★★★☆☆
Vegan activists versus a pig farmer’s family, in the bloodiest Dutch film ever made: the nastiest violence at the fest.
Martijn Smits earns his festival notoriety with what has been billed as the bloodiest Dutch film ever made, and the first from the Netherlands to land an adults-only certificate. Mirthe (Caro Derkx) works undercover at a pig farm and slaughterhouse, secretly filming its cruelties to prove herself to the Animal Army, a radical collective led by the fearless, faintly fanatical Nasha (Emma Josten). When their night raid to free the animals arrives too late, the pigs already slaughtered, Nasha’s crusade tips into revenge against the farmer and his sons, and a mutual bloodbath erupts across the slaughterhouse floor.
Smits, working from a script by Johan Paul de Vrijer, plays the single location as a maze already stocked with the tools of the trade, and the practical gore is gleefully, wince-inducingly brutal: baths of boiling water, electro-shock prods, bolt guns and saw blades all pressed into service against activist and farmer alike. It sits squarely in the New French Extremity lineage of Frontier(s) and Inside, and it is the nastiest thing you will see at the fest: watch-from-behind-your-fingers stuff throughout.
What it is not is a complicated story: the plotting is perfunctory, the characters are mostly there to bicker and be dispatched, and the both-sides satire of self-important self-righteous online activism throws its jabs without much beneath them. But nastiness is the pitch, and on that promise it never once lets up. Bring a strong stomach and expect the carnage turned all the way up.
Meat Kills played at Tubi FrightFest in London.