Patrick builds up incremental levels of strangeness to become an offbeat delight. The feature debut of Peaky Blinders director Tim Mielants, it’s a weird but winning amalgam of zero-degree humour, a controlled filmmaking aesthetic, a poignant metaphor for grief and a whole load of swinging members. It’s somewhat of an acquired taste — some may find it slow — but, if you can slide into its groove, it serves up an original, memorable treat.
The titular character is the thirtysomething son of Rudy (Josse De Pauw), the owner of a nudist camp somewhere in the woods of the Ardennes region. When Rudy suddenly kicks the bucket, Patrick is sent into a tailspin not over the death of his father but because his beloved hammer has gone missing from its spot. On the surface what follows is a detective story as Patrick goes looking for his absent tool, but is really an obvious but effective metaphor for the loss of a loved one, Mielants mining nifty subtext from a man who can be naked physically but not emotionally.
Informing the hammer hunt are the internal politics of a nudist enclave, Patrick’s affair with the wife of a campsite big-wig (Ariane Van Vliet), a Jemaine Clement cameo as rock star Dustin, lying low with his kinda-sorta girlfriend (Hannah Hoekstra) who takes a shine to Patrick, some zero-degree comedy, beautiful cinematography and a flugelhorn-centric score that adds a mournful, affecting layer. Yet the film is held together by the impassive Janssens as Patrick, bravely sporting 2020’s worst cinematic haircut, whose low-energy presence makes you care about the most small-scale, pastoral mystery. Great fun.