Retrospekt (2018)

Retrospekt is a brutally poetic, suspense-packed, modern-domestic fairy tale seen through the eyes of Mette, a confidant and successful young mother, struggling with life's absurd purposelessness. Mette (Circé Lethem) is in the final phase of her rehabilitation, when one day Miller (Lien Wildemeersch) pays a visit, trying to get Mette to testify against 'Frank'; Miller's boyfriend who apparently put Mette in a wheelchair. Mette can't seem to remember anything. Then, left alone and in a haze of medication and increasing anxiety, Mette has time to reminisce. In an escalating puzzle-like narrative, we inhabit Mette's consciousness and see the events in the film unfolding through her fractured memory. Trying to juggle daily pressures of relationship, career, and motherhood Mette inevitably slowly drowns in a cacophony of repercussions. Blunt, semi-operatic voices and music echo her fragmented daydreams of the events leading up to her accident. Sitting at home on maternity leave, Mette is struck by the increasing absence of satisfaction that she once felt from her organized life. Both her family and job as a Domestic Violence councilor no longer provide her with a sense of purpose. When her husband Simon (Martijn van der Veen) is away on a business trip, Mette learns that a former client of hers (Miller) is in trouble. On a whim, Mette ceases the opportunity to do something 'meaningful' and invites Miller into her home, fully aware of the potential consequences. Retrospekt is life's sense of humor or proof many of us are living a fairy tale; it is easy to make sense of 'it' all in retrospect, but the chaos of everyday life blurs our vision at the point in time when decisions are made.