The Columnist is a dark comedy with a great premise: what if a feminist columnist started doing to internet trolls the same things they repeatedly threaten to do to her? The debut feature film from director Ivo van Aart intends to provoke (its original Dutch title, De Kuthoer, is much more inappropriate), and gets a lot of mileage out of the perverse appeal of its basic set-up. If you're hoping for something more than "basic," however, The Columnist underwhelms as a work of satire.
Revenge films are always caught somewhere on a spectrum between catharsis and criticism. Revenge is something we know is wrong but often feels righteous, so any movie on the subject is gonna have to take a stand at some point in this complicated web of feelings. The Columnist makes its stance on revenge clear - Femke Boot, the protagonist played by Westworld's Katja Herbers, ends up on the bad/scary side of things despite her initially sympathetic motivation. The problem is it does so at the expense of taking a solid stance or even just delving deeper into the other topics it's covering.
To its credit, there are a lot of things The Columnist gets right about the nature of internet trolling, particularly in its first act. The masochistic push-and-pull of being on social media while attacked is represented well, as are the ways law enforcement fails to take online harassment seriously. The part where the trolls start falsely accusing Femke of being a "pedosexual" based on distorting a column she wrote about dating as a teenager feels extra prescient in light of QAnon's growth this year.
However, the film's perspective feels awfully limited in other respects. The trolling Femke faces never goes beyond mean and occasionally threatening social media comments and emails to her publisher. Essentially, the movie treats trolling as entirely a matter of words when it frequently goes beyond words. Surely someone would have doxxed Femke, which would make her essentially doxxing her murder victims more ironic, but instead the movie treats the trolls as essentially passive and her revenge as active while ignoring the more active forms of trolling. Sam Levinson's flop Assassination Nation had a number of similarities (including similar flaws) to The Columnist, but its understanding of how internet harassment works was far deeper and more insightful.
The biggest missed opportunity is the subplot about Femke's daughter fighting for free speech at school. It's built up enough that it seems like this plotline will intersect with the main story, possibly offering some commentary on navigating the complicated waters of free speech and harassment. Instead, there's no narrative connection, and it's just played as irony (isn't it ironic Femke's killing these men for their words?). This irony underlines the movie's point about revenge, for sure, but the revenge narrative is a fantasy, and the actual free speech/harassment questions that the movie's dodging are real.
If this review seems like it's possibly overthinking a silly pulpy movie, that's because the movie itself often tries to resist the pulpiness of its premise and begs to be taken seriously. The kills are for the most part understated and often off-screen, and while Katja Herbers' deliveries on her bitter one-liners are great, the movie's not going for constant laugh-out-loud moments either. The most purely entertaining scene in the movie is actually its final one (avoid looking at any trailers if you want to go in spoiler-free), which will leave viewers with some feeling of satisfaction even if The Columnist is, as a whole, unsatisfying as social commentary.
The Columnist stars Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen and Claire Porro. It is available to stream from the Telluride Horror Show through October 18 and from the Chicago Film Festival through October 25.