Holiday review – an unlovely sojourn around the twisted male psyche

Last year, the Danish film-maker Isabella Eklöf made a fierce impression on international audiences with the body-horror romance Border, the movie she had co-written, full of transgression, freakiness and loopiness. Now UK audiences can see her directorial debut Holiday (co-scripted by her with Johanne Algren), an icily accomplished drama about sexual violence, toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, in a pretty familiar Euro-hardcore style not dissimilar to the manner of shock veterans such as Ulrich Seidl or Gaspar Noé.

It’s about a damaged and dysfunctional young woman gradually becoming complicit in the abusive relationship she is having with her middle-aged gangster employer/boyfriend: a kind of Stockholm-Vichy syndrome. He has invited her, with the rest of his sycophantic entourage, on a grisly “holiday” at one of the luxury villas he has built in the Turkish resort of Bodrum, a business intended to mask his income from the drugs trade. With the glittering waters of the ocean and the Hockney blue of the infinity pools around which young women are expected to dance decorative attendance on fatter, older, paranoid guys, this is a world that can only be called Hate Island.

Victoria Carmen Sonne gives a horribly convincing and mesmerically uncomfortable performance as Sascha, a young woman in skimpy swimwear who is the trophy girlfriend and abuse victim of Michael (Lai Yde), a gang boss who presides over a cringing court of mob lieutenants and their various mums and kids. Sonne brilliantly shows Sascha’s creepy, childlike narcissism, gazing at her reflection in changing room mirrors in a celebratory stupor. She zooms about the place on a motor-scooter, wearing a floating, trailing, Isadora Duncan-type scarf. A local tries to warn her about the danger of this accessory but Sascha won’t listen. Her cherubically blank face is imbued with a scary kind of knowingness that doesn’t really know much at all.

These abuse-victim mannerisms are gruesomely juxtaposed by Eklöf with the menfolk’s entitlement. Michael has the bland complacency of what he imagines to be alpha-male seniority, but prickling with insecurity and resentment of slights real and imagined. Then there is the yet more sinister Bobby (Yuval Segal), another violent man with a pterodactyl expression whose abusive relationship with Sascha may or may not be known to Michael. On this ill-omened holiday, free-spirited Sascha finds herself flirting with Thomas (Thijs Römer) a handsome younger guy with a yacht – a status symbol that nettles Michael as much as anything else. The horror begins to impend.

The centrepiece of this film is, heartsinkingly and inevitably, a rape that can only be watched through your fingers and made more brutal by the hard sunlit sheen of the production design and the rectilinear way the shot is set up. It goes on for an unbearably long time, and there is a moment when someone appears accidentally to walk in on the attack in the background, and then retreats out of shot: a sulphurous touch of callousness borrowed from Noé’s 2002 film Irréversible.

Eklöf makes it clear that this event is all about male rage and male hate: it is a result of one of his male subordinates letting Michael down with a serious blunder.

Has Holiday anything new to say about rape? Or do scenes like these fetishise sexual violence and irradiate it with a cinematic anti-glamour that fails to shed light on the banality of this particular evil? I’m not sure, but Eklöf does convey the idea that violence is internalised by the victim. Just as Michael’s errant male employee becomes extravagantly, almost puppyishly loyal as he dishes out apology gifts to the guys who had beaten him up, so Sascha begins to sink further into her mindset of sexual serfdom.

It results in a dramatic scene of further violence that to me looked stylised and contrived. But there is no doubting the verve and style of Eklöf’s film-making – and the brutality from people on an open-ended holiday from ordinary human empathy.

• Holiday is released in the UK on 2 August.