Holiday review – violence and ambiguity under the sun

As the girlfriend of a drug dealer holidaying in Bodrum, Turkey, a resort city both aesthetically pleasing and culturally vapid, Sascha is young, beautiful, and unreadable. From the moment we meet her, dressed in a skimpy outfit, pulling her luggage, her life appears as a series of contradictions. Abused and yet also beloved by her partner, Michael (Lai Yde), a petty criminal with a taste for expensive things and not much else, Sascha exists as a blend of victim and pampered trophy girlfriend, a role she seems indifferent to.

Isabella Eklöf, who co-wrote the recently acclaimed supernatural drama Border, makes her directorial debut with Holiday, a determinedly cold but ultimately sly thriller that plays at one type of story, then twists itself into something far more complex. As a tale of a woman taking control of her life in a compromised paradise, it’s the sort of film with a conclusion so stark and unexpected it upends the previous 90 minutes, forcing you to reevaluate all that came before.

There is something of Michael Haneke in the clinical way that Eklöf places her camera, in the moments of uneasiness punctured with sudden bursts of violence. We observe Holiday with a kind of voyeuristic detachment, perched on poolsides, rarely moving – always there but somehow uninvited. The film languishes with Sascha, Michael, and his entourage (the epitome of Eurotrash) as they spend lazy days by the pool, eating at restaurants, indulging in empty hedonism – video game arcades, water parks, sterile clubs blaring repetitive techno music. And beneath it all we witness the subtle and mysterious power game between Michael and Sascha, a relationship that never truly reveals itself to a discernible degree.

Sascha, played brilliantly by Victoria Carmen Sonne, seems fine with this dynamic, more or less. Then one day, queuing for ice cream, she meets a handsome, cultured Dutch sailor named Tomas (Thijs Römer), whose manners – a far cry from the loutish antics of her posse – quickly impress. Soon, a chance encounter reunites the two  – an act which eventually attracts Michael’s attention. Given Michael’s proneness to violence (he exerts it upon his own friends, even), this is obviously the last love triangle you’d want to be caught up in – though not, in the end, for the reasons you’d probably expect.

Whilst Holiday is deliberately uneventful for much of its runtime, there is a dramatic shift about an hour in: a spectacularly explicit scene of sexual violence, and one that has – and will continue to – draw parallels with the notorious assault in Gaspar Noé’s infamous rape-revenge thriller Irreversible. It’s a truly abhorrent moment, to the point that some cuts of the films have opted to edit it out. But this scene is essential to what the film is trying to say and do, an exploration of Sascha’s role and choices. To remove it is to cut the heart from Holiday.

This is a film that lives or dies on how well you can tolerate its ambiguity, its intent to create something less obvious from recognisable parts. But none of this is subversion for the sake of it. Holiday is an attack on our own complicity and expectations; it’s a film that shows that nothing is as it seems, and that no one – even the trophy girlfriend of a criminal – can be pigeon-holed. For a work that brims with bright, bubblegum colours, it’s very much a film rendered in shades of grey. I can’t stop thinking about it.

★★★★☆

By: Tom Barnard

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