Ben, a withdrawn autistic boy, dreams of taking revenge on the school bullies in the same effortless way he dispatches his enemies in computer games in the accomplished Belgian feature Ben X. Based on a play that was in turn based on a bestselling book, Ben X sees Nic Balthazar, the author of both these works, also in the director’s chair for the film adaptation. It would be hard to guess from the final result that Balthazar has never made a film before: Ben X takes full advantage of all that the medium has to offer. The film has been a hit in Belgium with over 260,000 tickets sold to date, though foreign results have been less stellar, with some of the film’s appeal probably literally lost in translation. A US remake is already in the works, which should widen this story’s appeal ever further.

Ben (Greg Timmermans, definitely too old-looking to be going to secondary school) is a computer game fanatic who loves to lock himself up in his room to play online games with his virtual partner Scarlite (Laura Verlinden), the avatar of a girl he has never met. He is not very good at physically facing people; suffering from autism, he is picked on at school, where even the headmaster is not particularly sympathetic to his cause, much to the distress of Ben’s caring mother (Marijke Pinoy).

Two of his classmates, Bogaert (Titus de Voogd, Belgium’s hottest young actor) and Desmedt (Maarten Claeyssens), are concentrating their efforts on Ben, and finally one of their exploits ends up on the only place where Ben felt safe: the internet. This leads to a break-down with dire consequences, handled by Balthazar with a cinematic sleigh of hand that is a tough balancing act but played just right; neither too flashy nor too maudlin. Even the unlikely final turn of events and some of its overly clumsy symbolism somehow finds its appropriate place once everything comes together.

Autism aside, the film’s portrayal of school bullying is its major selling point, and together with the Estonian film Klass (The Class), it makes for an unnerving if solid cinematic case against bullying in school. 

As a story with two previous incarnations in literature, Ben X might be untranslatable, loaded as it is with wordplay and puns. The title alone is a pun on Ben’s computer avatar, his own name and his non-existent sense of self-worth as Ben X phonetically sounds like ‘I am nothing’ in Dutch. A lot of the film's clever wordplay will be lost on foreign audiences, though Balthazar largely compensates with a flashy -- but fully justified -- execution that welds the real and virtual worlds together in such a visually assured way that non-Dutch speakers will probably forget about the literary origins of the story altogether.

The film's cinematography and production design, by Lou Berghmans and Kurt Loyens, the team behind the equally stylish De Indringer (The Intruder), play a major part in telling the story, making Ben X one of the first films in which the virtual world is convincingly used to express character. Cinema has come a long way since Leonardo di Caprio mechanically jumped through a computer game version of Asia in The Beach.

Together with well-made mainstream comedies such as Man zkt vrouw and balls-out arthouse titles like Ex Drummer and Small Gods, the arthouse light Ben X also shows that Flemish cinema is on the up again and that intelligent films can also become local blockbusters.

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