Borgman

As Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) expressed the dread of Communism turning Western individualists vegetable, the Dutch film Borgman captures the current fear of an insidious invasion by terrorists. Here the terrorist is an outside evil bent upon overthrowing the normal order (domestic here standing in for political) who has no qualms about killing but whose real aim is to increase his power by seducing more adherents. Their first appearance, sleeping in holes under the forest, makes them sleeping cells amid a rich complacency.

The film is extremely unsettling, from the opening bark of the German shepherd (dog) to the periodic atonal assaults. The horror of a family’s subtle invasion is amplified by Marina’s nightmares woven indiscernibly into the narrative. Yet the film carefully denies any racial identification for the threat. The only racial elements are Richard lying to reject a black gardener and Camiel Borgman’s playful rejection of Jesus in his rather unsettling bedtime story that transfixes the children, about “a little white girl” who’s digested by a beast and whose mother begs she be regurgitated for burial. Borgman is otherwise an abstemious figure who denies Marina sex and stiffly adheres to the tasks he has undertaken. In Europe today, of course, especially in Holland and Scandinavia, there is a growing fear of the traditional culture being overwhelmed by radical Islam. The theme of invasion is even more disturbing than those sound effects. Camiel, of course, could be Khamil as readily as Camille. 

In the film’s key scene the shaken Marina tells husband Richard that she feels a threatening dark shell closing in on them because they are too secure, too affluent. That represents the peak and the nadir of capitalism. That conscience makes her vulnerable to the needy Borgman when he appears on her doorstep, first asking to have a bath, then seeking her sympathy to nurse the wounds from Richard’s assault. The family’s affluence and modernity turn them into the Western civilization that the hungry, marginalized and more ascetic society comes to disdain, to hate (though they enjoy the TV) and to destroy. Nor will the terrorist be mollified or won over by such acts of kindness and empathy. Those virtues rather fire the terrorist;'s sense of his enemy's weakness. 

Marina’s vulnerable virtue is imaged in her voluptuousness and appetite for life. Her fulsome breasts remind us of her maternal nature that, notwithstanding all her love and care, by modern convention she has farmed out to the thin nanny Stine. Marina is also an artist, making extravagantly gestural abstract paintings quite in contrast to the tightness in her domestic bearing. That Borgman’s effect turns into explosions. She is too fleshy and feeling a partner for Richard, whose thinness and tightness rather resemble the shaven Borgman when he returns to be their gardener. But like her lavish, sleek house and furnishings, Marina’s art is meaningless and emotionless. Her art is empty gesture.

Borgman first tests the charity of a large traditional estate, which brusquely denies him. But at the sleek and more isolated modernist house he doesn’t accept his initial rejection. He claims Marina nursed him in a hospital, a lie which proves prophetic when he does seduce her into nursing his wounds and providing food and shelter. The preternatural stranger seems to sense the moral vulnerability of the modernist, unsupported by the old abandoned traditions in values as in architecture.

Borgman takes a mysterious hold on the innocent, especially the three children,. So, too, his henchman Pascal seduces Stine when her soldier boyfriend is visiting for dinner. Borgman’s hold on young Isolde is especially striking when she calmly kills the man she found in the forest, a rival gardener. With this power Borgman controls mysterious dogs -- and can use his cell phone underground! When their mental control is confirmed by Ludwig’s implants, the mystery evokes the spread of jihadism into affluent Western societies. In a Hitchcockian flourish, screenwriter/director Alex van Warmerdam himself plays the older surgeon Ludwig who takes physical control over his actor recruits.

Like Ludwig, Borgman’s other henchmen — the fake doctor Brenda, the strong-armed ballerina — prefer murder over seduction when they despatch the gardner and his wife, the family doctor, and ultimately Richard and even Marina. Their upset of the natural order is imaged in their burying their first corpses in the water head down in concrete. More frightening than their murders are their conversions, as they add nanny Stine and the three children — who don’t question their parents’ sudden disappearance — to their ominous cabal. As the troupe moves on, the elegant modern estate has been reduced to a blighted bunker, stripped of life, colour, beauty, modernism reduced to lifelessness. As gardener Camiel destroys the Edenic garden he found.

The troupe's evening performance shows two comical figures leading on (or flaying) a shrouded figure. The climax is the signs “I am” and “We are,” which proceed from solitary self-interest to an acknowledgment of collective responsibility. While that coheres with the fear of terrorism, it also opens into a wider theme, the breakdown of the social contract in Holland and the Scandinavian countries. So the hunted, revolting and ultimately in revolt characters are the Other in a broader social context: the poor, the marginalized, the hopeless, here driven underground and flushed out to our danger.  

Curiously, the film opens with two sinister thugs and a priest gathering with metal spikes to hunt down the mysterious figures living rough in underground holes. We don’t see the three again. The first man seems especially brutish, with his pike, dog, and pickled herring breakfast, so his partnering with the priest after communion is itself unsettling. As we look back on their scene, they are vigilantes but they may be justified by the enormous danger they have discovered. In their assault on Borgman’s refuge the anti-terrorist civilization may seem as brutal as the terrorist. When they disappear the film leaves behind all our familiar moral and social bearings. We turn fascinated to Borgman’s manipulations and the helplessness of the innocence over which he has taken command.