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.