‘Fabula’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr. Michiel ten Horn. Netherlands/Belgium/Germany. 2025. 121mins

A small-time crook from the Dutch province of Limburg (a place, the way the film tells it, composed entirely of mud and despair), Jos (Fedja van Huêt) has always blamed his miserable luck on a family curse. But a combination of an infected tick bite and a botched drug deal sends Jos on a fantastical journey of discovery, leading him to finally explore the truth behind his family and its benighted history. The latest film from Michiel ten Horn is an absurdist, meandering crime comedy that veers off into fantasy and magical realism, and makes very heavy weather of its convoluted plot.

Dated and heavy-handed comedy fails to land

The opening film of the Rotterdam film festival, this is the fifth feature from ten Horn, whose debut, The Deflowering Of Eva Van End, premiered at Toronto in 2012, and whose sophomore picture, Aanmodderfakker, scooped several of the top prizes at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2014. Parochial, unfunny and charmless, Fabula is not the most auspicious choice for a festival opener; It’s hard to imagine that the film will have much reach beyond the domestic audience.

The picture, which is carved up into chapters, starts with a prologue narrated by one of several voices which take on storytelling duties in this exposition-heavy tale. Set a generation or so in the past, the prologue introduces us to Jos’s peat-cutter grandfather who, while delving about in all the mud and despair, discovers an ancient artefact – a golden helmet. The fate of the helmet is clouded in the mists of history, but Jos’s father Lei (Michiel Kerbosch) believes that it was re-buried to evade the grasping hands of the other peat cutters. Lei also believes that finding the missing helmet could be the answer to the family’s financial woes and, to this end, spends most of his time digging holes in his garden.

In fairness, the financial woes are probably less due to a family curse or a missing helmet and more to do with the fact that Jos, his junkie brother Henrik (Georg Friedrich), his father, and his son-in-law-to-be Ozgur (Sezgin Güleç) are dullards to a man. And since Van Huêt plays the character of Jos with a single expression – gormless incomprehension – it’s hard to muster much sympathy for him.

Jos and Ozgur have already failed to pull off one criminal enterprise together – the theft of some racing pigeons – and Jos’s debts are mounting. And now that Jos’s teenage daughter has given birth to Ozgur’s baby, there’s an added incentive to turn around the family fortunes. A shady synthetic drug deal with a criminal gang of German-Turks is probably not the best way to do it, but hey, these are imbeciles we are dealing with. A dead body and missing bag of cash later, and Jos is on borrowed time. But his mission to locate Henrik and the bag of money is continually thwarted by larger than life characters who are determined to tell him seemingly unrelated stories.

Meanwhile, the tick bite on Jos’s neck causes him to pass out at dramatically convenient moments, and his subconscious is besieged by memories of a tragic accident in the past.

Despite the best efforts of the assertively whimsical score, the dated and heavy-handed comedy fails to land and the film’s pacing drags. And there’s a curious contradiction at the heart of the picture – the characters are cartoonish and grotesque, but the look of the film is, for the most part, grey-tinged and glumly realist. A misfire.