Serial blogueuse

It's very easy to interact with people you don't know on the internet; and it's very easy to be very mean to people you don't know. But might it also not be easy to take revenge on them? This is the central idea of Dutch comedy-thriller 'The Columnist', which keeps a mostly straight face even as its plot turns farcical. The central character is well-constructed, and there is a serious point about the toxic nature of social media. 'The Columnist' never quite reaches the peak of 'Black Mirror', but it's nicely paced and might just make you think twice about the difference between how you behave online and in real life.

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.

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.

Seriously, who hasn't wanted to hunt down some internet trolls. I'm not saying you should actually do it, but I'm sure the fantasy of at least scaring them has crossed all our minds at least once. The Columnist/De Kuthoer is one of those movies where you quickly end up cheering for the killer because these people aren't just trolls that poke some fun; no they are saying they know where she lives and they are threatening her and being extra awful. We quickly see how the addiction to social media does so much harm, but also how Femke seems to now be addicted to killing. The character development in this is wonderful. We see so many sides of Femke, the harm this addiction does to her, her boyfriend and her daughter; who is inspired by her mom and trying to speak out against issues regarding freedom of speech. There's a lot of irony in this with Femke silencing people for their words while also saying she supports free speech. Femke mostly writes a pretty neutral column, but she does end up getting a lot of hate because she is anti-Zwarte Piet/Black Pete. She's also under stress of deadlines from her publisher for a book she's writing. It seems the killing helps her with her writing though, so I guess that's good for her and sucks for the trolls?