Wij isn’t Salò for 2020, or the next Kids—it’s just repugnant

The plot: I’m not sure the world was crying out for another film in the vein of Kids, Bully, or Havoc—a genre of entertainment we’ll charitably dub Kids Do The Most Fucked-Up Things! But that’s what We is, and it since it’s not bound by any of the pesky sense of decorum you might find in American movies—even those with graphic sex or violence—what you see is way, way more fucked up. If you were to ask me who this movie is made for, there’s not really a great way of saying, “God, nobody, I hope,” yet here we are.
We (Wij in the original Dutch-Belgian release, with the pretentious subtitle “A Summer Odyssey In Four Parts”) tells the story of eight teenagers (underage, it needs to be stressed, though the film uses the tried-and-true tactic of having them portrayed by actors roughly a decade older)—four boys and four girls—who decide to spend their summer vacation making explicit porn and uploading it to a website; having the girls prostitute themselves with local men; and generally behaving in ways you would never, ever want kids to behave. After one of the girls dies, they recruit two more impressionable girls and drug and abuse them into becoming participants. At one point, they steal a dog and drag it along the street on their bikes, before tying it to a set of train tracks. Yeah, it’s that kind of unpleasant.
The movie is broken into four parts, each from a different character’s point of view, as they recount the events of the summer from a time in the future when they’re involved with a trial of some sort—though who’s on trial isn’t clear until the closing minutes. Each section begins on the same day and recounts the same events through their shifting perspectives, beginning with the most normal and empathetic character and descending in order of repulsive personalities before concluding with a kid so cartoonishly evil, he makes Jack Nicholson in The Departed look like a sweet old businessman.
It starts with Simon, a nice-seeming kid who falls in love with one of the girls, Femke, but who quickly loses his taste for all the porn and prostitution and quits the group. He recounts how they started off like normal kids—riding bikes, sharing crushes, finding an abandoned trailer home in the countryside where they threw parties and whiled away the hours. The constant question of how they could make a lot of money soon leads where you’re hoping it won’t: Within 15 minutes of the film’s start, they’re playing a “game” that involves the girls pulling down their pants and trying to guess what object is being stuck up their asshole. Sounds fun! Three minutes later, they’re making their own porn. If you weren’t already put off, this is the moment when you lose the desire to invest in any emotional arc the movie tries to pull off. Or any desire at all, really. It’s repugnant.
From there, it’s a spiral circling the drain of increasingly repulsive behavior. Part two is Ruth, who at least still has morals, and despite recruiting two innocent girls into their teenage brothel, feels guilty when the girls accidentally cause a car accident by going bottomless on a freeway overpass as a joke. Femke dies, and Ruth’s breaking point comes when they try to induce a miscarriage in one of the new girls by punching her in the stomach. Part three is Liesl, who justifies her vile deeds by insisting it’s art, that she wants to push people out of their comfort zones and confront “real life.” When they learn the people who died and were injured in the car crash were a mother and two small children, she says it was their own fault. She, too, eventually quits after Femke’s death, but only after insisting that if they “don’t go bigger, smarter, and further” in their horrific acts, “I’m done.” Yikes.
It ends with the story of Thomas, a kid so appalling that he practically twirls a cartoon mustache after every act. He frames his testimony to the court through the false claim that the town’s mayor was behind it all: The porn site he started, the brothel he initiated, blackmailing the men who visited the brothel. And then we learn how Femke dies: It’s during one of those stupid “guess what’s going in your ass” games, when Thomas inserts an icicle and Femke freaks out and hits her head on a rock. They burn her body and pretend they found it that way. Thomas beats a random kid on the street. He drugs and rapes one of the girls he recruits, then carves “whore” into her skin just below her belly button. He pisses on her when she asks him for help. In case it needed to be said, he’s the one who ties the dog to the train tracks. He concocts an alibi pinning everything on the mayor, but in the final seconds, it’s implied that maybe, just maybe, the mayor abused him as a child, and that’s what led to his behavior. That’s awful, but also: Fuck you, Thomas, I don’t want to watch a movie about your awful ass. Roll credits, and roll me rolling the hell away from ever watching another frame of this disaster again.
Over-the-top box copy: “A strikingly explicit spectacle of millennial depravity,” goes the blurb, which is actually pretty accurate. The back cover description ends by comparing it to “the films of Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, and Lars von Trier,” which is only true in the sense that those directors have also made movies about terrible people, but with roughly 100% more justification. (Well, Korine and von Trier, anyway.)
The descent: Look, I’m no more immune to the lurid allure of a “must be seen to be believed!” ad campaign than anyone else. In fact, I’m generally a fan of the kids-behaving-badly plot, which is what led me to pick this latest release from shock ’n’ schlock distribution house Artsploitation Films. And apparently this is based on a novel of the same title, which I could see doing a little better at giving purpose to all this gross stuff. So please, learn from my mistake: Caveat emptor.
The theoretically heavenly talent: Maybe one of these kids is a Selena Gomez-level star in Belgium, but not as far as I can tell. They’re probably recent film-school grads who thought this was gonna really blow some minds, man.