THE WEEPING WALK (WAAROM WETTELEN?)

The past few years have not been kind to Flemish cinema and this inept, infantile, tedious film debut of famed local novelist Dimitri Verhulst hammers another painful nail in the coffin.

At the funeral of his wife her widowed husband is informed by a notary that it was his spouse’s final wish not to be buried in the family plot, but in Wettelen, a town that even Google Maps cannot locate. The hearse driver knows the way however, which is the start of a dayslong, surreal funeral procession.

This plot of The Weeping Walk might evoke memories of Luis Buñuel and Andy Kaufmann, but let me state loud and clear: this picture should never be mentioned in the same sentence as those two filmmakers, as Dimitri Verhulst, a famous Flemish novelist making his directing debut, shows little discernible talent as a screenwriter or director.

For a project that Verhulst himself has argued could not be confined to the pages of a novel, The Weeping Walk is a visually wholly uninteresting affair. Nearly all the so-called gags are contained within dialogues that are a far cry from realistic conversations and the actors are never allowed to flex a single muscle on their face, it seems.

Even worse are the plot machinations, that strive for surrealism but end up as scattershot, infantile half-assed ideas that weren’t that good in the first place. A case in point is a scene wherein the daughter of the deceased defecates in her pants and demands that her lunch companion does the same out of solidarity, and that isn’t even in the top ten of worst sequences in the movie.

The original Flemish title of The Weeping Walk translates as Why Wettelen, and the lingering question I have after seeing the film is a why in multitudes: why was this film ever greenlit, why didn’t anyone notice during production that this was going to be an abomination, and finally: why couldn’t Dimitri Verhulst just have stuck to writing novels instead of making me sit trough one of the worst films to come out of Flanders in decades?

release: 2024

director: Dimitri Verhulst

starring: Peter Van den Begin, Tine Roggeman, Hilde Heijnen, Tom Vermeir