Woof. Yet another heavy foreign drama, this time courtesy of Belgium. This took me something like three days to watch, partly because Tyler hates movies like this so I have to watch it when he's not around and partly because it's such a fucking drag.Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a cattle farmer who buys and sells illegal growth hormones. His vet (Frank Lammers) has an in with a big-time hormone gangster named Marc DeKuyper (Sam Louwyk) but Jacky gets cold feet after seeing someone from his past at the meet-up. This chance meeting stirs up all his memories of a truly horrific childhood trauma and puts everyone involved on a downward spiral.
Literally and metaphorically, this movie is about balls. There's really only one female character and she is basically treated as a prop the whole film. (Eva doesn't count because she's a cop and therefore has bigger balls than most of these dudes.) Men are emboldened, shrunken with fear, bolstered with drugs, and left to stew with the consequences of previous cowardice. There's a lot of homophobia and some violence against women, as well as the previously mentioned childhood trauma. Toxic masculinity is the dark, rotted heart of this film, however, and pretty much every event stems from it. Schoenaerts is phenomenal as Jacky and it looks like he's used this role to deservingly catapult his career. I look forward to him being in a movie that isn't horrifyingly painful to watch.
Bullhead is currently streaming on Tubi with ads.
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