WE, written and directed by Rene Eller from a novel by Elvis Peeters, concerns a group of eight teenagers in a little town on the Belgian-Dutch border who spend a summer vacation wreaking all sorts of immoral havoc until they inevitably go too far. You’ve seen a version of this movie before, certainly, but WE pushes things to a graphic extreme. It’s definitely a difficult watch at times.
To tell the truth, I’m not quite sure how I feel about the film, even after having watched it twice. A scene involving the torture of a small dog almost had me turning the movie off before it was even a third of the way done. It felt gratuitous. Sure, the teenagers being portrayed here are evil little shits, but did we really need to see this to understand that? Eller is clearly trying to attack the audience’s senses, presumably in an attempt to get them to think about the violence they’re seeing. The problem is that the script doesn’t really need this kind of starkly realistic violence to get its point across.
I think almost everyone who’s been a teenager can relate to the strange sensation that a high school summer vacation brings. You feel a kind of freedom that’s just not there during the school year. Sure, you’re still at home with one or more of your parents or guardians, but there are huge swaths of time that are completely yours. You work more hours at your job and have more money in your pocket during your days off. You feel like an adult, even though you don’t have the same responsibilities or culpability. Your sexuality is bourgeoning and you’re starting to really consider who you are and what your future might become. You feel like an adult, and yet you’re not. Your brain is still developing. You’re in this weird grey area between an adult and child. You have adult desires but a child’s emotional development. That might not work out so well.
The teenagers in WE are middle class in a town in the middle of nowhere, and the boredom and sameness is getting to them. And so their rebellion takes the form of rejecting the stilted, mundane world around them. They have a kind of Nietzschean superiority about them. Beyond good and evil, all that. The standard stuff. And that’s mainly how they justify themselves.
And of course there’s a romantic element to all of this. Simon (Tijmen Govaerts), the pretty boy of the group, says at one point, “We wanted to discover the world and had no time to lose.” He’s fully aware of the transitional phase they’re in. Soon, they’ll have to leave their newly acquired “freedom” behind and enter the world of adult responsibilities, the mundane world that they despise. And so they want to do everything in the short time that they have. Unfortunately, the “everything” that they want to experience mostly hurts other people, as well as themselves.
Things start out relatively tame, when the group decides that they want to make a lot of money over the summer. And how to make a great deal of money in a short period of time? Well, porn, of course. And so the group of four girls and four boys get it going in front of a camera, wearing cartoony masks to conceal their identities. The masks make things that much more surreal, giving a sense of malevolence to something that’s relatively harmless.
On one level, it’s just a money-making thing, but in another sense, the whole porn operation serves as a kind of bonding ritual. Before they were a group of friends, afterward they’re a tribe of sorts. Because if WE is about anything, it’s about groupthink and tribalism. Individually, they surely wouldn’t take things as far as they eventually do. But they end up feeding off of each other, becoming, in a sense, a single organism greater than the sum of its parts. This is where the film excels, and it’s the reason I saw it through even after that scene with the dog that completely fucking destroyed me.
It’s a scary thing, this teenage groupthink. I remember being part of a group of kids who pushed each other further and further into drug and alcohol abuse during a particularly long Alabama summer in 1997. It was insane, and a lot of people got hurt. It’s scary how quickly you can get caught up in this stuff. I was lucky to get out. Others didn’t.
One thing the guys in the group I was involved in never considered (I’m 90% sure) was convincing our girlfriends to prostitute themselves while the guys took pictures and recordings and various other evidence that we could use to blackmail the tricks later on if we wanted something from them. But that’s where the kids in this film take things after they realize that Internet porn isn’t a way to get rich quick. Things quickly spiral from there into violence, blackmail, and nihilism.
All of the teenagers have at least short moments of reflection where they question what they’re doing. That is, everyone except for Thomas (Aimé Claeys), the sociopath star around which the other teens orbit. A couple of the girls quit the group, but by then they’re nothing but numbers, and can be replaced by other girls. The group is a kind of insane organism that can regrow its limbs.
It’s dark stuff, but the bleak subject constantly stands in contrast with the absolutely gorgeous Dutch countryside where all this takes place. Eller and cinematographer Maxime Desmet excel in the many outdoor shots where the kids hang out in their countryside surroundings. Some of it is absolutely gorgeous. It makes for something of a contrast to the growing apathy and nihilism of the teenagers. But, of course, we’re talking about an ironic beauty where the bucolic setting only reinforces the cold, removed nature of the kids’ psyche.
WE is full of interesting visual contrasts, and the story is interesting enough, but I find myself wondering how much I actually liked the movie. I certainly don’t think I’ll watch it again. The violence isn’t exactly gratuitous because it’s all in service to the story. And yet…
I get the sense that Eller has at least a bit of contempt for his audience. It’s like he’s poking us in the chest, daring us to go on to the next grotesque scene. Because without the extreme violence, there’s not a ton to say about the story. Bad teenagers do bad things. Well, yes, certainly.
And that’s the thing: you could have eliminated the most extreme scenes, or maybe just alluded to them, and the ideas behind the film would still be obvious. The nihilism, the good-youth-gone-bad themes, the tragedy that can result from groupthink, would all still be there. In that way, the violence does become gratuitous.
I wouldn’t be writing for this site if I had problems with violence in movies. I love it. But this was very realistic stuff added onto a script that’s full of unredeemable characters who get away with their crimes and leave the world that much worse because of it. And it’s all told with such a straight face that I don’t see how someone could watch this and not come away from it feeling at least a little empty inside.
As a film critic, this puts me in a weird position: this is a good movie, certainly, but would I actually recommend this to anyone? I’m not sure I would want to put anyone I know through that kind of darkness when it’s all around us in real life anyway. Certainly, if you’re going to watch it, proceed with caution.
Tags: Adaptations, Aime Claeys, Belgium, Blu-ray, Elvis Peeters, Maxime Desmet, Rene Eller, Tijmen Govaerts
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