Sadly, Veerle Baetens can’t get to the same place with her brutally manipulative “When It Melts,” a film that required an age verification before the screening because it’s such a dark, horrible experience. When you’re going to make an audience suffer through the dark places that this story goes, there needs to be the feeling that the journey was worth the effort, and “When It Melts” doesn’t quite get there. There’s a really genuinely strong performance from its young star that keeps it from total failure, but it’s a film that makes it very clear early on that you’re going to watch something horrific in the final act, but doesn’t make clear why you should stick around to do so. And then it ends on such a dark note, making the two hours that came before feel even more punishing. I respect films that are willing to show the extreme horror of violence and trauma in a way that doesn’t blink, but there needs to be more than that to hold onto. Otherwise, it’s just torture.
“When It Melts” unfolds in a present/flashback structure, mostly the latter. In the present-day, we meet Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne), who stumbles on a social media post about a memorial for an old friend from the village in which she grew up. Her reaction to this post, makes it clear that she has trauma connected to this person and her youth, and the flashbacks play out like a slow-motion car crash, introducing us to a young Eva (the excellent Rosa Marchant) and her two male friends. The trio play a riddle game, in which they find girls in town who they then tell a riddle. For every statement or question that gets the answer to the riddle wrong, the teen girl has to take off an object of clothing. Violent tragedy feels sadly inevitable, especially given how many adults in this community appear to be looking the other way.
Marchant is so believable here that her work almost elevates “When It Melts” above its thin screenplay, but I always felt like I was watching a movie, a problem when it comes to dark stories of the human condition like this one. It leads one to question why the filmmaker is making certain decisions instead of getting invested in the characters and their violent trauma. There’s too much here that feels manufactured in a way that’s punishing instead of enlightening.