Bullhead

★★★★

Michael R. Roskam’s Bullhead is a strange film indeed. It’s part brooding character study, part crime drama and part tragedy set against the backdrop of the crooked, mafia run, drug enhancing, belgian cattle trade. With an Oscar Nomination under it’s belt at this years awards, a loudquiet central performance and beautiful cinematography, it’s a film which certainly deserves a wider audience.

We are cornered throughout Bullhead with the hulking physical presence of the actor Matthias Schoenaerts. He plays Jacky Vanmarsenille, a steroid using cattle farmer haunted by an horrific “accident” 20 years ago that took away a life he supposedly always wanted. When he’s not rough housing businessmen he’s alone in his room with a fridge full of hormones. When Dietrich (Jeroen Perceval) an old childhood friend of Jacky’s turns up in a meeting, things start going sour and these two men with secrets get themselves in all kinds of mess.

Roskam has been derived for the amount of threads in Bullhead. Jacky and Dietrich’s past, the police force who are investigating Jacky and his cohorts, Dietrich’s closet homosexuality, Jacky’s on going obsession with his first love and a murder mystery involving a bullet ridden BWM and a couple of flat headed mechanics. There is a lot to hold on to in Bullhead, this is true, but it never feels forced or awkward.

Punctuated with gorgeous photography and full of stellar performances inside a world that is unfamiliar to most, it really is a great and challenging film. Its most solid foothold is definitely the tension between Jacky and Dietrich, giving us a study of what it really means to really be a man, to protect and to try and forget. Though not for everyone Bullhead is certainly original, creative and fully realised cinema.