There is a cruel logic to writer/director Lodewijk Crijns’s screenplay for Tailgate, which carries a simple premise: A family man lets his road rage get the best of him in a highway encounter with another driver and learns a hard lesson in the form of that driver’s peculiar attitude toward common courtesy. Simplifying it even more, Hans (Jeroen Spitzenberger) rides the bumper of Ed’s (Willem de Wolf) work van, only to be stalked and terrorized by the man and his tools used to exterminate pests. Ed’s profession is perhaps the best joke in this blackly funny, consistently inventive and appreciably stripped-down thriller, especially in the film’s cold open.
We get the gist of what’s to come in that opening scene, which pits a hapless bicycler against the toxic chemicals in Ed’s pump machine. We also get barely a taste of de Wolf’s calculated and dead-eyed performance as this man, whose egotism has been mixed, in an unruly concoction, with sadism. He towers over everyone else here, and seemingly no attempt to intimidate him physically can move him – either literally or philosophically. In other words, Ed is a truly terrifying presence, in part due to how de Wolf plays the role and in another, larger part due to the way Crijns has written the character with no accessible motivation, history, or entry point in which a lesser screenwriter might have shoehorned something sympathetic.
He is, simply and purely, a villain, and approximately 70 minutes of the film’s 86 (including credits) is devoted to watching helplessly as Hans, his wife Diana (Anniek Pheifer) and their daughters (Roosmarijn van der Hoek and Liz Vergeer), packed into their van to visit some family, escape Ed’s wrath. Curiously, Crijns does not give us an entirely opposite foil, in the person of Hans, as our protagonist. Hans is impatient, quick to anger, and not particularly excited to arrive at the house of Diana’s parents – her rather judgmental mother Trudy (Truus te Selle) or her father Joop (Hubert Fermin), who is slowly slipping into the weeds of what appears to be Alzheimer’s disease.
Hans almost certainly could have avoided the entire situation that develops with Ed, had he been more attentive to his family’s needs and to minding his own business. That would be playing a game of blaming the victim, though, especially after we witness the lengths to which Ed is capable and willing to go. The trajectory of the film is, admittedly, simplistic in how straightforward it is, but it also manages to subvert our expectations on a couple of occasions – how, for instance, the action eventually moves from their cars on the road to the parents’ home and in the final shot, which plays as both a punch line and a terrifying escalation of Ed’s methods.
The story of the film is not in whether it can or should entirely break from its own general predictability, but in Crijns’s showmanship in executing this genuinely insane premise in a way that both entertains and terrifies. The filmmaker succeeds on both fronts with wild abandon, from the dynamic camerawork that utilizes the entire geography of the family van to how the dimensions of space and time are entirely grounded in the real world. No one, not even Ed, suddenly possesses preternatural abilities in this chase, but that means everyone, including the girls, are put into direct, mortal danger often and quite brutally.
The film is elevated by de Wolf’s presence and performance and anchored by Spitzenberger, who is good as a counterweight to the villain’s mania. There isn’t much that is truly special about what Tailgate is doing, which fits firmly into the old-fashioned “…from Hell” subgenre of a subgenre, but as the old film-critic adage goes, it’s how the movie does it and not what the movie does.
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