Our Girls

Bluesky

A darkly funny psychodrama about two families suddenly faced with a life-of-death crisis while on a joint holiday in the Tyrolean Alps, Dutch writer-director Mike van Diem's Our Girls is a solid, gripping, handsomely filmed pan-European production that deftly walks a tonal tightrope between comedy and tragedy. With its universal themes, sumptuous postcard visuals and multi-lingual dialogue in Dutch, German and English, it has a good chance to travel overseas following domestic cinema release earlier this month. It has also just won Best Director prize at the Warsaw Film Festival, adding to van Diem's long list of accolades, which includes two Academy Awards, for his student feature Alaska (1990) and the off-beat crime thriller Character (1997).

The holiday-from-hell premise of Our Girls inevitably invites comparison with the skewering social satires of Swedish shock maestro Ruben Östlund, although van Diem displays more humane empathy towards his flawed characters and their traumatic trials. Anouk (Thekla Reuten) and Danny (Fedja Van Huêt) have a long tradition of spending a week every summer with Gwen (Noortje Herlaar) and Erik (Valentijn Dhaenens) at their shared mountain holiday house. The friendship between the two couples dates back 10 years, and the writer/director recreates their first meeting with an attention-grabbing piece of slapstick violence.

The wry comedic tone of Our Girls takes a full-blooded tragic turn when Elise (Frédérique van Baarsen) and Madelon (Rosa van Leeuwen), teenage daughters of the respective couples, are involved in a serious accident while recklessly riding on a quad bike driven by local boy Ralph (Jeremy Miliker). As the girls lie in hospital, one in a coma, another with deceptively serious internal injuries, their parents are pushed to nerve-shredding extremes, struggling to keep blame and recrimination in check, even as long-buried secrets and simmering grudges rise to the surface. With both daughters in grave danger, a terrible bargain comes to dominate the story: can the families agree to sacrifice one child to save the other?

Van Diem adapted Our Girls from the 2019 novel What We Can Do by Dutch actor-writer Lykele Muus, though he has changed the location and several characters, adding much more dark humour to the sombre original text. He leans a little too heavily on soap-opera cliché in the final act, which unfolds in a crescendo of shock revelations, unlikely betrayals and a restaurant showdown which feels engineered more for maximum theatrical tension than realistic drama. But mostly the director keeps his protagonists plausibly rounded, neither victims nor villains, their actions sufficiently rooted in reality to ensure viewers remain invested in their tortuous ethical dilemmas. Austrian cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, who won a Berlinale Silver Bear last year for his work on The Devil’s Bath (2024), brings a strong visual dimension to a generally high-calibre production, once again capturing the widescreen beauty of his mountainous homeland.

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