News about art and medicine
This section, edited by Henk Maassen, features reviews of current novels, films, music, theater, exhibitions and poetry in which medicine plays a role every two weeks on Saturdays. But, since we are a Dutch side in origin, films will probably be the main topic in the English version of Scoop.
Scoop June 14th 2025
This edition features reviews of two feature films that both dramatize trauma and trauma processing in an original way: Drowning Dry and Hoard. We also look at the reissue (in Dutch) of Richard Flanagan’s award-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the fate of a doctor who was involved in the construction of the infamous Burma Railway under inhumane conditions during World War II.
Reactions in the form of comments, questions, tips, criticism, and praise can be sent to: scoop0329@gmail.com
Film
Drowning Dry
How trauma works
In Drowning Dry by Lithuanian filmmaker Laurynas Bareiša, sisters Ernesta and Juste spend a weekend at their parents’ country house with their husbands and young children. Unlike the sisters, who get along well, the differences between the brothers-in-law are immediately apparent: Lukas is an athletic, taciturn martial arts fighter with a tattooed torso and few financial resources; Tomas is a rather self-important, overweight businessman who is well off. His condescending attitude toward Ernesta and Lukas’ financial worries and his opposition to selling the vacation home expose tensions that also manifest themselves physically when the men challenge each other in an uncomfortable sparring session. But that’s not what this film is about.
The point is that it is difficult to explain what the theme is, because that would spoil the film. Just know this: the structure of the film is fragmentary and plays with time. For example, in one scene, the sisters dance to a popular song, but when the scene is repeated later in the film, it turns out to be a completely different song. What’s more, several scenes seem to repeat themselves with slight shifts in detail, yet it’s usually clear that we’re looking at the past, present, or future. It’s clear that something dramatic has happened out of the blue, twice even, and that these events have had consequences. The English title Drowning Dry already gives something away in this regard – the Lithuanian title was ‘just’ Sisters – because it refers to an emergency situation that can arise after a near-drowning. Later on, there will also be a panic attack and a kidney transplant, but it is best not to reveal any more about the how and what here.
Filmmaker Bareiša, who operated the camera himself, uses jumps in time to show how grief, loss, and, above all, trauma processing unfold. Anyone who watches the film twice—which is easy to do, as it is also available on picl.nl—will see how well Bareiša succeeds in this.
He observes his actors and their actions almost like a spy, often from a distance, from fixed camera angles, and in long takes, and he does not show everything that happens. It was undoubtedly the right choice to select his film as the Lithuanian entry for the Oscars.
The ending, with images of the stillness in the summer house that is being sold and of a rain-soaked, spoiled still life of an untouched table with food on the terrace, works in an unemphatic way that is both symbolic and poignant: this is how life and death are intertwined.
Henk Maassen
Film
Hoard
Now in theaters
A traumatic collection of love
The year is 1984: seven-year-old Maria lives with her mother Cynthia, who surrounds her with an abundance of love, protection, and attention. But the idyll is sickly; Cynthia suffers from compulsive hoarding; she is a hoarder. During the day, the two roam the streets, looking for what Cynthia considers treasures. She tells Maria that all this junk is a “catalogue of love.” Later in her life, Maria will come to realize that it must have been a traumatic collection of love.
That “later” covers most of the film Hoard, the debut of British director Luna Carmoon. In 1994, Maria lives with a loving foster mother. She likes to have fun with her best friend Laraib, but when Laraib disappears from Maria’s life and her foster brother Michael shows up, the situation changes. Michael works as a garbage collector. His smell evokes old memories and images in Maria, in an almost classic Proustian way. Without initially understanding why, she becomes obsessed with filth, starts collecting rubbish, and a relationship of physical attraction and repulsion develops between her and her foster brother. “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire,” she says to him at one point.
Luna Carmoon says she wanted to make a film “to explore and relive the intense moments” of her own past, “to survive them, to get a grip on them and examine them.” All the characters in the film come from the world in which she grew up and was shaped, right down to the nature of the dialogues. “My mother was a kind of collector, a hoarder. When I wrote Hoard, I often compared Maria and her mother to magpies: birds that always live in pairs and scavenge and collect trinkets and bits of fabric for their nest, their cocoon.”
