Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Borgman Blu-ray Movie Review

Who (or What) Is Borgman?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 23, 2014

Note: When Borgman was released on Blu-ray on Sept. 9, 2014, it was immediately noted that the forced English-language subtitles on this Dutch film were, in fact, English SDH subtitles including descriptions of numerous sound effects such as "[dog barking]", "[suspenseful music playing on TV]", etc. Issuer Drafthouse Films began work on a corrected disc, which was released in mid-December, but a problem occurred in replicating the replacement disc, such that a second corrected disc is now being manufactured. It is expected to be available in January 2015.

Further Note: On January 9, 2015, I received a copy of the final corrected disc from Drafthouse. Anyone wishing to exchange their disc should contact Drafthouse directly at info@drafthouse.com. The corrected disc cannot be identified by its packaging or external markings, but its menu has an entry for "setup" that contains optional English SDH subtitles.

Borgman is the eighth film by Dutch writer/director Alex van Warmerdam, and it was the official Dutch entry for Best Foreign Language Film to the 2014 Academy Awards. The first Dutch film to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 38 years, it was nominated for the Palmes D'Or. But Borgman is not the kind of film that wins awards. It gets noticed, and it stays with you, but in the end it's just too weird and unsettling to generate the kind of warmth that triggers a "yes" vote on a ballot. The film can't even be easily categorized. A thriller? A satire? A dark fairy tale, much like those the eponymous protagonist likes to tell children? A horror story masquerading as a deadpan comedy? A Dutch variation of The X- Files? Borgman has elements of all these things, but that still doesn't capture its uniquely astringent flavor.

Borgman opens with a Biblical-sounding quotation: "And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks." As van Warmerdam says in the printed interview accompanying Drafthouse's Blu-ray, the audience forgets about this opening in the tangle of events that follows, but it actually does provide a narrative "through line" for the entire story.

We first meet the man we will come to know as Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) when he is being hunted in his current lair by a group of men that includes a priest. Borgman's hiding place is a maze of tunnels below the forest in which he appears to have been living for an extended period, but he hears the pursuers' approach and escapes. He also alerts two cohorts hiding in nearby holes, Pascal (Tom Dewispelaere) and Ludwig (director van Warmerdam), who flee in a different direction. Borgman's group will eventually be revealed to include two more, a mother named Brenda (Annet Malherbe) and her twenty-something daughter, Ilonka (Eva van de Wijdeven), who work as a team.

Borgman himself looks like a homeless person, complete with a mane of matted hair, a long and unkempt beard, dirty, ragged clothes and a wild look in his eyes. At the same time, he seems to have focus and purpose. As he goes from one well-appointed house to another, he may be asking whoever answers his knock at the door for the use of their shower, but the request is so unlikely that it is obviously a pretext. Whatever Borgman is looking for, it is behind his words (and that is usually the case with this slight, reserved figure).

The comfortable, expansive house on which Borgman settles belongs to the family of Richard (Jeroen Perceval), a TV production executive, and his wife, Marina (Hadewych Minis), a housewife, mother and painter, whose three young children are tended by a Danish au pair named Stine (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen). Marina communicates with Stine in English, which is the lingua franca of Europe. I'll skip over the details of how Borgman comes to reside in the property's guest house, but they're both horrifying and oddly comical. The events also give Borgman his initial insight into the rifts within the household, which will provide him the foothold he needs to execute his larger plan.

The exact nature of Borgman's plan is part of the film's unfolding mystery, made all the more puzzling by elements and events that van Warmerdam chooses to leave unexplained. Borgman has an odd surgical scar on his back. Eventually, so do others, but its purpose is never explained. The man seems to have the power to influence dreams, and he exerts it on Marina, who begins experiencing nightmares of her husband's abuse. Several greyhound dogs appear at regular intervals and behave as if they understand Borgman; they never appear at the same time as Pascal and Ludwig, who eventually show up to assist their "boss" when, with a haircut and a shave, he ends up taking a position as Richard's and Marina's new gardener. The man is a master of poisons and sleeping potions, and he also knows gruesome fairy tales that none of the three children have ever heard. Angelic little Isolde (Elve Lijbaart) finds Borgman fascinating. The other two, Rebecca and Leo (Dirkje van der Pijl and Pieter-Bas de Waard), follow her lead.

