Dutch film about a thirty-one-year-old agoraphobe (Alex van Warmerdam, the film's director also) who hasn't been out of his parents' apartment in ten years, and who passes his time by spying on the neighbors through binoculars or trying to catch flies with a scissors. It has, in short, a high level of bizarrerie, but it has a compensatingly high (not to say equally high) level of humor. Van Warmerdam knows how to design a scene of comedy, as witness the careful strategizing and rehearsing of a dinner party for the father's mistress and then the deviation of the actual event from the practiced form. But the rampant bizarreness ("Why isn't life normal?" laments the head of the family) sets up an anything-goes atmosphere which works against the tensions required for comedy. And also against any sustained interest. With its theatrical lighting, its skyline vistas simultaneously banal and unreal, and its consciously Hitchcockian visual witticisms, the movie is often interesting to look at. Henri Garcin, Loes Luca. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.