THE HELLE BROTHERS

“A film in which there is little visible action, but a lot happens on a small scale. The drama is not superficial. It is kept under the surface except when an outsider from the city (Loes Vos, a beautiful role filled with contradictions) comes to disrupt the peace briefly as the fiancée of the more worldly brother. But in the end, the details are more important: the way the mother (Jeanne Verstraete) in this film allows a pudding to drop from a form is more fascinating than the way actors and other films pretend to beat each other to death. Digna Sinke knows what she is talking about and that makes everything in her film so familiar. She knows situations like this down to the tiniest detail and has apparently observed with as much attention as distance. She keeps returning to static totals, everything in its place, seen from the front, seem like an old-fashioned formal photo.
“The film is exciting, especially thanks to the intense glances, but also the control she uses to tell the story; Not a single unnecessary word is spoken and hardly any unnecessary shots are included.”