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. Comments, questions, tips, criticism, and praise can be sent to Henk Maassen: scoop0329@gmail.com
SCOOP 6: July 12, 2025
This new episode focuses on unfulfilled childhood wishes and miscarriages (in the film Kind and the novel Hello Baby), the French comedy On Ira, in which a terminally ill old lady wants to end her life but encounters quite a few communication barriers, and the film Hot Milk about a woman who is burdened by unexplained physical complaints and thus restricts her daughter’s life. But first, the razor-sharp, short Japanese novel Hunchback, in which a woman with congenital myopathy talks candidly and pessimistically about her severe physical disability.
Click here for the pdf.
Novel
Hunchback, Saou Ichikawa,
A permanent state of constriction
She has, says narrator Shaka Izawa in Hunchback by Japanese author Saou Ichikawa, a myopathic face, because she suffers from myotubular myopathy. Although not a progressive disease, it is one in which muscle tissue wastes away if not used, with no chance of recovery. And that’s not all: she suffers from further physical limitations, because: ‘The S-bend in my spine is so extreme that my right lung is compressed, which in my world gives a special meaning to left and right. This means I can only get out of bed on the left side.” Furthermore, she can only reach things in the refrigerator with her right hand, and only the tips of her toes touch the floor.
All this exceptional discomfort means that Shaka is in a ‘permanent state of constriction’. Speaking is difficult – long conversations literally take her breath away – which is why she prefers to communicate via text messages. After all, there is always the risk of suffocation if accumulated mucus is not cleared sufficiently and her windpipe becomes blocked, and even if that is not the case, her oxygen saturation can suddenly drop to dangerous levels if she keeps moving for too long. Her frustrations are considerable: “Because I didn’t start menstruating until I was nineteen, I looked a lot younger than the forty-something I was. It could also be that my aging curve, like my spine, had started to show the same S-curve since I left the normal growth path.”
Thanks to the enormous amount of money her parents left her, she is financially independent and lives in a care facility that is paid for by those funds. Her existence as a student is her only connection to society, “not counting her side job as an armchair writer.” That “moonlighting” refers to her sexually explicit pulp fiction writings published under a pseudonym— Hunchback begins and ends with them.
Writing is not easy: ‘While I was struggling to finish the article, mucus had accumulated in my windpipe and now the alarm on Trilogy’s ventilator was beeping nervously (…) I inserted the suction catheter to remove the mucus that had been whipped into a foamy mush by the ventilator over the past twenty minutes with a slurping sound, reconnected my tracheostomy tube to the ventilator hose, picked up my iPhone that was lying next to my bed (…).”
When she’s not taking online university courses or writing pornographic stories, she tweets wishes and statements she thinks no one will see, such as: “I would like to know what it’s like to have an abortion,” and “In another life, I would like to work as a high-class prostitute.” But a male caregiver, Tanaka, hints that he has indeed read her tweets and erotic stories. She offers him money to have sex with her. They despise each other, and their unequal social positions certainly play a role in this. This novel is therefore not only about the severe limitations of Shaka’s medical condition, but also about power differences—those who have money can arrange good care for themselves—and about society’s acceptance of people with disabilities. Hunchback makes it clear that in Japan, people like Shaka are effectively excluded from society. For example, it is only since 1996 that disabled people have been allowed to reproduce; before that, they were forcibly sterilized. According to a recent report in the newspaper, this is changing, however.
Ichikawa uses the perspective of her own disability—she herself has congenital myopathy—for her novel, but to describe it as purely autobiographical would be going too far, I think. Her approach is too literary for that. She writes with a sense of subversive humor, sometimes cynical, even nihilistic, always mischievous, provocative, and with a touch of essayistic style. Shaka wonders whether she is a freak, like those who performed in freak shows at the beginning of the twentieth century, and who were later transformed into the familiar Hollywood monsters whose disguises provided people with “a moral buffer that allowed them to gawk at deformed creatures unabashedly and without remorse.”
