(The Netherlands/Hungary, 90 min.)
Dir. Loureens Blok, Writ. Marco van Geffen,
Philip Delmaar
Starring: Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen,
Ella-June Henrard, Yannick Jozefzoon, Tygo Gernandt, Halina Reijn
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| Photo courtesy of TIFF. |
The Netherlands is a police state in the
not-so-distant future and the youth, the nation’s future, are its prisoners.
One young man, Sam (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen), finds himself at the
centre of this strange, powerful, and corrupt system when he awakens in a daze
on the city subway with nothing other than a backpack, a mysterious girl named
Lara (Ella-June Henrard), whom he faintly recognizes, and a swarm of po-po pursuing
him as if he’s a wanted terrorist. Kids have an innate sense of how to navigate
dystopia now that moviegoers between the ages of ten and twenty-five find
themselves within the family tree of Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior, but Sam,
renamed 7 in his depersonalized world, navigates a dangerous situation from
which even a mockingjay might have trouble fleeing the coop. Take Boy 7 as a Euro Hunger Games or as a Dutch Divergent,
and this fast-paced adventure into a haywire future is a pretty wild romp.
There might not be anything besides language that differentiates Boy 7 from American dystopian teen cinema—it’s even based on a bestselling book!—but the intersections between the films are bound to make it an easygoing ride for most audiences. (Amen to you, Katniss, Tris, and Sam for working together to make subtitles cool!) Boy 7, like its Hollywood counterparts, envisions a dark, cold, and steely world where the youth are guinea pigs for a larger experiment in social control as Sam discovers when he retraces the shards of his memory back to a hacking stint that landed him in prison. The prison, however, is really an elaborate charade for experiments and training regimes that turn mildly delinquent youths into drones and pawns.
Director Loureens Blok creates an evil
atmosphere of cyber-coded sterility as the prison guards and government players
manipulate the inmates. Everything is white and muted—there's not a shred of
character to be found in Boy 7’s
compound except in the seeds of rebellion that begin as Sam (re)discovers his
love for Lara. Boy 7 frequently
ruptures the chronology with blips in Sam's memory that remove him from the test
tube of the prison and help him return to reality. Cameras and microchips are
everywhere as Blok creates a moody world in which people are prisoners of their
own digital devices, but just as apps and codes can program humans into drones,
they’re also man-made systems that Sam can outmanoeuvre just as sharply as
Katniss fires an arrow. His lessons and his innate ability to decipher social
codes make him the ideal rebel to break the machinery of the Dutch Big Brother
state from the inside.
Blok offers some efficient action sequences
amidst the character-driven game of memory and identity. This handsomely
produced film boasts impressive visuals and crafts, especially the cinematography
by Jasper Wolf and an energetically pulsing techno score by Jorrit Kleijnen and
Alexander Reumers (better known as the duo Paraphrase). Boy 7, as speculative cinema goes, is both smart and entertaining
as it nimbly meets the bar set by the latest international phenomenon in teen-targeted
film and fiction. It’s stylishly tapped in to our plugged-in and digitally-driven
culture.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Boy 7 screens at TIFF Next
Wave on Sunday, Feb 15 at 5:45 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Please
visit www.tiff.net/nextwave for more
information.
