Eight teenagers live in a village on the border of Belgium and Holland.

They are four boys and four girls, they don't work, they don't study, their families are rather absent.

They locate a caravan where they gather and practice idiotic and violent games and pastimes.

With no apparent economic problems they seem to converge on one goal: to do something sensational and make money.

Provoking highway accidents by raising skirts on the overpass; snatching dogs from the old lady to tie them to the tracks and see the effect when the train passes by; organizing real gang-bangs to be filmed carefully disguised so as not to be recognized; playing quiz games where the girls have to guess who the human, non-human, inhuman phallus belongs to...

sex, pornography, blackmail, abuse, violent abortions, all as if it were a game, including prostitution.

There is the artist who wants to produce hyper-real art, the girl desired by everyone who because of a phallic game will lose her life, and the manipulator perhaps abused or perhaps not.

Their recklessness is fueled by violence, death, blackmail, used and abused bodies, and sociopathic upward games.

The living with which they gracefully conduct their playful misadventures places them far from the Hanekian or Kubrickian style Funny Games atmospheres; here the violence is too easy to be recognized as violence.

Although the film is Northern European, the seemingly uninhibited female also flaunts the slightest perception of her own body; abused, offered, sold, recorded as if it were a dress to be worn, washed, and torn with extreme gracefulness. The management of one's body is likened to that of a ketchup sauce with which to accompany any companion on the market.

The boys are complicit-exploiters of their bodies in order to acquire power over their customers and why not thus buy 5 motorcycles for the price of one from an unwary seller/client of minors.

No substance use among the boys because their emotional illiteracy does not need drugs, the emptiness that invades them does not know the vowels to invoke any emotional substitute.

As with animals, there is no desire, not even sexual, but only phylogenetically inherited instinct; there is no form of eroticism: the body is governed integrally by the natural mechanics of instinct, totally subservient to the only perversion of visibility and money.

The boys' consumption is hyper-hedonistic, therefore devoid of any desire.

Their emptiness does not involve lack but only enjoyment that has no need to desire; what is exercised is gesture without any emotional resonance: emotion, thought and gesture are disconnected.

As disconnected and skillfully scripted turns out Eller's film, with flashbacks and narrative caesuras accompanied by extreme and sophisticated editing.

Form and content follow the same interrupted and skillfully found track to narrate a phenomenon that of youth now devoid of any noumenal reference; depth is not there but only a representation determined by a will to live devoid of any purpose in which the finite is no longer resolved Hegelianly into infinity because it no longer has the possibility of becoming happy consciousness. Extreme alienation becomes the only metaphysical and ontological condition, and consciousness-raising, if possible, would be the only despairing possibility, the only "gaze that stares at horror, stands up to it, and in the irreducible consciousness of negativity, considers the possibility of the best."

Ma chi può osare tanto?

La drammatica inconsapevolezza è la vera protagonista, e i ragazzi ritratti nel film ne sono le vittime prescelte: la strumentalizzazione dell’altro diviene il mezzo per raggiungere il fine attraverso il mezzo stesso del proprio corpo, o meglio del corpo delle ragazze, usato e abusato come merce per avere quel denaro, unico vero fine di un sesso privo di qualunque nesso.

Il sesso di un corpo dematerializzato, privato, essiccato, disidratato di desideri che, non potendo più sostare nell’attesa, non possono più ricorrere alla rianimazione di uno spazio, una volta tempo di vita.

Pertanto la vita dei ragazzi si svolge in un presente sempre così presente che la sua invadenza non ha più la capacità di rivolgere lo sguardo al passato, povero passato, e al futuro che non c’è.

Quindi l’incantesimo del presente diventa la condizione dell’incubo in cui tutto è possibile, soprattutto l’orrore disumano.

Un film straziante, un film che fa male soprattutto per l’apparente ludicità del vissuto dei ragazzi travolti dalla noumenica volontà di vivere senza ragione e senza scopo.

L’esaltazione psichedelica di una vita che non è altro che istinto di morte, disperazione esistenziale, vanità insonorizzata di un vuoto incolmabile.

E mentre tutto accade a loro insaputa l’incapacità di intendere e di volere non li salverà dalla condanna che si sono procurati perché se la legge non prevede ignoranza la vita non la consente.

Il film, tratto dal controverso racconto di Elvis Peeter, conferma le inattuali previsioni degli intellettuali del ventesimo secolo e fa convergere nello sguardo del cinema attento l’inquadratura ad alta risoluzione dell’esaurimento delle scorte di un orizzonte ormai tramontato.

Not unlike Nocturama, which likewise tells the story of politically committed young people, this film does not hesitate to denounce the catastrophe of a youth undone, erased, eliminated by a distorted and irreversibly disturbed reality that plays tricks, that weaves dangerous traps that destine new generations never to be born.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice