I have a friend that missed the first five minutes of Under the Skin. So – even though this was never explicitly stated in the film, but heavily implied by a “birth” in a van – he missed the idea that Scarlett Johansson was playing an alien. Or at least someone who was not human. Watching Borgman is what I’d imagine watching Jonathan Glazer’s film would be like without that key hint of information: mysterious to a fault.
There are plenty of hints in Borgman, but they all feel like red herrings. This Dutch oddity is equal parts Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema), Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). But by the end, maybe even Marina’s (Hadewych Minis) consistent affluent guilt is just a misdirection. Like I said, everything feels like a red herring here.
Let me stack up the story points, or: hints of otherworldly malfeasance, for you. In one of the absolute best opening sequences I’ve seen in a film in a long time, we follow a man loading a weapon and grabbing a long wooden pokey-pole, a priest loading a rifle after performing mass and a man (who looks a lot like Crispin Glover) grabbing a hatchet. They march side by side in the forest, come to a specific spot and one man begins thrusting the pole into the ground, the other hatchets the ground and the priest aims at whatever will emerge. In that area of the ground lives Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet). Through a series of underground tunnels Borgman escapes, phones other underground dwellers and informs them that they’re being evicted.
Borgman enters the above ground world in a dusty suit looking for a bath. He’s wandered to the extremely wealthy area of the Dutch countryside. He’s given a bath by Marina, but only in secret. She’s ashamed by how her husband (Jeroen Perceval) reacted violently to the vagrant saying that he knew Marina from a previous stay in a hospital. Her husband nearly beats Borgman to death. Marina hides him in the backhouse. When he’s allowed to bathe inside, he’s given a fancy TV tray, fancy food, wine and watches TV on a large flat screen in the bathroom. It’s affluent Gummo.
Strange things happen in Borgman. Two wiry Russian wolfhounds appear in the house. Borgman crouches naked over the sleeping couple exactly like the demon in Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare”. Marina’s youngest daughter pulls the straw stuffing from her teddy bear and replaces it with dirt. Inexplicably Marina asks Borgman to come back to her in a different form. Borgman’s cohorts (Annet Malherbe, Eva van de Wijdeven, Tom Dewispelaere and van Warmerdam himself) poison, murder and dispose of multiple bodies. And her husband wakes up with an “X” marking on his shoulder.
The murders in Borgman are similar to Under the Skin. Neither the purpose, nor the assistants who protect and aid the predator are explained. Although Glazer did give the viewers a little bit more. He showed one man’s body turned into meat goop that went down a conveyer belt. So obviously it’s feeding something, somewhere. In Borgman the bodies are dropped (head first, head in bucket of cement) into a pond. Their legs float upward. They resemble a willowy plant in the water. It’s a playful image, but it ends there. There’s no new identity. No goop. Just a graveyard.
Borgman, the character, says that he’s bored and wants “to play.” And the film does have a playfulness about it: men wear suits while “gardening” (which is really just turning the backyard into a gaping hole), and the garden itself turns into a goofy performance stage. The first half of the film leads you down a surreal path where you have absolutely no idea where it is going to go. Which is an amazing, invigorating feeling to get from a film.
There’s a certain point where I lost interest, though. It’s because Borgman is missing that one extra scene that gives – not answers – but at least more information to all the hints. For Under the Skin it was the genesis in the van and the goopy conveyer belt. In Borgman van Warmerdam inexplicably has the entire house fall under Borgman’s spell and then divergently adds dialogue about mans servitude to his boss, or the handiwork of child labor to make you think he’s striving for some larger class system analogy. Until van Warmerdam drops that and moves on.
By midpoint onward, the rodents who were rousted out at the beginning of the film have taken over a modern mansion: one that is blocky, sterile and lacks any tie to history. Borgman feels the same as that house looks: expansive – but restricted by its largeness – and just empty enough to provide an unwelcoming echo.
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
