The Montreal World Film Festival

The verdict of this year FFM’s jury led by legendary European filmmaker Jiri Menzel that best directing was demonstrated by Jan Verheyen in The Verdict, restores faith in justice, what is actually in the core of this extremely intelligent Belgian achievement. Furthermore, I would say that this piece is not just this year’s FFM highlight, but one of the peaks of recent European cinema. Starting as a profound psychological drama about a prominent engineer whose wife gets killed after an accidental encounter with a burglar at a gas station, consequently causing his little daughter tragic death, grows into in-depth study of the shortcomings of law, rising a number of fundamental questions of law and ethics, i.e. challenging our notion of truth and justice. In fact, a nonsensical legal act called procedural error in today’s Belgian reality, shown in the movie through one banality as forgotten signature of the public prosecutor for the perpetrator arrest (murderer of the protagonist’s wife), allows legally releasing of the offender (?!). Verheyen, who also wrote this precise and uncompromising radical screenplay, skillfully challenges moral dilemmas of our time, building the drama from the most subtle and intimate, to the sociopolitical one of the highest degree, underscoring the growing problem of our society so called political correctness (in this case, endeavor to justify even fatal offenses of certain felons from the lowest social class only because they had a tough childhood, as opposed to those decent people who are doing their best, i.e. invest considerable effort in order to achieve some fine results). In The Verdict, well-balanced range of subgenres from revenge film (hero takes justice into his own hands) to the legal drama are skilfully disguised as an exciting thriller, while all the characters are both right and wrong. Meticulous directing and furious pace, with a strong visual identity (in spite of that the large part of the action is naturally attached to the courtroom and dialogue-heavy), evoke Hollywood's top classics of this kind. Finally, if the justice does exist as The Verdict optimistically suggests, Verheyen’s work is, at least, worth of being nominated by American Academy for best foreign film.

Dejan Nikolaj Kraljacic - Dex