Ex-Drummer

(Koen Mortier/2007/Belgium)

Deliberately, provocatively repulsive, it’s as if Koen Mortier wants you to react against this film. On the surface it seems like a depraved attack on audience sensibilities but there’s more at play if you can sit it out. Based on a novel by controversial Belgian author Herman Brusselmans Ex Drummer tells the story of 3 odd balls that have formed a band called The Feminists and consider themselves handicapped. They are without a drummer and ask famous writer and the film’s narrator Dries to join them; mistakenly thinking he is an ex-drummer. He accepts motivated by cynicism and mockery of the three involved and the possibility of material for a new book. The singer is a violent misogynist with a stammer, the bassist has a paralyzed arm and a warped oedipal complex and the guitarist is a half deaf junkie and domestic abuser; pond life at the lowest ebb of society’s tide. Through a mish mash of cinematic tricks (the entire introduction section is shown with the film running backwards and the guitarist is often shown upside down to everybody else for example) and an assortment of grotesque secondary characters Ex Drummer reels you in before clobbering you. It is an explicit descent into the lower echelons of deprivation for the amusement of Dries and by default the viewer. The violence and depravity of the characters within the film can be taken as a reaction to that or equally as an indictment of those same characters. That’s the provocation, which premise is true in the mind of the viewer? I’m never really sure if films like this work, it involves a balancing act that requires a bit of subtlety; another Belgian film, Man Bites Dog, does it brilliantly but subtlety is not a word that applies to Ex Drummer. It is a sustained assault in an attempt to question the audience, in order to question society, to follow a thought process to its logical end. If people like the ones in the film who live their lives and go from birth to death with the same ups and downs and emotions and needs and wants as us all, are really as stupid and ugly as Dries claims then wouldn’t they end up much as the films characters do - In a bloody, messy quagmire of their own fateful making? Ex Drummer is laced with black humour and has an infectious soundtrack created for the film by a handful of Belgian punk bands. It’s abrasive, energetic, addictive viewing but it’s also repellent. Press play and ask yourself do you really want to keep watching?

(3.5/5)