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MORLANG
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Warning to potential renters: thirty-five minutes into Morlang (2001), I turned to Nancy and suggested quitting the film because the protagonist was so unsympathetic. She wanted to stay with it, and I'm extremely glad we did.
Julius Morlang (Paul Freeman, Belloc in Raiders of the Lost Ark) is a modernist whose vast canvases are angry self-referential mixtures of photography and painting featuring either himself or his muse, which as the film opens is raven-haired Irish Ann (Susan Lynch, The Secret of Roan Inish), and whom we rapidly discover has supplanted Julius's dead wife Ellen (Diana Kent). Julius and Ann have an idyllic windswept trysting nest, a vast gray stone house on the cliffs of County Kerry in southwest Ireland, from which Julius broods, idles, paints, and plays casual golf with his agent Wim (Eric van der Donk), who flies to Ireland to golf with and wheedle Julius into producing, or offering for sale, a new painting.
For reasons unexplained (Julius being closed, imperious, and much older), both Ann and before her Ellen are devoted, attentive, accommodating, and sexually flirtatious. Julius has everything he wants, his life completely in whack.
Then things happen. Someone is stalking Julius.
Perhaps with memories of World War II in their blood, the solid and sober Dutch fuse the banality of evil with the grotesquery of psyche, as evidenced by Paul Verhoeven's The Fourth Man (1983) and George Sluizer's Spoorlos (1988; remade, with a sappy ending stapled incongruously on, as The Vanishing). Morlang is in this tradition, and first-time Dutch director Tjebbo Penning is astonishingly sure-handed in telling his story via three braided time lines, intercutting among them without transition and forcing viewers to assemble piece by piece the past and Ellen's death. A precursor of Memento and other zipper stories, it uses visuals as grab bars (Julius has a beard in the present, clean-shaven in the past) to jump between Amsterdam and Kerry, Ellen and Ann, secrets and sins … and all the pieces dovetail.
To say more would be too much. Put this in your Netflix queue. When it arrives, don't read the box, don't study the menu options, don't look up reviews. Sit down, shut up, and watch it carefully -- all the way through.