Essential to van Warmerdam's narrative strategy is that everything after Borgman's initial escape from his pursuers looks contemporary and normal, even ordinary. Borgman and his cohorts all communicate by smartphone. The family of Marina and Richard live in a house of recent construction filled with furniture of modern design and obviously new appliances. The film's digital photography is flat and ordinary, as if nothing were being concealed in the shadows. Visually, there isn't a hint of the kind of world where magical sprites, whether good or evil, might venture out of the forest to interfere in the lives of regular people. Then again, some of the story's events cannot be explained any other way—for example, the odd coincidence that Stine's new boyfriend (Mike Weerts) just happens to have a surprise connection to the family, changing the entire tenor of the dinner to which Marina invites him, or Stine's odd behavior that evening. It's as if some unseen hand were arranging these events for a purpose, in the same way that Borgman, Pascal and Ludwig begin to remake the backyard garden for a purpose that only Borgman fully comprehends.

Some elements of the character of Borgman are supposed to have been borrowed from German folklore, but it's clear from the deleted scenes in the extras that van Warmerdam carefully removed anything that might tip the story too much in the direction of explaining who or what Borgman is. He says in the included director's statement that "I wanted to show that evil comes in everyday form, embodied within ordinary, normal, polite men and women who perform their tasks with pride and pleasure, and with ruthless attention to detail." He might have added that evil doesn't always announce its presence with a foreboding score, special effects and prosthetic makeup. Sometimes it just knocks at the door.

Borgman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Borgman was shot by Dutch cinematographer Tom Erisman, who regularly works with van Warmerdam. According to IMDb, the film was captured with the Arri Alexa and finished on a 2K digital intermediate, which is consistent with the appearance of the finished product. Drafthouse's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, released through Cinedigm, was presumably sourced from digital files.

If you have only seen publicity stills from Borgman, you will find the colors and brightness on Drafthouse's Blu-ray surprising, because the stills are saturated and contrast-y, whereas the Blu-ray image has been desaturated and contrast is turned way down. I did not see Borgman theatrically, but I presume that this is how the film was intended to look, because the visual style in the stills would cut against the matter-of-fact approach reflected by everything else in the film. The Blu-ray image has good sharpness and detail and consistent black levels, but it avoids bright, saturated colors, preferring a palette of blues and dull earth tones. Even the occasional appearance of blood (most intensely in Marina's dreams) isn't overly red. This isn't an image for showing off one's system, but it has a hypnotic power that draws you in, much as the quietly deliberate Borgman draws in Marina and her children, right under Richard's unsuspecting nose.

With its usual commitment to quality, Drafthouse has placed the 114-minute film on a BD-50 with an average bitrate of 29.99 Mbps. Compression artifacts were not an issue.

Borgman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Borgman's seemingly ordinary environments, sonically reproduced in 5.1 surround and encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, are punctuated with some distinctive sounds that are difficult to describe without spoilers. Water is a frequent element: a large country lake near the home of Richard and Marina; a giant pond that Ludwig and Pascal excavate behind their home, as part of Borgman's makeover of the property; even the simple sounds of the bath that Borgman takes when Marina lets him into the house. The sound mix is subtle and never overwhelming, but like the photography it has a hypnotic effect. The same holds for the spare, electronic score by the director's brother, Vincent van Warmerdam.

Borgman's dialogue is primarily in Dutch. Please see the introductory notes regarding the issue with English subtitles, which, as of January 9, 2015, has been corrected by Drafthouse with a remastered disc.

Borgman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2.39:1; 6:08): This small selection of deleted scenes is revealing on two fronts. First, as noted in the Video discussion, the scenes indicate how much the color timing was altered in post-production. Second, these scenes suggest how the editing process deliberately removed anything that might have confirmed supernatural powers on the part of Borgman's group. For example, in the scene where Stine's boyfriend returns to the house, Ludwig demonstrates abilities beyond that of a normal person.



• Trailers
• Borgman Theatrical Trailer
• The Act of Killing
• A Field in England
• Pieta
• Wrong



• Booklet: The enclosed booklet contains film and disc credits, stills, one-sheet concepts and drawings, concept paintings by van Warmerdam, a "director's statement", and informative interviews with van Warmerdam, Bijovet (Borgman), Minis (Marina) and one-sheet designer Brandon Schaefer.

Borgman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Borgman has been compared to the work of Michael Haneke, but I found the experience to be nothing like watching a Haneke film. Haneke is too much of a stylist ever to be called a realistic filmmaker, but his characters tend to be real people, even if the director views them coldly from a distance. By contrast, van Warmerdam's characters in Borgman may look like real people, but you're never entirely sure what or who they are, and despite the realistic texture, Borgman eventually acquires the quality of a waking dream. There's a sequence in the latter part of the film where Borgman and his "team" put on an outdoor show for the family whose house they've taken over, and it plays like a cross between David Lynch and Monty Python. The only reason it isn't pure comedy is because terrible things have happened by that point, for no apparent reason other than, as Borgman says to Marina, "I want to play". It's not a scene I can imagine in a Haneke film, and neither is Borgman's conclusion. It's not quite like anything else I can recall. Highly recommended, once the fully corrected version is available from Drafthouse.