dir. Yfke Van Berckelaer

Yfke van Berckelaer’s “Izzy” is short, sweet, and searing. With a runtime just shy of five minutes, this new short film from the Netherlands seeks to condense a lifetime of systemic and cultural frustration within a clean, compact container. “Izzy” stars Nahéma Ricci in the titular role, a character defined by her invisibility, by her silence, and by her capacity to exist almost exclusively in her interiority despite her body manifesting in the material reality.  Izzy’s characteristic semi-smile, an ingratiating pleasantry obfuscating a crescendoing madness, complements the subtext of the plot. The story follows a very natural-feeling, if relatively unoriginal arc: Izzy’s relentless neglect and unending exposure to vapid or misogynistic conversations leads to her eventual incapacity to tolerate such conditions.

Horror, as a genre, has developed a reputation around its willingness to write roles for women with negligible dialogue. The “silent woman,” the woman-as-object, as an innocuous piece of scenery, is a storied and well-established motif. Berckelaer’s choice to showcase the inanimate, overlooked woman–the woman denied of voice, of autonomy, of opinion–as the central character, feels like a commendable inversion of the archetype found throughout slasher and sexploitation horror. Izzy’s lack of recognition as a sovereign body, her relegation to a passive existence instead of an active one, becomes a pressure cooker, inviting the question: how long can we tolerate being dehumanized? A question more important, more prescient, than ever. 

The cinematography and editing are clever, creating a sort of nauseating fever dream of discomfiting, aggravating situation after discomfiting, aggravating situation. From corporate offices, to bedrooms, to cocktail hour, to movie theaters, Izzy is barraged by a maddening onslaught of successive frustrations that repeat, inverse, and re-pattern themselves in such a way as to make the viewer feel overwhelmed. It culminates in a moment of physical panic, a tense and dizzying sequencing that provides the viewer with an immediate and satisfying catharsis upon its climax. Berckelaer’s artistic choice of red glitter was a clever use of camp, especially for a short film working within the confines of a strict budget. The glitter is symbolic and evocative, but also exaggerated and surprising; subsequently, it contributes to the weirdness and unreality of the story. In a film that is so explicitly realistic and tonally banal, this element of camp helpsed to disrupt the predictability and adds a necessary injection of surprise.

There is much that is clever, good, and fun about “Izzy:” it is relatable, it is prescient, it is well-acted by Ricci, it is well-edited, and it is not overly insistent. While these things make the four-minute and fifty-second film enjoyable, it falls short of doing something particularly new or interesting. Watching “Izzy” is like watching an abbreviated montage of many of the films that have preceded it exploring how women are ignored, insulted, or overlooked by a global priority on patriarchy and the propagation of male superiority. I wished for something that felt fresh, that felt like a distinct or new exploration, a more emergent and unconventional symbolic language that would make me feel something new, something memorable. “Izzy” is good enough, but it is not memorable, and it does not evoke dread or fear or horror, because the path it treads has been beaten down by many feet before it.