Hannah Hoekstra

Magic Mountains

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Hannah in danger of falling

So you broke up with someone and now they’ve got in touch to ask you if you’d like to go climbing with them, just like the two of you used to. One last hurrah, kind of thing, a farewell to all that. You decide to go, though it doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Before anything else happens, Urszula Antoniak’s Magic Mountains, a brooding yet brief (only 81 minutes) exercise in mood management, has to explain why Hannah (Hannah Hoekstra) would accept this invitation from former boyfriend Lex (Thomas Ryckewaert) to go to the Tata mountains in Slovakia. Antoniak does it adroitly, in a scene which establishes the entire mood of the … Read more

The Fury

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Young Tiny by the climbing frame

The Fury (aka De Helleveeg in the original Dutch) gives Hannah Hoekstra something to do. Impressive in any number of films and TV shows, Hoekstra has at this point in her career (2016, she’s 29) played sexy young things with attitude and varying levels of coquettishness. And that’s just what she plays here, with a twist, and with a chance to show there’s more in her bag than we might have thought. She plays a young woman called Tiny, a working-class girl in a dead-end job in 1960s Netherlands whose life consists of her family trying to marry her off while in the interim she works for them as a skivvy. The local … Read more

Patrick

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Kevin Janssens as Patrick

So, Patrick (aka De Patrick), a film set in a Belgian nudist camp about a guy who’s lost his hammer. That’s it. He’s lost his hammer and he wants to know who’s taken it. Patrick has seven hammers which normally sit on the wall in their designated slots. Now there’s a space in the middle where one of them should be, and Patrick is upset about it. Or he would be if he showed any emotion at all, beyond a furious beetling of the brows. Patrick may be on the autism spectrum, it’s hard to say, or he might just be dealing with a long-term trauma. Either way he doesn’t go in for … Read more

App

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Anna and her phone

App is a film about an app and it originally came with an app. Wha? It’s the first movie to use “second screen technology’ to deliver extra content via smartphone while the main feature plays out on the big screen. “Start the app now” a message (in Dutch) flashes up on the screen as the movie gets underway. App came out in 2013. I watched it in 2022. The accompanying app is no longer available, and even if it were, it probably wouldn’t work on the new operating systems now in use. Nothing dates quite so fast as tech. Movies, on the other hand, have more of a shelf life, and the good … Read more

Hemel

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Hannah Hoekstra as Hemel

In brisk, businesslike fashion, much like its heroine, Hemel gets straight down to business with an opening scene of two people naked and rolling around, the woman mocking the man’s penis – you’re no David and it’s hardly Goliath etc – as part of an extended bout of cockteasing foreplay. Hemel – it means Heaven in Dutch – is a woman who likes sex and, being good-looking and young, has no trouble getting it. But, sex in this film being nowhere near as simple as it seems, Hemel wants it with an urgency that seems almost too needy. Later, having had her fun with the partner we met in the opening scene, she’s … Read more