SFIFF 52: 'Can go Through Skin'

There's only so many episodes of paranoia and scenes of dead cats in garbage bags a person can handle, even if they are in a film festival. When Noe stuffed his dead cat into a plastic bag in '35 Shots of Rum' it was funny, and it revealed another facet, however slight, of his eccentric character. But when Marieke shoves her dead kitten into a garbage bag in 'Can go Through Skin' the effect is slightly sickening, because we have already witnessed nearly an hour of her paranoiac disintegration on screen and are quite disturbed enough. The first feature of Dutch director Esther Rots, 'Can go Through Skin' is a harrowing look at the introverted and hallucinatory psychological collapse of a young rape victim. There is nothing stylized about this picture, nothing along the lines of Polanski's 'Repulsion' for example, but therein lies its power to disturb. With very little in the way of effects, (even its hallucinatory scenes are played straight and bleak), there is a terrifying immediacy to the vision that is frankly too depressing to really enjoy.

Rots, who wrote and produced as well as directed this debut, described the film's genesis as a meditation on how it "might feel" to break up with a lover. Clearly the experience involves for her a sort of tragic vulnerability which breeds monsters of the imagination. Marieke is seen to be isolated and desperate from the outset, as she dials numbers of any men she can think of in the wake of her failed relationship. Her withdrawal after the attack only serves to compound her problems, and it is easy to see from our vantage point how her decisions are compromised by her isolation. She removes immediately to a decrepit house in the middle of nowhere, drinks too much, sleeps in a crawlspace, and discusses revenge fantasies with strangers online, hardly a recipe for recovery. Perhaps this is a comment on the extent of our isolation generally - perhaps there really is no shelter and no support to be found in a society oriented so thoroughly toward personal success and determined individuation? For Marieke, at least, there is none, and she embarks on her hero's journey alone. But hero's journeys cannot take place otherwise, and this is perhaps the best way to think about the film, as a hero's journey through a death of the ego, with its attending phantoms, its macabre details, its rotting floorboards and rat-infested drains and dead kittens in garbage bags, where fantasy and hallucination and hope and reality blend in a contorted and relentless drip drip drip of time through space. Nothing is certain ... by the close of the film I was not even sure if the relationship she had started with a neighbor was not a sort of fantasy, like her pregnancy, a fantasy of hope and fulfillment that she was perhaps beyond realizing, or even a fantasy of ours, projected somehow into the action by virtue of our uncomfortable empathy with her plight and our wish that she be 'saved'. Certainly there are reasons to believe that Marieke may actually be experiencing a renewal of her life while simultaneously descending into a hell of self-division.

A good film often raises more questions than it answers, and there comes in the aftermath of this movie a not unpleasant sensation of its many disquieting impressions and unanswered questions expanding in the mind. It is just as well, because unleavened this picture would be too heavy by far.