Borgman (2013)
Directed by Alex van Warmerdam
An enigmatic vagrant cons himself into the home life of an arrogant upper-class family, turning their lives into a psychological nightmare in the process.
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4 films that influenced Borgman
What critics say influenced Borgman
It is, in short, a singular experience, a film that, while often lazily compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, eschews that director’s penchant for clinical dissection in favor of a playfully nefarious tone.
Production designer Geert Paredis has found a brilliant location for the sinister events that unfold, its seclusion in verdant surroundings reinforcing a vague kinship with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
A dark suburban fairytale that takes cues from Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth") and Michael Haneke ("Funny Games"), while firmly remaining its own strange beast, "Borgman" hovers perilously over a stiff upper-class family whose bearings are unmoored by the appearance of a mysterious vagrant fellow (Jan Bijvoet).
While easily comparable to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," the characters in that movie were more blatantly psychopathic, while the motives of Borgman and his crew are difficult to discern until the very end.
Soon enough, things start to feel more like Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” a very different kettle of incongruity, in which thugs invade an affluent couple’s home.
What does make “Borgman” a first cousin to “Funny Games” is the victim’s membership in the European one percent, which in the U.S. would make them just another upper middle-class family in suburbia.
I also thought of Dogtooth, the insane 2009 Greek film about an isolated family.
A dark suburban fairytale that takes cues from Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth") and Michael Haneke ("Funny Games"), while firmly remaining its own strange beast, "Borgman" hovers perilously over a stiff upper-class family whose bearings are unmoored by the appearance of a mysterious vagrant fellow (Jan Bijvoet).
In the same black, poisoned vein as " Dogtooth " and " Funny Games " pumps Alex van Warmerdam’s "Borgman," another darkly comic thriller about domesticity crumbling into violence and even insanity.
Warmerdam’s direction recalls Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth, another film about a comfortable family unraveling via occultish psychological manipulation.
At its weakest, Borgman recycles the deranged-family satire of films like Funny Games or Dogtooth, making similar points about the terrifying conformity of suburban existence.
Early reviews emerging from the Croisette have already compared the film to both Yorgos Lanthimoss Dogtooth, and the more severe works of Michael Haneke, two touchstones that absolutely hit the mark.
With the assistance of Brenda (Warmerdam's wife, Annet Malherbe) and Ilonka (Eva van de Wijdeven), two other members of his weird tribe, Borgman rids the family of their gardener (Gene Bervoets, "The Vanishing") to enable an elaborate ruse with Ludwig and Pascal to get himself hired (also illustrating Richard's xenophobia and racism and Borgman's sway over the family's youngest, Isolde (Elve Lijbaart)).
Borgman reminds me of ambitious projects like Holy Motors and Delicatessen, lavish foreign productions expressing unique storytelling that refuse to be confined by scripting rules that demand no detail be presented without reasoning.
Leos Carax recreated him, in an even more anarchic form, as the sewer-dwelling Merde, both in the omnibus film Tokyo! and his 2012 feature Holy Motors.