Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: David-Jann Bronsgeest
Starring: Rick Paul van Mulligen, Sonia Eijken, Isa Hoes, Charlie Chan Dagelet, Sara Luna Zoric
With their 2018 horror short Meet Jimmy, the Dutch duo of director David-Jan Bronsgeest and writer Tim Koomen gained the attention of Hollywood, with a planned feature film ultimately falling through over reported creative differences between the filmmakers and the studio suits. Now Bronsgeest and Koomen have returned home to the Netherlands and made their feature film, Jimmy, on their own terms. It's likely for the best, as Jimmy is enlivened by the sort of European edginess that just wouldn't fly in a Hollywood production.
Jimmy takes its cues largely from the J-Horror of the '90s and 2000s. Like so many of those Japanese movies, it features a curse that's transmitted through media. In this case it's a true crime podcast that purports to explore the truth behind "Jimmy" (Rick Paul van Mulligen), who murdered a teenage girl named Veronica some years ago, before later taking his own life while residing in a sanatorium.
The feature opens with essentially a recreation of the short, in which a punky young woman, Jenny (Sophie Bouquet), enters a laundromat late at night. Listening to the Jimmy podcast while her washing spins seems to unnerve her in a very personal way. Spooked by odd noises, she's ultimately killed by an unseen presence.
For Jenny's funeral, her friend Dilara (Sonia Eijken) returns to her small home town for the first time in years. There she reunites with her estranged older sister Maryam (the wonderfully named Charlie Chan Dagelet) and her old friends Sharon (Richelle Plantinga) and Bowie (Sara Luna Zoric). When those around them start to be butchered by an unknown assailant, the girls fear Jimmy has returned from the grave to enact vengeance for some past sin on their part.
As a J-horror imitation, Jimmy doesn't quite work. It's too unclear regarding the mechanics of the role the seemingly supernaturally infected podcast plays in all of this. Ultimately, this element is relegated to something of an afterthought as the film leans more heavily towards traditional slasher fare. The idea of a figure returning to enact revenge on those who wronged them has fuelled many a slasher, and that's essentially what Jimmy boils down to.
Where it departs from the norm is that there isn't a distinctive "final girl" figure among this group of friends, the one innocent party who finds herself targeted by association. Dilara and her friends are an awful bunch of sociopaths who can't remotely claim innocence, and once their sin is ultimately revealed it's impossible to have any empathy for these Millennial monsters. The movie gets around this by making Maryam the audience surrogate. She has no idea of the true horror of her sister's past, but she becomes a target of Jimmy by association, as does her infant son.
The film takes a little too long to lay its cards on the table, so for much of the running time we're left a bit rudderless when it comes to whom exactly we should be rooting for among its characters. But once Maryam is centred as our heroine we finally have something to grasp onto, and the final act is a suspenseful riff on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Jimmy has bags of style with its very '80s neon palette, and boasts some convincing performances from its young cast. It's unfortunately let down by some confusing plotting and an inability to tie together its J-horror and slasher plotlines. It often feels like we're watching a movie that began as one sub-genre and morphed halfway into another after a couple of screenplay drafts. What makes it stand out is its very Dutch willingness to go to some taboo places, with a genuinely shocking final moment that almost certainly wouldn't have been allowed in the proposed Hollywood version.
