Final Rating: 3/5
This quiet, cryptic tale of a murder and wider brewing unrest, set in a corner of the Netherlands clinging to a way of life lost everywhere else, is best entered with your mind open and your eyes open even wider. Reedland (Rietland in Dutch), the first feature from up-and-coming writer-director Sven Bresser, is a film about questions – one that feels frustratingly hostile toward the idea of answers. But the production design of Clara Bragdon and Liz Kooji and especially the memorable cinematography of Sam du Pon NSC will leave this tale lingering in your mind long enough to start itching at those questions yourself in ways that may prove rewarding.
The story, as much as there is one, is anchored by traditional reed farmer Johan, played by real-life reed farmer Gerrit Knobbe with a screen presence and natural ease in front of the camera that completely cloaks his lack of experience. He is a simple man whose life is built around the ritual of his farming work: we meet him in the act of harvesting by hand, with one of the scythes we later learn the local government would like to replace with machines that do the work faster but less cleanly, and in a way that will damage the land, Johan worries. He is an austere man, his largely all-black wardrobe an arresting visual contrast to the endlessly waving golden grains usually seen towering over him. Every frame is filled with lush Northern austerity, where the shadows of the forests strike stark silhouettes against the babied blues of the skies and ubiquitous waterways.
Writer-director Bresser grew up in a landscape like this. Wondering where the reedlands had disappeared to later in life, he located a last bastion in the Northern province of Overijssel, around the Weerribben-Wieden National Park. (An area best known outside of this film by the picturesque canal town of Giethoorn.) The region lies less than a two-hour drive from Amsterdam (with almost no options for public transportation), but is isolated enough that this writer with ears trained to Amsterdam-Dutch found her eyes frequently sliding towards the subtitles for clarification on the words and pronunciations used. Bresser, however, also usually based in Amsterdam, spent three years learning the lives of the Weerribben-Wieden reedworkers from the inside, along the way meeting his leading man and much of the rest of the cast.
So there is good reason Johan seems so perfectly suited to his locale – a man and his land equally content to persist in the severe beauty of their routines. His is portrayed as a dour community, who offer equally muted responses to moments of joy and tragedy. However, when Johan is asked to care for his pre-teen granddaughter Dana for a while, the excellent Loïs Reinders brings welcome energy to the screen, with her tenacious temperament and hippo-costume school-play demands.
Casting a pall over both Johan’s regularity and the warm injection of life his granddaughter brings, a body is discovered in his fields, a woman that viewers can see has clear signs of sexual assault. This unnerves Johan even more than might be expected, launching him on his own private investigation that puts him at odds with the police and his neighbors.
But don’t expect murderboards filled with strings; Johan’s meddling is as inscrutably opaque as the character himself. No insight into this man’s head is offered – we see Johan sneaking into barns, but there is not a second of hand-holding exposition. So you’ll be forgiven if you are confused why he is taking detours to root around in his neighbor’s cupboards. And little progress is made over the nearly two-hour runtime. This is a story that takes its time, perhaps more than you might like.
It plays out like a fable, a diffuse exploration of the tensions between the growing demands in the community to modernize, to work faster, even to cease to exist. All part of a larger sociological landscape of old but now growing tensions with the fictional “Trooters” across the lake – let alone with foreign competition, like Chinese imports.
The overall thesis seems to be: when something like this happens, we seek to put the blame on the Other. Outsiders. Yet Johan suspects the problem may be closer to home – perhaps his neighbors. He seems to question even, at times, silently as ever, his eyes holding a bit too much appreciation for young women uncomfortably close in age to his own granddaughter: could he ever be capable of such a thing himself? Could his granddaughter become a victim of a man like him?
Scenes like a sex-bot chat gone wrong, a town meeting that goes relatably nowhere, and a school play featuring the world’s most cinematic hippo costumes stand out for offering glimpses of insight that almost tease explanations. But then there’s the inexplicable inclusion of an incident with a washing machine late in the film, along with its even more baffling aftermath, that are unfortunately likely to cause many viewers to check out in frustration.
This Dutch-Belgian co-production had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week Grand Prix – the first invitation to this showcase a Dutch film has received since 1998. So it’s not exactly a surprise it was selected as the Dutch entry for the 2026 International Oscar.
However, its reception at home has been mixed, and its chances of shortlisting, let alone receiving a nomination, are quite small. Dutch cinephiles question its selection over the likes of Our Girls (Voor de Meisjes), the winner of the three big prizes at the “Dutch Oscars” (Golden Calf Awards), with an “our girls are in danger” plotline that offers a greater sense of urgency and dark humor. Or even the documentary De Progadandist, the personal favorite of this writer, a WWII-derived warning that suddenly feels very timely again.
Yet, as far as capturing the current moment in the Netherlands – in a time capsule preserved by the status of forever having been the film submitted to the Oscars this year – perhaps, in many ways, this is the film that accomplishes that best.
At this moment, there are regular headlines in the Netherlands from a Dutch village questioning whether or not to disband to make way for industry, and the range of opinions thereover from the villagers themselves as well as the wider region. And the rest of the country’s farmers, having grown so collectively frustrated with the demands of meeting not only increasingly competitive commercial interests but also environmental regulations that seem at odds with these commercial demands, have formed their own political party.
Often the blame is pointed outward from the community itself, even to the wolves that have been allowed to re-expand into the region for environmental reasons. The direct news-radio reference to this last part in particular provides a pop-up jump-scare for regular consumers of the Dutch news cycle.
The film has more depth than a first viewing conveys, but you’ll have to do your homework to garner a full appreciation of the thoughts it’s intended to provoke. Despite all it purports to want to say, it is a quiet movie of relatively few words (none at all for the first 12 and a half minutes). It features some pleasing visual folk-horror trappings, but never commits fully to the darkness, or to any efforts to grasp at definition or deeper understanding.
However, the striking compositions full of modern rural aesthetics brought to life in granular textures, with superbly complementary audio choices, are easy to appreciate. The lighting compositions alone are the real stars of some scenes. All in all, it leaves an impression of polished authenticity…with an unnervingly dark underbelly, where every male gaze the camera lingers over becomes suspicious.
Thank you to Viking Film, The Party Film Sales, and klhpr for the screener.
