The Last Days of Emma Blank

Emma Blank is dying in a large house in the country. Around her are a housekeeper, a cook, a maid and a manservant; all of them do whatever she says, all of them call her madam. None of them is a servant: all four are Emma's relatives, and they agreed to play these parts in order to get the inheritance. Emma's brother is playing the family dog. Alex van Warmerdam both directs and plays the brother who is the dog. The woman's demands get a little more absurd every day and nobody can object, because whoever objects is out of the will. Then the truth about the inheritance comes out. There is a dry humour particular to this strand of Dutch cinema: nobody raises their voice, the camera exaggerates nothing, and the whole thing is shot as if it were perfectly normal. The film was shown at Venice in 2009.