This passage is in the same contemplative vein: ‘The longer I lived, the more my body deteriorated into a disfigured state. It did not decay in the run-up to death. It deteriorated in order to live—the deterioration of the body as a testimony to the time it had endured. In this, it differed fundamentally from terminal illnesses or infirmities of old age that able-bodied people may experience, and which vary from person to person due to slight variations in the rate of deterioration.”
The jury that nominated Ichikawa’s novel for the International Booker Prize called it an unapologetic and fearless novel that dismantles social and moral assumptions about disabilities while focusing on the joys of the body.
That is no exaggeration.
Henk Maassen
Film
On Ira
Now in theaters
Euthanasia packaged as a road movie
Can you turn a desire for euthanasia into a comedy? Yes, at least French filmmaker Enya Baroux succeeds quite nicely with On Ira, his debut. This comedy of errors is based primarily on miscommunication between 80-year-old Marie, her son, and her granddaughter. Marie is suffering from metastatic breast cancer and has decided to travel to Switzerland to end her life. But on the morning she plans to settle matters with her only son, everything goes wrong, and he doesn’t find out what she is planning or the seriousness of her health condition. She wants to report to Zurich in a week’s time to end her life.
Her new home care worker Rudy—a free spirit with a heart of gold for his patients who is eager to escape the mess of his own life—turns out to be her savior and, against his will, becomes a kind of end-of-life counselor. Marie manages to persuade him to drive her, her son, and her granddaughter to Switzerland in her dilapidated camper van, under the not very credible pretext that they are going to collect an inheritance from a relative who died some time ago. Marie plans to reveal the real purpose of the trip at a suitable moment during the journey. But you guessed it: that moment never comes. The family’s communication is based on lies and unspoken discomfort; you could even call it a pattern. The granddaughter conceals her first period, the son hides his extremely precarious financial situation, and then there’s a running gag involving a rat that travels with them.
Does it work? Yes, because Baroux, who co-wrote the screenplay, tells a well-constructed story, avoids sentimental clichés, and is supported by convincing actors, even if he doesn’t make the whole thing particularly exciting cinematographically.
He dedicated his film to his grandmother, so there is undoubtedly some personal experience behind it. Anyone who has ever seen the film Little Miss Sunshine will also know where Baroux got his inspiration.
Henk Maassen
Film
Kind (Child) (Dutch movie)
Now in theaters and available on picl.nl
Holistic nonsense in obstetric care
In the 15th week of her pregnancy, Jaimy (played by Noort Herlaar) has a miscarriage. Her gynecologist cannot identify the cause, she says, but that is the case in 85 percent of cases, which sounds reassuring. But after Jaimy and her husband Leon (Vincent van der Valk) insist on further investigation, it turns out that Jaimy is probably going through early menopause and that the chance of another pregnancy is virtually nil. That’s a tough blow. Such is the starting point in Kind by Jan Verdijk and screenwriter Johan Paul de Vrijer. Enter holistic midwife Nicole (Tamar van den Dop). She promises that Jaimy will indeed get pregnant again; what’s more, she even knows it will be a girl. Everything about this unctuous woman with her affable, empathetic smile and her even “friendlier” and gentler assistant exudes danger, yet Jaimy grabs this straw.
Interestingly, at one point Jaimy realizes how deceitful Nicole is and wants to quit, while Leon, in his desperation, seems to have been converted to her “gifts.” Meanwhile, a constant threat hangs over the film, not least because of the occasionally subtly menacing sounds in the soundtrack.
According to its makers, Kind is not intended to be a sermon on spirituality or science, nor is it shock horror with cheap tricks. Verdijk: ‘Horror is not a goal for us, but a form to touch something essential. At its core, Kind is about the deeply human desire for control. How we tend to want to control everything, even during the early stages of pregnancy, when we are largely at the mercy of fate. Kind shows a man who goes beyond himself to maintain control, but as his desperation grows, so does the danger of not being able to let go.”
