Based on a novel, Veerle Baetens’ movie about a young woman who has never gotten over a teenage trauma has an unsettling allure at first, since the source of the trauma remains hidden. That’s not to say it can’t be easily discerned, given the screenplay’s device of parallel storylines, one in the “present,” where Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne), leaves her home in Brussels to attend a party in her rural home town with a large block of ice, and the other when Eva was 13 (Rosa Marchant, who looks remarkably like an adolescent version of De Bruyne) and hanging out with two older boys, Tim (Anthony Vyt) and Laurens (Matthijs Meertens), playfully calling themselves the 3 Musketeers. Though there’s nothing wrong with this structure if you’re going to show how the past affects the present, Baetens’ methodology is almost shamelessly transparent, as each facet of Eva’s current psychological torment is telegraphed by overly ominous clues from the past.

Part of the problem is that the setup is overloaded. Young Eva’s home life is fraught with anxiety, as her short-tempered father and alcoholic mother constantly clash over every little thing. Eva naturally turns toward her two male friends, who are at the age when their attraction to girls make them unreliable comrades. They recruit Eva, whose relative lack of physical development makes her “look more like 10 than 13,” as someone comments, to lure older girls to their barn lair, where they play a riddle game to get these girls to remove their clothes. Eva means to please, and when Tim, whose own trauma involves the recent death of his beloved brother in a farm accident, turns surly she tries to placate him by making friends with a pretty conceited girl who is spending the summer in town with an older relative against her will. Her plan is to offer the girl up to Tim. As they like to say, one thing leads to another, but in a rather obvious way.

It’s clear early on that Eva is returning to her hometown with notions of revenge, as passive-aggressive as those notions may be. It’s almost too perfect that she will be attending a function being held by Tim in honor of his late brother. The reason for the block of ice becomes apparent early on in a clumsy reveal that was probably more subtle in the book, but in any case the movie advances toward its horrible denouement in a plodding manner. The heavy-handedness doesn’t necessarily blunt the power of the story, but it makes it feel more manipulative than dramatic. 

In Dutch. Opens July 25 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

While It Melts home page in Japanese

photo (c) Savage Film-PRPL-Versus Production 2023