The words stylish and Flemish are rarely used in the same sentence by cinephiles, but after Koen Mortier’s Ex Drummer from earlier this year, there is now a second film that just would justify their conjunction: Dimitri Karakatsanis’s demented road movie Small Gods. Like the language of its title indicates, the film owes more to English-language (and particularly US) cinema than home-grown fare, with Malick’s Badlands as the most obvious inspiration for this tale of three lost souls -- of which at least one nominally kidnapped -- travelling by camper through a dream-like Belgium, both escaping from and heading towards violent collisions in various shapes and forms.  The self-consciously arty film could please arthouse aesthetes and festival programmers.

 

Both Ex Drummer and Small Gods are first films; Mortier and Karakatsanis both come from the advertising world and Mortier’s production company co-produced Small Gods, so the two films have more in common than just their sense of style. But whereas Mortier adapted a popular novel, Karakatsanis’s subject is an original screenplay; a road movie that, like all road movies, is more about the trip itself than its physical destination. The screenplay from the director’s hand developed from an earlier work that was much more horror-oriented and of which some scenes had already been shot. In terms of narrative, these scenes nevertheless make sense, even if their tone is different from the more poetic material that constitutes the rest of the film.

Small Gods is told in what could be flash backs as Elena (newcomer Steffi Peeters) tries to explain to her lawyer (veteran Dirk van Dijck) what has happened to her since she went missing from a hospital where she was being treated for the wounds caused by the car accident that killed her little boy. According to Elena, she was kidnapped from the hospital by an unknown but apparently lovable young man named David (rising Flemish star Titus De Voogdt), who took her on a trip across the country.

 

A third person, the young blonde runaway Sarah (Louiza Vande Woestyne), joins them not much later and the three live together as a not very communicative make-shift family, with Elena never feeling the need to resist her kidnapping or plan an escape. If viewers will be as docile remains to be seen, as some of the film’s more enigmatic scenes (and particularly the more spiritually-inspired ones such as a boxing match with God) might be too esoteric and nonsensical even for patient arthouse habitués.

 

If Small Gods had been intended as a 90-minute filmmaking résumé, then cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis (the director’s brother) would probably be the one most likely to be fought over by future employers. His work is by far the most striking aspect of the film, giving Belgium a Malick-like make-over that transforms the flat and dreary country into a landscape located between dreams and nightmares. The brothers’ choice not to explicitly reference any existing geographical places was obviously the right one, with only the language giving any indication of where the story is set. Nicolas’s unerring eye for detail lends the film some moments of lyrical beauty, including a shot of a kite flying between electricity wires that works both as a stunning visual image and as a metaphor for the characters' complicated and tricky navigation through life itself.