The Intruder

Tom Vansant, an emergency doctor in Brussels, has been looking for his daughter for eighteen months. He comes across a young woman he believes knows what happened to her, but she will not talk about her past. Chasing that answer takes him to a small village in the Ardennes where nobody wants to help him and nobody likes an outsider. Frank van Mechelen draws his tension less from event than from the silence of a closed community that has decided in advance what a stranger is. Koen De Bouw plays Tom, and Maaike Neuville is making her first film appearance. The wooded, enclosed geography of the Ardennes was singled out as one of the film’s strongest elements: to an outsider the village simply will not be read.