While developing the script for Kind, Verdijk and his girlfriend were also in the midst of a long, silent struggle to have a child. “We had experienced several miscarriages. We tried everything: tests, diets, supplements, acupuncture, hormone treatment. There was no cause. We received no guidance. Only the advice to try again. ‘Just bad luck,’ the doctors said. And then, out of nowhere, we got pregnant again. This time it went well. No one knew what made the difference this time. For someone like me – down-to-earth, non-religious – that’s hard to comprehend. But somewhere in that vacuum, something resembling faith emerged. Not in something divine, but in the inexplicable.’
This viewer could not see the film as anything other than a warning or an indictment of the nonsense peddled in the alternative sector. But I’m not entirely sure that this is what the makers intended.
Henk Maassen
Novel
Hello Baby, Kim Eui-kyung. Uitgeverij Pluim, 223 pages, 22.99 euros (Not translated into English)
Six Korean women who want children
Just like in the film Kind, Kim Eui-kyung’s Korean novel Hello Baby features a woman with early menopause, which seriously hinders her deep desire to have children. Five other women populate this book; they are all in a joint chat group and consult the same top clinic in the hope of getting pregnant. All of them have a medical condition and are relatively old—just under or over 40—which makes IVF necessary. Unfortunately, they have suffered multiple miscarriages.
Unexpectedly, one of them gives birth after all. How this is possible, and whether it is true, is irrelevant here. The plot of Hello Baby is extremely predictable. This rather flatly written novel focuses on the six women, who are characterized in separate chapters and situated in their social and family environments, including their relationships with men who are often uninvolved (one of them is single). The novel focuses particularly on what drives them not to give up hope of having a child. They all get their own story.
What is striking is that the author is medically well informed, she knows the various IVF techniques and knows, for example, what polycystic ovary syndrome or obstructive azoospermia is. She also makes it clear how much this issue affects South Korea: in 2020, the country had the lowest fertility rate in the world, mainly because women are having children later in life and prioritizing their careers.
And, as elsewhere in the world, men still have the best of both worlds, as implied by Hello Baby: they pursue careers and are not burdened by IVF procedures. “While women had to endure all kinds of injections and medical procedures, men only had to go to the clinic to masturbate and hand in a jar of semen. Whereas egg retrieval was characterized by pain, sperm collection was all about physical pleasure.”
According to her afterword, Kim Eui-kyung based her novel on her own experiences.
Henk Maassen
Film
Hot Milk
Now in theaters
How Persistent Physical Complaints affect more than just the patient
Hot Milk, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut, is an exploration of emotional dependence between mother and daughter and what it means to suffer from somatically unexplained physical symptoms, now referred to as POTS: Persistent Physical Symptoms. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Deborah Levy, which was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize. As in the above-mentioned Kind, the film is set in a clinic with a somewhat alternative, ‘holistic’ approach to the sick, but here it all seems a bit more sensible and reliable, and horror in any form is fortunately far away.
The focus is on the relationship between Sofia (Emma Mackey) and her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), who are both spending the summer in the Spanish coastal town of Almería, where Rose has pinned her hopes on Dr. Gómez, who runs a clinic there for “difficult” cases, of which Rose is one. She has been confined to a wheelchair for years, as she is more or less paralyzed (“I can walk once a year at most”) and is in pain everywhere. She has seen several doctors, who thought she might have iron deficiency or diabetes, but found nothing: she is actually in perfect health. Her condition may have something to do with trauma from her past. In the meantime, she forces her daughter into the suffocating role of caregiver. When she doesn’t ask Sofia to arrange some kind of outing, she complains about the heat and insects, but between all the grumpy bluntness, love still shines through between the two.
Sofia has indeed put her anthropology studies on hold to care for her mother, but not entirely willingly, as we see when she crawls behind her laptop. In the hours she spends away from her mother, Sofia gets to know the mysterious, liberal, and above all seductive Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). She, too, it turns out, is burdened by a traumatic past, but unlike Sofia’s mother, she acknowledges and recognizes it. An affair develops between the two.
