Stella’s War (2009)

Directed by: Diederik van Rooijen | 90 minutes | drama, thriller | Actors: Maartje Remmers, Thijs Römer, Javier Guzman, Anna Drijver, Teun Kuilboer, Juda Goslinga, Micha Hulshof, Cecile Heuer, Keesje Rietvelt, Hanin Msellek, Wim van der Grijn, Dic van Duin, Herman Egbers, Wendel Spier

We know soldiers who return from the war from American films such as ‘The Deer Hunter’, ‘Born on the 4th of July’ and ‘In the Valley of Elah’. In 2004 Susanne Bier made a wonderful European drama with ‘Brødre’ about a Danish soldier who returns traumatized from Afghanistan. In 2009 the Netherlands follows with ‘Stella’s war’, a story about a confused soldier, his worried girlfriend and a mission that goes terribly wrong.

‘Stella’s war’ partly follows the same path as ‘Brødre’, although the latter opens with acts of war while these are only discussed later in ‘Stella’s war’. The bigger difference is the elaboration of the subject. While ‘Brødre’ is mainly about shifting relationships on the home front, ‘Stella’s war’ is about what went wrong in the hell of Afghanistan. Due to Stella’s search for the answer, the drama turns into a psychological thriller after a while, before ending in a drama again. That thriller part has the necessary clichés and conflicts with the earlier realism. Also, some exciting scenes are unnecessarily long.

Unfortunately, they are not the only weaknesses. Occasionally the logic is thrown overboard because of the dramatic effect or the progression of the story. For example, Stella’s way of discovering a missing piece of evidence is dramatically successful, but not very believable. They are detail errors, but they undermine the credibility of the whole.

The explanatory tone is also less successful. After we see a soldier wandering through his house like a zombie, we hear in the next scene that this is about post-traumatic stress. We had already found that out ourselves. And when a soldier asks his girlfriend on the eve of leaving for Afghanistan if she might be worried, you wonder what they are talking about every day at breakfast.

Still, these minuses don’t mean you should let ‘Stella’s war’ pass. The acting ranges from reasonable to good, with Maartje Remmers and (especially) Thijs Römer in very strong roles. But even more important is the urgency. Rarely do Dutch filmmakers deal with bloody current affairs, and certainly not in the uncompromising way in which it happens here. That makes ‘Stella’s war’ a brave, honest and at times intense film, but one with the necessary weaknesses.