A riotous rollercoaster ride of gross-out horror comedy, sci-fi conspiracy theory and psychedelic acid-trip derangement, The Belgian Wave is one of the most unusual and entertaining world premieres at this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival. It is also one of the most incoherent, but petit bourgeois concerns like narrative logic and plausible characters clearly do not interest Belgian writer-director Jérôme Vandewattyne, whose default style is maximalist splatterpunk surrealism.
Part-time rock musician Vandewattyne was last in Oldenburg to premiere his debut feature Spit’N’Split (2017), a band-on-tour mockumentary which morphs into a gonzo horror bloodbath midway through. The Belgian Wave feels bigger and more ambitious, boasting high-gloss visuals and slick production design elements that defy its reportedly modest budget of 300,000 Euros. Peppered with knowingly retro homages to the scratchy VHS look and saturated neon palette of vintage 1980s and 1990s cult cinema, this delirious Midnight Movie is plainly not pitched at fans of tastefully restrained art-house fare. Even so, it is made with more polish and wit than its pulpy surface aesthetic might suggest, and is way too inventively weird to ever become boring. Genre-friendly festivals and psychotronic movie connoisseurs should take an interest.
The stranger-than-fiction back story to The Belgian Wave is a rash of real-life UFO sightings that occurred in eastern Belgium between late 1989 and early 1990. Soon after two military F-16 jets were scrambled to investigate unexplained radar anomalies, around 140 people claimed to have witnessed a triangular alien aircraft in the skies, with hundreds more sharing similar accounts for months afterwards. A series of official reports and media investigations proved inconclusive, but mostly blamed this bizarre phenomenon on normal air traffic, extreme weather events and even mass psychosis. The emergence of hoax photos did not dampen conspiracies of a government cover-up. Vandewattyne includes real archive news footage of these events in his patchwork narrative, alongside fake media reports shot with a similar vintage video look, blurring the line between historical fact and playful fabrication.
The Belgian Wave signals its mischeivous truth-bending intentions right from the start with an opening quote from rock icon Jim Morrison about favouring fantasy over reality. The action begins on the floor of a giant techno club, where an odd couple of drug-crazed party animals, Elzo (Karim Barass) and Karen (Karen de Paduwa), meet to discuss newly released UFO footage. They agree to open the cold case of Elzo’s missing godfather Marc (Dominique Rongveaux), a TV journalist who mysteriously vanished decades ago while investigating the 1990 sightings.
Driving a pimped-up former hearse repainted in sparkly purple (possibly a winking homage to the Ghostbusters films) the duo’s wild road trip leads them to series of close encounters with a colourful cast of oddballs, clowns and creeps. Chief among these is a sinister mask-wearing cult who perform an orgiastic dance ritual that plays like a deliciously weird mash-up of Alien (1979) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Along the way the duo also uncover a haul of Marc’s previously unseen video reportage, which lends The Belgian Wave a found-footage horror dimension with vaguely David Lynch-ian undertones. They also take a random detour to Ecuador, where the mystery is partially resolved in a time-collapsing, mind-bending drug hallucination.
Confused yet? Do not worry, nothing in this WTF carnival of lysergic excess makes much logical sense on a literal level. Vandewattyne’s forte is not docu-drama realism, but he does have a flair for absurdist comedy, luridly inventive visuals, super-fast cross-cutting edits and densely detailed sound design. This means The Belgian Wave manages to remain a frequently hilarious and consistently engaging feast for the senses, despite being an incoherent and overloaded mess in places. Crucially, it is also photographed with great stylistic brio by Jean-Francois Awad, whose superbly orchestrated drone shots soar high across cityscapes, dance around techno clubs and swoop over giant dams. A throbbing analogue electro-rock score by Belgian composer Yannick Franck, aka Raum, is another pleasingly retro touch.
Director: Jérôme Vandewattyne
Screenwriters: Jérôme Vandewattyne, Jérôme Di Egidio, Kamal Massaoudi
Cast: Karen de Paduwa, Karim Barass, Dominique Rongveaux, Vincent Tavier
Cinematography: Jean-Francois Awad
Editing: Ayrton Heymans
Producers: Rose Quenon, Gregory Zalcman
Music: Yannick Franck
Production company: Take Five (Belgium)
World sales: Reel Suspects (France)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Midnite Xpress)
In French
90 minutes
