceral darkness) in a moment that comes perilously close to making the audience roll their eyes and go, “Okay, we get it.”
However, Bresser later follows that scene with a simultaneously bizarre, subtly menacing sequence and deeply ambiguous. Having heard a loud noise from his washing machine, Johan opens it to find a thick, black mass of solidified tar, like a rock. Is it a threat? The supernatural manifestation of evil in a domestic setting? Have the rival farmers somehow put it there? The script pointedly refuses to provide any answers, and Johan’s bafflingly contradictory reaction (first, he throws it into the lake, then he retrieves it) only serves to confuse matters further.
Bresser’s eye for the bizarre also extends to the film’s funniest subplot, in which Dana asks Johan for help in constructing hippo costumes for her school play. The costumes themselves are inventive and striking, priming the audience for something cute and adorable, only for it to turn out that the play centers on a group of hippo people who massacre entire villages.
Accordingly, the school play sequence perfectly encapsulates the film’s central theme of the darkness lurking within both nature and humanity (there’s a clue early on when two hippos are shown in a violent fight in a documentary clip). There’s a similar note in the film’s most sexually explicit sequence, involving Johan’s prized mare being impregnated by a local stallion, a prime example of a symbolic horse (an all-too-common arthouse cinema trope), though to say more would be straying into spoiler territory.
Sex itself plays an integral part in the story, also functioning as a dark undercurrent of human desire. For example, Johan is clearly attracted to Aleida (Anna Loefen), a young local singer he sees hitchhiking. But once again, the motivations in his actions are ambiguous at best. It’s possible that Johan wishes to protect her from the clearly toxic young farmer. Still, his experience with an AI sexbot (a masturbation sequence that is equal parts comic and pitiful) shows that he has clearly unsatisfied sexual desires of his own. Is he capable of having committed the rape and murder, even though he didn’t do it himself?
The performances are excellent. Knobbe’s real-life experience clearly pays off in the extended reed-burning sequences (an almost ritualistic process that involves burning away weeds and impurities), and he has an enigmatic stoicism that’s compelling to watch. There’s also strong support from Loïs Reinders, while Loefen contributes a colorful turn as Aleida.
In addition, the film is gorgeously shot throughout, courtesy of cinematographer Sam du Pon, who creates images with natural light and landscapes worthy of the Dutch Masters. His coup de grace comes in a beautiful shot of what initially looks like the night sky but is revealed to be the discovery of the tar in Johan’s reedland.
In short, this is an accomplished debut for writer-director Bresser, a superbly acted and beautifully shot mystery thriller with a strong sense of place and some satisfyingly Lynchian undertones. There’s even a bit with a menacing tractor, like an evil version of “The Straight Story.”
