The Columnist | Little White Lies

The Colum­nist

13 Mar 2021 / Released: 12 Mar 2021

Woman with bloodied face standing in front of crowd.
Woman with bloodied face standing in front of crowd.
4

Anticipation.

I can relate to columnists.

4

Enjoyment.

I can relate to vengeful psychokillers.

4

In Retrospect.

Fucks with the free speech debate like a cunt.

This blood-lashed black com­e­dy takes aim at right­ist trolls as it explores the lim­its of free speech.

If peo­ple don’t agree with me, they’re allowed to be angry, they’re allowed to curse me, fight against me, with every argu­ment they can come up with. But they aren’t allowed to silence me.”

Anna Boot (Claire Por­ro), a third year in high school, is on the warpath. After her head­mas­ter (Har­ry van Rijthoven) has her removed from the school paper, osten­si­bly for using inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage while, more prob­a­bly, because she has been crit­i­cis­ing his merg­er plans, she begins a free speech cam­paign that tests the very lim­its of what it is pos­si­ble to say. This film, how­ev­er, is not real­ly Anna’s sto­ry, any more than the words (quot­ed above), that she reads out at a ben­e­fit she has organ­ised, are her own.

Rather they belong to her moth­er Femke (Kat­ja Her­bers), a well-known colum­nist and lib­er­al who is engaged in her own war – and not just one of words – against the army of right­ists and misog­y­nists who bom­bard her with hate mes­sages and even death threats online. The film’s orig­i­nal Dutch title De Kutho­er (lit­er­al­ly The Cunt Whore’) reflects the kind of slur with with Femke is reg­u­lar­ly tarred – and if the Eng­lish title, The Colum­nist, seems to prac­tise the sort of cen­sor­ship against which Femke and her daugh­ter rail, look clos­er and you will see that the most offen­sive term of the orig­i­nal title is still cun­ning­ly pre­served with­in it.

While Femke’s new boyfriend, the crime nov­el­ist Steven Death (Bram van der Kelen), has cul­ti­vat­ed goth­ic dress and and dev­il­ish demeanour for his pub­lic, in fact he is a good-natured, well-man­nered pussy­cat (whose real name is Erik Flinter­man). Femke is the oppo­site: she may advo­cate being nice’ on social media, she may give off the image of being sweet, home­ly and woke’ (she recent­ly wrote a con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle con­demn­ing as racist the Dutch cus­tom of black­ing up as Zwarte Piet), but deep down she har­bours a sharp, illib­er­al anger which finds expres­sion in her vicious feud against her vir­tu­al bullies.

The acci­den­tal killing of a noisy, reac­tionary neigh­bour leads to a series of alto­geth­er less acci­den­tal mur­ders which buoy her mood and (tem­porar­i­ly) end her writer’s block. While at first the view­er might cheer to see incels and cyber trolls get­ting their come­up­pance, Femke – who rapid­ly los­es any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for her actions and from the start col­lects fin­gers from her vic­tims like a psy­chopath – makes for an extreme­ly uncom­fort­able fig­ure of identification.

Femke’s tragedy is that she becomes in prac­tice the very oppo­site of what she preach­es: some­one who shuts down the con­ver­sa­tion and leaves those with whom she dis­agrees per­ma­nent­ly silenced. Yet from her ram­page against free speech’s ugli­er side, direc­tor Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Wind­horst weave the dark­est satire. In essence their sce­nario push­es at the same bound­aries between what is accept­able and unac­cept­able as Anna’s cam­paign, even as Femke’s vendet­ta shifts the argu­ment from mere­ly dis­cur­sive, the­o­ret­i­cal terms to the realm of the vis­cer­al­ly phys­i­cal. Still, it is all just fic­tive ban­ter, no harm done, right? Right?

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