Fantastic Fest 2008

Brief Summary:
A young woman moves in with her new boyfriend on the fashionable "left bank" in Antwerp only to discover that the building may have a very disturbing past.

Full Description:
The title refers to a trendy new suburb on the shores of Antwerp's River Schelde. Built up with new luxury high rise apartments and miles of running trails through lovely wooded parks, it seems an unlikely place to find evil flourishing. Yet the neighborhood has a dark past and a darker secret.

Talented young actress Eline Kuppens plays Marie, a driven young runner who has pushed her body to exhaustion and is forced by her doctor to take it easy. Without her grueling daily training, she finds she has the time to fall in love with a handsome young man she meets practicing archery at her athletic club. She moves into his apartment on the Left Bank, but soon discovers that the reason her lover is able to afford the apartment is because the previous tenant disappeared under mysterious circumstances. She discovers some papers that the young woman left behind when she vanished, and unsettled by the strange trail towards which they point, she begins to research the history of the land and the unsavory people that used to call it home before gentrification took over.

Deliberately paced and shot in a muted palette of misty grays, the film is almost oppressively atmospheric in the slow unraveling of the secrets of the past. Yet there are also touches of the bizarre, including a small wound that becomes more and more grotesque and unexplainably hairy; and lavish doses of sensuality - there's enough nudity and sex to qualify this film for a slot in the Japanese pinku series.

Tense and heavy with dread, the movie builds inexorably to what you would naturally expect to be a dramatic and tragic end. Yet the final moments manage to completely invert the entire horror paradigm, changing everything that went before and placing a thoroughly unexpected and opposite meaning to the events that have taken place. (Karrie League)

With director Pieter Van Hees live in person.