Your beautiful rubber brain (2019)

Directed by: Jelmer Wristers | 11 minutes | short film, fantasy, drama | Actors: Dave Aarts, Clint Heitlager

Setting: a pig farm somewhere in the Netherlands. The characters: a farmer (Clint Heitlager) and his employee (Dave Aarts). The opening scene of ‘Your Beautiful Rubber Brain’ couldn’t be more confusing: the farmer sits in a forklift and does something incomprehensible to some installation, which most likely has nothing to do with farm life. Not much later, the farmer enlists the help of the skinny worker, not exactly the epitome of a blushing, healthy farmhand. Newborn piglets are castrated, a horrific scene that will make your stomach turn.

A meal is eaten, a bath is taken, the worker seems nervous and uneasy. Are they withdrawal symptoms? At night, boundaries are crossed, but that seems to be part of it. Then David Lynch’s influence on this short film by Jelmer Wristers really becomes noticeable, although the alienating feeling that the first scene causes is also comparable to the feeling that the glass box from “Twin Peaks: The Return” produces. But this NTR Short! film is nowhere near as satisfying as Lynch’s work.

“Your beautiful rubber brain” is disturbing to say the least. The viewer is thrown in at the deep end with these two people and strange events or hallucinations. It is not clear through whose eyes we look, nor what consequences we should attach to it. Is it really happening or is what we see the result of drugs, overwork, psychosis? The many shots of the piglets – perhaps as a metaphor for the bleak future that the farmer and his worker face? – increase the uncomfortable feeling that ‘Your beautiful rubber brain’ leaves behind. If that was the intention, then the mission was successful. But for a nice, captivating film experience, something more is needed.