European Films

In the early 1990s, a group of derailed youngsters dubbed The Gang of Venlo shocked the normally peaceful Catholic South of the Netherlands when they committed a series of heinously violent crimes. Director Pieter Kuijpers, who has worked extensively in Dutch television, decided that this contrast would be an interesting subject for his feature film debut called Van God los (Godforsaken). In the screenplay, which Kuijpers co-wrote with Paul Jan Nelissen, he concentrates on a small triangle from which the violence emanates: Maikel (Tygo Gernandt), a violently tempered kid; Stan (Egbert Jan Weeber), a quiet boy from a broken home who needs to belong and Anna (Angela Schijf), Maikel’s hip girlfriend who kind of likes Stan too.

 

The most innovative streak of this gritty work is the voice-over narration provided by the innocent-come-violent Stan. Normally, voice-overs are a sign of lazy film-making, but in this case it works, because not only is Stan an expertly written and acted character, he is first and foremost an outsider and as such has the audience on his side. A high school drop-out who lives with his mother and her dentist husband, Stan becomes Maikel’s friend by accident, because he chooses to cover him when the police are looking for the petty thief. Maikel thanks him and asks if he would care for "more interesting jobs".

 

After Maikel has been caught again by the police, he announces with great pomposity: “Stan, we have been risking too much for too little. From now on, we will do things differently”. A tip from Maikel’s junkie friend Sef (Mads Wittemans) leads to a robbery that soon goes awry and not much later the trio have a corpse on their hands. Their first killing, even though it was "an accident", is the point of no return for both of them. “It will be easier after the first one,” Stan tells himself. Even though Maikel’s girlfriend Anna remains (perhaps consciously) in the dark about their sources of revenue, Maikel and Stan start to work as contract killers for the local Turkish mafia.

Van God los' tone is neither apologetic nor afraid of big emotions and the characters scream, cry and scream some more for the film's entire 83 minutes. This heightened emotional state serves the film well and though the characters are extreme, there are not less believable because of it. Bert Pot’s cinematography reminds one of Morten Søborg's Super-8 sequences in Elsker dig for evigt (Open Hearts), often grainy yet atmospheric. Pot counterbalances all the action and vivid emotions by many slow moving shots, avoiding a film that becomes a parody of kinetic energy by lingering on the characters’ faces.

 

Egbert Jan Weeber is superb as Stan, the emotional core of the film, and his often flickering eyes convey shades of anger, despair and wonder. He remains an outsider throughout the often barbaric proceedings, as if everything were happening to someone else and he was just standing by, watching. Gernandt is an impressive bad-ass with the proverbial heart of gold (look out for the scene where he shows Anna the new house; he really just wants to be a family man) and Schijf, though she is not given much to do, does a decent job of portraying the woman that loves both.

 

Van God los is a moody crime thriller that is as shocking for what is on screen as for the knowledge that it is inspired by real events. Top notch writing  and cinematography and a fabulous performance by Mr Weeber make of this short work something that is not to be missed.

 

Buy the DVD at: nl.bol.com, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk.

 

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