Nothing to Lose

A man was convicted of killing his father and his sister and has been held for years in a closed forensic psychiatric institution. He says he did not do it and believes the only person who could prove that is his mother, whom he has not seen for years. He escapes from the institution and starts looking for her. The escape turns dangerous both for those searching for him and for the people he meets along the way. The TBS of the title is the name of the Dutch measure that allows a prisoner to be kept in a closed institution after serving a sentence for as long as they are judged dangerous; its length is not fixed at the outset, and that uncertainty is the film's starting point. Pieter Kuijpers builds the subject not as an argument about law but as an escape thriller. Theo Maassen is in the lead and does not try to make the character likeable; whether the man is innocent is not clear until the end, which keeps the discomfort going.