De kuthoer

Male a**holes plague writer an columninst Femke. Cybertrolling, insulting, dominating, bullying, hating. Then Femke takes drastic measures. Actress Katja Herbers is great in this movie. With one look she shows us she is taking fateful decisions, maintaining a state of irony all the time. Seemingly innicent scenes get an ominous turn as she confronts her agressors with her being innocent and revengeful at the same time. Great scene settings, and balanced direction. Director Ivo doesn't need nervous camera movements or nervous cutting, actionmovie style, to create Hitchcockian tension. Will the police find out? Check out the scene with the nude guy in the bath. You are a nice guy"? O.k." Splash!!! No country for old men meets First wives club...

Haters are gonna die.

They say, don't read the comments, and sadly, that's true. For every one positive comment, there has to be 10 negative ones written by some poor hack living in its parents' basement. I'm usually good at mocking them, but they do feed off that. I wouldn't want to meet them. Femke Boot would.

Meet The Columnist. Someone hated for her opinions online. Fortunately for her, unlucky for them, they all live within driving distance. And when the title character confronts her 1st hater in person...she gets a taste of it.

I rather liked this affair. It's not perfect and the lead performers (Mom, Boyfriend & Daughter) aren't very convincing, but I was intrigued enough to see where this led.

Worth a watch for anyone who gets hateful comments, but has no other outlet to digest them. HINT: either delete the comments, or laugh at that person...or bot.

***

Final Thoughts: This was in Dutch, but I would LOVE to see an American, independent remake of this. No studio interference and someone in the lead who can play that Serial Mom dual role perfectly. I suggest Laura Linney. I totally can see her losing it on screen while improving as she's becoming the beast she is.

Columnist and author Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) rails against the online discourse which includes countless disturbing attacks against her and her daughter Anna. The police dismisses her. She's struggling to write her next book. She spots nasty racist misogynist tweets apparently coming from her noisy neighbor. She goes on a murderous revenge rampage.

This is fine. I am most intrigued with Katja acting in her native tongue. She sounds like I expected. A more compelling story would have somebody else catfishing as the noisy neighbor. She kills an innocent and gets blackmailed for it. That's a good twist. Some of these people must be using burner accounts. It's trolling 101. It's too easy to track down these people and I don't believe that Femke can kill these men with her hands. I do like the freedom of speech argument. This is fine.

Fancy a bit of mindless cyber-bullying/trolling? I wouldn't point that finger too fast, you might just pick the wrong 'victim'. Such as Femke Boot, columnist and would-be novelist with a bout of writer's block and an attack of (cyber) trolls vicious enough to make anyone head for the nearest Wi-Fi-free coldspot before you can say firefox adblocker. Femke, ( perfectly played by Katja Herbers), is not anyone, however, and the ensuing blackly comic madness, while never totally over the top, is always slightly skewed from reality, Stepford Wives-ish, so that the film could -almost- be called whimsical. Plenty of fun.

She did not hold a sex slave in the basement (and many other thing). But she did become a terrible person just like those trash-critic saying on Internet.

In the end, this movie is not about some regular and easy issue. It's about how fail we alway are as being a human.