REEDLAND

A movie that gets this far under your skin is a rare thing indeed. In director Sven Bresser’s atmospheric debut, a spectral thriller set in Weerribben-Wieden, deep in the Dutch countryside, a solitary farmer (real-life reed cutter Gerrit Knobbe) discovers the lifeless body of a girl on his land. Overcome by an ambiguous sense of guilt, he takes it upon himself to root out the killer and make sense of the evil encroaching around him—and possibly within him. Reedland’s masterful sound design is hypnotic and surreal, recalling the elemental menace and supernatural whispers of Kaneto Shindō’s folk-horror masterpiece Onibaba. The uncanny sensation created by wind passing through fields of dried-out reeds feels like sinking into an abyss. There are shots and scenes in the film that you can’t really account for or solve—including a middle school pageant that drifts into beguiling unreality. Latent violence and repressed desires are sublimated into the air, bringing to mind Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s cinema of soul-stained contagion. Everything has a sinister charge that builds and builds without release. ~OO