Drafthouse Films picks up weird Dutch thriller ‘Borgman’

Drafthouse Films announced Friday that it has acquired North American rights to the film “Borgman,” which recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was the first from the Netherlands to play in the Main Competition at the festival in nearly 40 years. Drafthouse plans both a theatrical and VOD/digital release in the U.S. sometime in 2014.

Written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam, the film crafts an allegory on the nature of evil with its story of a vagrant (Jan Bijvoet) who invades the lives of an upper-class family. Writing in Variety, critic Guy Lodge called the film “a sly, insidious and intermittently hilarious domestic thriller,” while the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard declared that it “tickles happily for the first 40 minutes, then gets niggly, then annoying, and finally just a bit tedious.”

In a statement, Drafthouse Films founder and CEO Time League said, “Maybe once a year, I am deluged after a premiere with texts and emails to the effect of ‘This is such a Drafthouse movie.’ It’s strange, disturbing, hysterical and utterly unique. ‘Borgman’ is the quintessential Drafthouse film of Cannes. We can’t wait to share it with audiences in North America.”

FULL COVERAGE: Cannes 2013

In the film’s Cannes press book, van Warmerdam noted, “I wanted to descend into an unknown, dark part of my imagination and see what was to be found there. And I wanted to make a film very much open to interpretation, one that raises more questions than it answers.”

“Borgman” joins an eclectic roster of upcoming Drafthouse Films releases that includes the documentaries “A Band Called Death” and “The Act of Killing” along with British filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s much-anticipated psychedelic historical film “A Field in England.” The company also recently acquired the rights to the German film “Nothing Bad Can Happen.”

ALSO:

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Follow Mark Olsen on Twitter: @IndieFocus

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