Schneider vs. Bax

Schneider is offered a job on his birthday. Kill a writer, be home by afternoon, cut the cake with his daughters in the evening. The writer, Ramon Bax, lives in a cabin in the middle of a reed marsh, is not sober, and happens to be a contract killer himself. He has been given a job for the same day: kill Schneider. Alex van Warmerdam directs and plays Bax. Tom Dewispelaere plays Schneider. It is a Dutch and Belgian co-production. The whole design sits in that inversion. Mertens, the man who commissioned both, is working both ends, and as the day goes on more people than the marsh can hold keep arriving. Nobody recognises anybody, everyone is armed, and none of them knows why the others are there. Van Warmerdam stages this not as a dark thriller but as a comedy shot in full daylight. No shadows, no night, no mystery. Everything happens in the open, which is precisely what makes it uncomfortable. His previous film, Borgman, had been in competition at Cannes. This is the drier, smaller thing that followed it. Who it is for: viewers who like European crime comedy that is cold and geometrically plotted. Who it is not for: anyone who wants someone to root for. Nobody here was written to be liked, and the film has no interest in rescuing them.