Meat – original title: Vlees – is a 2010 Dutch psycho drama film directed by Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs (Venus in Furs) from a screenplay by the former. It stars Titus Muizelaar, Nellie Benner, and Hugo Metsers.
Plot:
An overweight, lustful butcher, used to living out his lurid fantasies in the shop, becomes interested in his young female apprentice. The young woman, documenting everything with a video camera, enthusiastically gets involved with him.
However, when the butcher is murdered and a police inspector, who looks exactly like the dead butcher, investigates the crime, the story takes on a bizarre nightmare-ish quality…
Reviews:
” … one of the most imaginative damnations of the animal industry you’ll ever experience. Yes, butchers are a tradition that goes back to the domestication of animals, but a butcher is also a metaphor for cruel and deadly people, and Meat certainly has its freezer full of dastardly delmonicos caught in their own obsessions of passive-aggressive sexual dominance and guilt.” Quiet Earth
“It’s an often dark, blackly comic film with a slight aura of sleaze enhanced especially by the location of the butcher shop. There’s a lot of mystery within, both regarding what actually occurs and the motivations of each of the characters – which makes for a wonderful change from a lot of cinema, not having everything laid out for the viewer, even by the final frame.” Letterboxd.com
” …as the film goes on, the pace becomes ponderous and the narrative begins to tangle itself. The dream logic that appears to be at play just didn’t quite work for me, all leading to a baffling final sequence. What we have here is a hypnotic set up of themes and characters that could only go so far in the filmmaker’s eyes. As such, the ending carried no weight.” UK Horror Scene
Film Facts:
Meat premiered at the 2010 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
