THIS is a story about shattered innocence couched in a murder mystery. Everything else is extraneous to the main theme of this Belgian flick.
The movie opens with a scene of a muscular naked man and vials of something. The nakedness is not just for show, but will reveal everything about this character and movie later.
You see, he's a beefcake, but also only half a man. A teen smashed his testicles when he was kid and he had to use testosterone to keep up the appearance of looking like a man.
There's a poignant scene when the boy, realizing what his life will become, imagines that the crucifix of Jesus Christs on the wall is bleeding in the crotch.
A normal man would die to have a body like this farmer, but the farmer can only pine to be with a woman. He declines a friend's invitation to go to brothel, and just watches the whore in the shopfront with a longing look.
His brother says he prevents others from making fun of him, from calling him: "That's the bastard without balls."
Him taking the hormone also makes him an angry man, and him killing a man because the latter danced with a woman they both liked is testament to his raging hormones.
The ending is contrived and didn't need that kind of violence. There's a flashback of him as a kid at the end, and that sum's up the movie's theme: a kid trapped in the body of a man. It could also be about the day the life as he knew it ended.
The movie opens with a scene of a muscular naked man and vials of something. The nakedness is not just for show, but will reveal everything about this character and movie later.
You see, he's a beefcake, but also only half a man. A teen smashed his testicles when he was kid and he had to use testosterone to keep up the appearance of looking like a man.
There's a poignant scene when the boy, realizing what his life will become, imagines that the crucifix of Jesus Christs on the wall is bleeding in the crotch.
A normal man would die to have a body like this farmer, but the farmer can only pine to be with a woman. He declines a friend's invitation to go to brothel, and just watches the whore in the shopfront with a longing look.
His brother says he prevents others from making fun of him, from calling him: "That's the bastard without balls."
Him taking the hormone also makes him an angry man, and him killing a man because the latter danced with a woman they both liked is testament to his raging hormones.
The ending is contrived and didn't need that kind of violence. There's a flashback of him as a kid at the end, and that sum's up the movie's theme: a kid trapped in the body of a man. It could also be about the day the life as he knew it ended.