Carmoon’s film is at times really “dirty”: you need a strong stomach; you can almost smell it. She doesn’t tell a classic story in which one scene follows another in a dramatic logic; rather, she orchestrates emotions with images and works with recurring, highly diverse motifs that anchor the story and take on meaning in the changing context—Maria’s coming of age, you might say. Note the role of smells, of Christmas, of hiding under sheets, references to the film Die Blechtrommel, chilblains. When Maria eventually ends up in a psychotic state, the film itself becomes psychotic, and the viewer wonders: what is real?
It is clear that Carmoon starts from the idea that traumatic childhood experiences become embedded in your body. You can forget them, but they will resurface at some point. Maria even undergoes a kind of catharsis. Does this correspond with what we know about traumatic experiences? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is an excellent debut with convincing actors.
Henk Maassen
Novel
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan.
Death as relief
From 1942 onwards, the Japanese forced prisoners of war to build the infamous Burma Railway. In his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, for which he won the Booker Prize in 2014, Australian author Richard Flanagan describes the inhumane conditions under which this took place. The book was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece at the time. A Dutch translation was published ten years ago and is now available again.
In his book, Flanagan gives us an insight into what motivated the Japanese slave drivers, who play a major role in the novel. He gets inside their heads. However, he focuses his narrative primarily on the Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans, whose medical improvisations—he cobbles together an operating room out of bamboo and wire, for example—are no match for the starving patients teetering on the brink of death, suffering from exhaustion, cholera, malaria, beriberi, and other terrible diseases. His medical efforts seem futile from the outset. The fact that Evans is seen as a hero after the war means nothing to him and he finds it deeply undeserved. After all, it was his job to select the people who had to work on the railway every day, even when almost no one was left who was capable of doing so. Looking back, he realizes that he often chose the men he expected to collapse soon.
Dutch-American author Ian Buruma has written that working on the Death Railway was an experience that is almost impossible to imagine. That is exactly what Flanagan has tried to do: imagine it. Does he succeed? Often, as in this passage, in which an Australian prisoner of war is falsely accused of not doing his job properly and is whipped half to death by Japanese guards: “They found him late that evening. He was floating head down in the benjo, the long, deep ditch filled with rain-churned shit that served as a communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital where they had taken his broken body when the punishment was finally over. It was assumed that he had lost his balance while squatting and had fallen in. Because he didn’t have the strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.’
Flanagan’s omniscient narrator’s writing style doesn’t always work; sometimes his words sound over the top or too hollow. But most of the time, his prose is sensory, compelling, vivid, and poignant. Like here, when Dorrigo Evans goes to see how the forty-eight men “in various stages of death throes” are faring. “Death was nothing here. It brought, Dorrigo thought—though he fought the feeling as a treacherous kind of pity—a kind of relief. Life was a struggle of fear and pain, but, he thought to himself, you had to live. To convince himself that there was no heartbeat here either, he bent down and lifted the shriveled wrist of the next huddled skeleton, a silent pile of bones and stinking sores, when a shock ran through the skeleton and the skull-like head turned. Strange, half-blind eyes bulged out hazily and seemed to focus on Dorrigo Evans. The voice sounded a little shrill, the voice of a boy lost in the body of a dying old man. Sorry, doctor. Not this morning. Sorry to disappoint you.
Flanagan loosely based Evans on Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, himself a prisoner of war and Australian war icon. But where the historical figure was surrounded by mythical glory, Evans is primarily a man chasing his own shadow. Ultimately, this non-chronological novel is about a highly complex personality, both in love and in his view of life, as well as in his morals and in the meaning he can only find in literature and especially poetry.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North has recently been adapted into a TV series of the same name, which has been purchased by BBC1. It is not yet known when it will be broadcast.
