Borgman (van Warmerdam 2013)

Though I don’t know all that much about Jan Bijvoet aside from his turns as a ex-con psychopath skilled at corpse-disposal in The Ardennes (Pront 2015) and as a scientist lost in the Amazon in Ciro Guerra’s stupendous arthouse flick Embrace of the Serpent, his weird, blank energy transforms Borgman from a psychological thriller into something approaching a fable about the banality, and inscrutability, of evil. Despite the contemporary setting, Borgman feels virtually medieval: a band of confidence artists, seducers and murderers, chased from their (literal) warren in the countryside, converge on the home of an affluent family and methodically dismantle all of those structures we associate with a comfortable upper-middle class existence: peace, prudence, predictability. These tricksters possess no apparent motive, and in that regard they function as an instrument of punishment for sins no one can guess.

The Breaking Ice (Chen 2023)

The parallels to Nouvelle Vague cinema, particularly Jules and Jim, are obvious in this film about disaffected Chinese zoomers, though the intrusion of a CGI bear towards the end risks turning the story into a fable. Briefly, Haofeng, Nana, and Xiao spend a weekend together drinking, clubbing, and touring the ethnic-Korean enclave of Yanji in northern China. Everybody’s emotionally frozen, a fact underscored by the snowy landscape and Haofeng’s proclivity for chewing ice. And if Nana’s aborted ice-skating career lurches into the narrative a bit unexpectedly, pristine camerawork and youthful lachrymosity and alienation keep us interested.

The Workshop (Cantet 2017)

I can’t help but compare this story of youthful alienation with Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Whereas the latter can offer no explanation for its subject’s malice and rage, Cantet’s film allows Antoine, the disconnected and disaffected young man at its heart, to express something like a reason for his deadpan antisociality. The issue of violence is also a point of contrast between these two texts. Kevin murders his fellow students and family while Antoine doesn’t physically harm anyone. As much as I like Lynne Ramsay’s work, The Workshop possesses more dimensions, gesturing at ideas such as the distinction between imagination and action, as well as asking what, if any, moral responsibility we bear with regard to the stories we create and consume.