05/02/2024 - Steeped in a lush sepia tone, Guido Coppis's feature debut delves into a perplexing narrative on the fringes of psychological drama and thriller

Dutch cinema does not really have any specific overall image attached to it, but what we have been seeing recently are either explicitly conceptual works, such as Met mes [+see also:
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film profile], or closer-to-genre cinema that nevertheless doesn’t strictly stick to the norms, like Narcosis [+see also:
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Mark (Reinout Scholten van Aschat) works in an animal shelter and often behaves like a stray dog himself – throwing frightened glances left and right, finding himself in a constant state of self-defence, and showing that he’s ready to snap whenever approached. Living in a cramped, gloomy and dirty flat with the curtains constantly drawn, his only social life consists of brief, confrontational interactions with a drug-addict friend of his and visits to his grandfather in a nursing home. And it’s there that Mark encounters Lisa (Frieda Barnhard), who seems determined to take him under her wing and tame him, despite his abrupt behaviour and obvious fear of being close to another human being. His face does indeed light up under her motherly tutelage, and just when we think this might be another opus about the power of love beyond conventions, the plot takes a sharp turn, and nothing is as it seems at first glance. It’s a twist that spices up the fable but neglects the opportunity to delve into the world of the characters themselves.

Bite takes place in an arbitrary time, space and cultural context; moreover, the seedy suburbs that Mark roams around have little to do with the dollhouse-like Netherlands, other than at Lisa’s family home in a scene towards the end. We learn even less about the characters that would allow us to at least imagine why they act the way they do. If the film had fully invested in the inner lives of its characters, this could have been a shrewd trick to lend it more universal relatability, but the moment the narrative takes precedence over the psychological layers, its rationale falls into the mere absence of logic while also reminding us of, but remaining far from, the macabre absurdism of Alex van Warmerdam's films, if we were to seek another reference to Dutch cinema. In any case, the eye-popping aesthetics, in combination with 25-year-old, self-taught newcomer Coppis’s efforts to create a world of his own, successfully grab the viewer's attention at least throughout the first half of the movie – a premise for a perhaps not overly profound, but definitely intriguing, cinematic experience.

Bite was produced by the Netherlands’ The Rogues and is distributed by Gusto Entertainment.