The Treatment

There are two central themes in Hans Herbots's Belgian tres noir The Treatment: the need for closure (an important form of treatment) and misogyny.

Inspector Nick Cafmeyer's investigation of some pedophilic murders is driven by his own childhood experience. When he was nine his younger brother Bjorn was kidnapped and has not been heard from since. Nick is still harassed by Ivan Plettinckz, a suspect released for want of evidence. Nick’s obsession with solving Bjorn’s disappearance both advances and hinders his pursuit of the current killer. By solving the present crime and saving another child Nick finally puts behind him his unwarranted guilt for not having protected his brother. 

His chase of the killer brings him back to the physical site of Bjorn’s disappearance — the railway tracks — which is also the psychological site. The film begins and ends with shots of the two boys walking along those tracks, playing cowboys and indians, with cowboy Nick poking an arrow at Indian Bjorn. Within this image of innocence the theme is already the hunter and the hunted, reversible.

Plettinckz is himself in need of closure. He teases Nick with promises of information about Bjorn. His inability to leave Nick alone is as compulsive as Nick’s guilt. His last clue takes Nick to a buried box of videos of criminal pedophilia. He finally admits his guilt when, after sending Nick to dig up this buried past, he hangs himself. By initially withholding the criminal videos and by both attending and not reporting Plettinckz’s suicide Nick seriously compromises himself as an investigator. So, too, when he pulps the killer seeing Plettinckz’s laughing face. Nick's decision to move away finalizes his distancing from his past.

The killer inflicts an additional torment on his victims. Impotent, he forces the fathers to rape their little sons. Every attack spreads the trauma rendering those victims in need of perhaps an impossible closure. The impossibility of complete closure is also reflected when Bjorn (who is still alive so many years later) is left to die in a remote caravan, his “friend” Nancy in jail because of the videos Nick finally passed on. Having carried an unwarranted guilt about Bjorn for so long, now Nick is blessedly unaware his sending of Nancy to jail causes his brother's death. In the novel Nick finds Bjorn. The film’s solution avoids an improbable happy ending in this most noir of worlds. Not that Nick's discovery of the broken Bjorn would have been a "happy" ending for either.

As Nick “treats” his guilt by preventing recurrence of the crime, the killer “treats” his impotence by a sick misogyny. He blames a mysterious female hormone for weakening him and wards it off with his urine. Hence the urine pouring under the door at the victim mother in his last crime. Hence, too, his storage of his urine as a disinfectant. His theft of  (feminine, dangerous) milk sets Nick on his trail. The killer is a split personality. One self considers giving the police the pictures he found. The other believes himself to be a more evolved human being, hindered only by the weakening impact of woman. Of course fear of le petit mort and the vagina dentata is a terror as old as manhood itself. Here it’s displayed in psychopathic proportions.

     The themes converge in the urine. Urine is like the past, something we go through (or that goes through us) and that we properly leave behind. The villain’s storage of his urine is as debilitating as the hero’s storage of his guilt.
     The film's other resonant metaphor is the porn gang woman' Nancy's tattoo. The heart in a cage differently emblematizes each character. For  Nancy and Plettinckz it expresses a passion forbidden, jailed. For Nick it represents his love for his brother, which cages him still. Thus it also personifies Bjorn, the innocent kept prisoner first as a child and now as a damaged adult.
     Those exemplify the poetic resonance in this compelling, gripping trek through the darkest corners of our psyche.