Review by Joan Cruz
Directed by: Sven Bresser
Starring: Gerrit Knobbe, Loïs Reinders, Anna Loeffen, Lola van Zoggel, Yannick Zoet
Been thinking about genre recently. Mainly the pleasures, but also how genre is leveraged and capitalised upon; a summarising template which reduces and peens products into utilitarian commodities only tolerable to the unrefined palate of the gluttonous genre fan. Every horror fiend knows the scramble through the nether regions of streaming services (especially at the end of October) to find something fresh, something unique: that new sound you're looking for, yet instead simply auditing the repetitive drones of the year; which you, as a keeper of the faith, listen to anyway in eager hope.
I accept horror's hyperreality, its relentless self-referentialism, the excess. But are my simple buttons just being pressed by, say, the remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer, or is it actually one of the best films of the year? You scoff, but the other thing about genre is how we prioritise certain types of films over another, as if one mode of playacting is judged to be of more hierarchal importance than another. The almost exclusively female fans of cosy romance (which I am really fascinated by as a phenomena) are unique in that they seem happily aware of the escapist formulae of the style, and breezily accept its constructed artificiality as part of the fun: contrast with the rabid, increasingly toxic mentality of the aging superhero audience who are, and I say this with love, a fucking disgrace. Not every reception is equal.
And so to Reedland. Another pet genre is Scandi-Noir, the stylish Nordic set crime dramas which focus on brutal murders perpetuated upon women to be addictively investigated by impossibly glamorous kriminaldetektivs. It was lockdown, see: some people baked banana bread, I fell in love with Saga Norén over 38 hours of The Bridge. I'm well placed to cast a jaded genre eye over Reedland, Sven Bresser's handsome crime drama-come-social commentary. Already highly garlanded (nominated for Critic's Week and the Caméra d'Or - nice), Reedland is a dyed in the (sheep) wool genre film, a rural scandi-noir which focuses on a reed cutter who happens upon a girl's corpse on his land: the bathetic discovery of the body being the scandi-noir trigger mainstay.
We open with aged reed farmer Johan (Gerrit Knobbe - an irl reedwright who has never acted before, a clear marker of this film's fealty to authenticity) who in a 10 minute sequence (settle in) is cutting the reeds, sweeping the reeds, gathering the reeds, pissing in the lake before piles of reeds, before burning the reeds as the blood pink disc of the sun sets in the sky: it's the circle of life.
Johann lives with his grown up offspring and her twelvety daughter in the far countryside. It's a humble life, exactly as mundane, noble and rustic as you'd expect. Johann is accused of "not keeping up with the times," and the theme of the film is how an unfeeling future of climate capitalism and myopic greed is encroaching on the integrity of the old ways: "these new machines eat the land," Johann complains, and a comfortingly manichean dynamic is presented (although a news report, flashing in the background like reports of a comet in a zombie film, about advancing "EU migrants" is ambiguous).
Death is commonplace on the farm, but the unnatural location of a girl's body, with obvious signs of sexual abuse, is an affront to the natural law. Happening on the corpse, Johann is ostensibly stoic, but storms gather behind his weathered eyes. The authorities don't seem particularly interested in attending to the case, yet Johann is, finding meaning and purpose in the pursuit of justice…
And so pursue it he does, in long, long shots of his grizzled face and extended, non-causal scenes of lived-in pastoral actuality. Reedland is enamoured of this existence, presenting the hardships of Dutch farm life with nary a windmill in sight. The composition is striking, but does Reedland repackage these authentic visuals as spectacle, relying on their evocations in lieu of narrative drama?
The who/why dunnit is incidental to the focus on Johann's cryptic mindset and the representation of a close-knit agrarian community. It's all here: funerals in a white washed church, suspicious looks, a man eating a sandwich solo at a wooden table. Bresser pushes our face in the manure; we see a cow getting killed to death with a bolt gun, and, in a scene which defines gratuity, we see two horses mandated to breed.
I think it was this moment where Reedland lost me: a scene of actual animal cruelty, supposedly enacted for a reviewer watching a screener in Wales with a cat on their lap (me) or them nauses in Cannes (them). What is it for, apart from niche art house edge? Yes, life is brutally elemental, built upon rudimentary lines of life and death. We get it, maat. But the film revels in this atavism: in a scene framed for its discomfiture, we see Johann bemusedly chat to an online AI sex bot - when the paywall kicks in, he has a wank anyway. Modern life is rubbish, etc.
As a cheerful genre fan, I am of course thrilled by the news of a new Scary Movie film (with the welcome return of favourite ally Marlon Wayans), a franchise which reminds us of the absurdity of our fandom yet also reinforces the community via shared recognition. It's unlikely the Wayans brothers will ever turn a scatological satirical eye towards the sweeping vistas and ornamental interiors of rural scandi-noir, but in the case of Reedland perhaps such a spoof is unnecessary, as this film's hyperbole, blunt severity and reiteration of tropes veers to me, a relative uninitiated, dangerously close to self parody (a scene based around a kids' concert is incredible though - malign, weird and dynamic, a mini folk horror by way of the school assembly). Perhaps because of the implied prestige, instead of laughing with genre acumen, we are positioned to nod along sagely and pity these sad little people and their desperate little lives because this is art, and it Means Something. If you like this sort of thing you'll probably love it.
Reedland is in US cinemas now. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