Hot Milk is a somewhat problematic film. The theme is interesting in principle, but Rebecca Lenkiewicz fails to bring the lives of Rose, Sofia, and Ingrid together. They remain parallel trajectories, while the intention was undoubtedly for them to mirror each other and enrich each other thematically. “The world is dark until you say yes,” is remarked in the film; a dog that terrorizes the neighborhood with its barking for days is freed from its chain by Sofia—these are two of a series of clues as to what this film is really about: rigidity and control versus embracing freedom, independence, and the search for identity.
Lenkiewicz did not quite grasp the theme. Perhaps Levy’s novel was unfilmable. The meaning of the ending is open to speculation: deadly revenge and inhuman? Or a successful, ultimate exhortation to break free from what might best be described as a sick gain?
Henk Maassen
Earlier Scoops are published below.
Scoop June 28th
This time two films that are being screened again: the Japanese classic Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa about a terminally ill civil servant, and the rich but compelling Danish medical drama Open Hearts.
Film
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa)
Finding meaning in the face of death
Several restored versions of films by the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa are currently being re-released. Among them is Ikiru, his first major masterpiece from 1952: a quiet character study of loneliness in the face of death. Ikiru is more than a film title, it is also a Japanese concept that can be translated as ‘life’ or ‘living one’s life’.
In the opening shot of Ikiru, we see an X-ray. The nature of the illness is mentioned off-screen by a voiceover. It is a death sentence: municipal official Kanji Watanabe has stomach cancer. He has six months to live. The realization that he has achieved nothing special in the past 25 years and has never enjoyed anything makes him want to fill that existential void in the short time he has left.
He wants to ‘Live’ with a capital L, but how? Until now, he has led a routine existence in a bureaucratic environment, which director Kurosawa has undoubtedly deliberately portrayed in a caricatured manner. In a bar, he meets a writer who calls himself Mephistopheles. This “devilish author” does not need money for his soul; after all, Watanabe is already doomed. He suggests that they go out together with the municipal official. They seek entertainment in the bars and strip shows of nighttime Tokyo. But Watanabe turns out to be a complete stranger amid all the glitz and glamour. He will find neither joy nor fulfillment here. He only finds that in his ambition to transform a neglected, vacant lot into a children’s playground—against all bureaucratic opposition.
About two-thirds of the way through the film, Kurosawa inserts a break: we learn from the voiceover that Watanabe died five months ago. Colleagues and family members gather for a memorial service. They discuss the merits and personality of the deceased from different points of view, creating a mosaic of rather hypocritical opinions. In flashbacks, we see what happened. Watanabe remained essentially misunderstood; only the mothers of the children in the playground mourn him sincerely. In the poignant finale, we see him alone, humming softly on a children’s swing, shortly before he dies.
A few years ago, a British remake of Ikiru was released, entitled ‘Living’, by South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus. Also not to be dismissed, but cinematographically less interesting than the Japanese original.
Henk Maassen
Film
Open Hearts
On: picl.nl
Doctor in love with patient’s wife: soap opera? No!
The plot of Open Hearts was originally intended as a romantic comedy, but at first glance it seems little more than a soap opera, and the film was to be shot according to the rather straightforward principles of the Danish Dogma group (known for films such as ‘Festen’) from thirty years ago: no special effects, only natural lighting, no studio shots, no soundtrack, hand-held camera, simple, authentic acting style (read: ‘as real as possible’). But it’s not as bad as it sounds, and fortunately it didn’t turn out to be a comedy.
The plot: Cecilie and Joachim are about to get married when the latter is seriously injured in a traffic accident. Joachim is paralyzed from the neck down and tells the grieving Cecilie that she must leave him. She talks to the doctor (played by the now world-famous Mads Mikkelsen), unaware that his wife caused the accident. The latter feels increasingly guilty about what happened and asks her husband, the doctor, to talk to Cecilie and comfort her.
You can undoubtedly guess what happens next: Cecilie and her husband’s doctor start an affair. Sounds rather schmaltzy? Certainly, but this is nevertheless a compelling film, better than many others from the Dogma wave of the time. Precisely because it is so honest and, yes, ‘real’, even if it does not adhere too ‘dogmatically’ to all the rules.
And besides, what do you actually do in such a delicate situation as a doctor?
Henk Maassen
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