Henk Maassen
Scoop May 17, 2025
Film
The salt path
Homeless on the Walk with Corticobasal Degeneration
The Salt Path was a – justified – bestseller, the film adaptation of the book is now proving to be a “hit” as well. In the book, Raynor Winn tells how she and her husband Moth – their college-age children are out of the house – lost all their possessions in 2013 due to a disastrous investment; they became destitute and homeless. And that at the moment when, to make matters worse, Moth was diagnosed with Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD), a rare progressive brain disease that usually starts with motor problems or with speech and thinking disorders. Those motor problems are always on one side of the body. In Moth’s case, this manifests itself in a tremor in his arm and a dragging leg. Prognosis, according to the neurologist in the film: four to five more years of life with, in the long run, sharply declining quality of life. Chance of cure nil, palliative care indicated. A walk along the English southwest coast may seem like the last thing on your mind, but that is precisely what both decide to do after all these job tidings. Call it a form of escapism.
In short, nonlinear flashbacks, we learn what preceded their trek, while chronologically following their trajectory in the meantime, and see how they sometimes struggle against the elements, Moth’s illness and lack of money, but they are also elated, don’t give up and are still in love. And how they have brief encounters along the way, with otherwise not always nice types.
The film is the feature debut of Marianne Elliott, who previously worked as a theater director. All the more remarkable how well she portrays the walk – which, of course, stands for more than just that – with great feeling for atmosphere, nature and landscape with panache but at a leisurely pace. For this she could count on two great actors: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, who in sparse dialogues portray convincing, sympathetic characters, the former often and oh so understandably worried, the latter optimistically-laconical about their fate.
And lo and behold, the latter gets it right: when Moth abandons his pregabalin, it initially leads to nasty withdrawal symptoms, but eventually he does better. And that continues to this day, the creators report in the end credits. Both are still doing well.
Whether one may infer that it was nature that healed them, that they were “salted” as it is called in film and book, is doubtful. What is certain is that the film’s subtext, thankfully not obvious, is that life is contingent, like a trajectory or journey without purpose. And that is something in which apparently many viewers (and readers) recognize themselves.
Henk Maassen
May 3, 2025
Film
Quiet Life
Katatoon after refusal of asylum: a new syndrome?
In Quiet Life, young Katja meets a curious fate. After her family is told that they will be deported from Sweden, Katja falls into a state most reminiscent of catatonia. In Sweden this is now known as Uppgivenhetssyndrom, internationally referred to as Resignation Syndrome. Since the late 1990s, numerous asylum children in Sweden have fallen into a similar condition: motionless, speechless, unreachable. Sometimes only tube feeding keeps them alive. These are children whose asylum applications have been rejected and who cannot bear the thought of returning to war, repression or social displacement.
Quiet Life is tightly composed, in mostly gray, bluish and white tones. The film is played in an understated, detached style. The dialogues are unnatural, sometimes even absurdist – entirely in keeping with the film’s absurdist atmosphere. The spaces in which the characters move are bare and symmetrical. As a result, many viewers will have difficulty connecting emotionally with what is happening on screen. But that seems to be precisely the intention of director Giorgos Avranas.
Still, the question inevitably arises: is this “real”? Did Avranas want to make a realistic drama, or is Quiet Life meant to be a parable about the cruel fate of asylum seekers? After all, the World Health Organization does not recognize Resignation Syndrome as an official psychiatric condition. Yet several publications – accessible via PubMed – and an impressive report in The New Yorker make short of that skepticism.
Regardless, Quiet Life is not an easy film to fathom. Katja’s parents are subjected to bizarre therapies and urged – or rather forced – to adopt an unnaturally cheerful attitude. To what extent this is based on reality remains unclear. It does help to know that Avranas belongs to the so-called “weird Greek wave,” a movement within Greek cinema characterized by alienating aesthetics and socially unusual manners. Its best-known representative is Yorgos Lanthimos, with such internationally lauded films as Poor Things, The Lobster and Dogtooth. These films examine and comment on political and cultural issues, social relations and – more broadly – the modern zeitgeist in disturbing ways. Quiet Life fits seamlessly into that list.
Henk Maassen