Vlees

I saw this Dutch movie at a film festival, and certainly it's not the sort of movie that usually gets a commercial release. It's kind of hard to describe, set mostly in a slaughterhouse (thus the title) it is a mix of surreal dark comedy and experimental film. It's hard to compare with anything, though one might find in it echoes of movies by David Lynch or Peter Greenaway. There is a lot of emphasis in meat (in the cow sense and in the naked human flesh sense) and in bodily functions. There are several gross out scenes, played for laughs. For example, right at the beginning, we have a very obese middle aged man making love in the shower to a very beautiful young blond girl. There is a murder right at the start, and the movie becomes a sort of detective story, though who done it is obviously not very important. The same actor, for example, plays the murdered butcher and the detective (it has this sort of modernist tricks). I am not saying this movie is for everyone or even for most people, but I have to say that I enjoyed this movie and laughed quite a bit at the theater.

An overweight and ugly butcher is sexually involved with his boss and his younger and attractive co-worker, who also likes to film stuff in green nightvision for some reason.

Some loser is out there doing who knows what in an office. His mom doesn't think much of him and he's not interested in his girlfriend/wife at all.

The attractive butcher girl is somewhat slutty, lets others take advantage of her, and gets herself involved with some animal activist guy. There's a murder I guess, and it turns out the loser is a cop tasked with the investigation. In the end there's something of a twist.

Meat features very little dialogue but lots of animal meat/gore which is a bit more perverse and sick than it needs to be. The butcher doesn't do butcher work if you will, instead he cuts up animal carcasses and organs in some gore-porn fashion for the sickos behind the camera. There's some ugly sex among ugly people and mostly unattractive nude bodies. The story seems to be OK...for a short, which this movie sort of is but they just added a bunch of gratuitous animal meat footage as filler and to make up for the absence of dialogue.

The ending is puzzling and I'm not sure if it's possible to make sense of the movie after all.

A very strange movie that shows a lot of "flesh". Both from animals (raw meat) and human (naked). But to reduce it to those things would be simple minded and not fair to the movie. It tries to create a vibe, an otherworldly feeling to it. Apart from the usual numbness that might succumb anyone in our society today that is.

There is not only one mystery, but quite a few, especially concerning the ending that seems to be quite a maze. Even an extended scene on the DVD didn't really answer any question, which you might find good or bad, depending on how you like your movies. The acting is solid (underplayed as the whole movie of course) and the rare dialog is decent enough too.

MEAT is a dark surreal thriller with a complex plot and weird characters. It's all very strange from the beginning, because all the characters have unusual behavior and everything is very disconnected and unclear. We don't know who is who and why they're taking those actions. The main plot's topic is a murder that occurs inside a butcher shop but the oddness begins when we notice that the detective and the victim are so identical that they seem to be the same man (it's the same actor that plays both roles)! Then it enters in a quite surreal and bizarre development that not even the end turns it clear and solved… yes, it begins strange and ends even stranger…

I liked this mood of mystery and oddness and also some bizarre scenes that occur unexpectedly (like that one when the detective's girlfriend (?) commits suicide, or the urine scene), but the pace is a bit too slow and there're some details that should have been better explained… As other users said it's not a movie for everyone and not be distributed in a commercial circuit because it clearly has an experimental and surreal basis that is materialized in an artsy cinematography and unusual plot. It's the kind of movies you can't figure it all out just seeing it for the first time