Borgman

• Borgman was the first Dutch film selected for the Cannes main competition in 38 years — the last was Jos Stelling's Mariken van Nieumeghen at the 1975 festival — and it landed straight in competition with a Palme d'Or nomination, premiering May 19, 2013.
• Mads Mikkelsen read the script and wanted to play Camiel Borgman, but production and his representation couldn't agree on his salary; the role went to Belgian actor Jan Bijvoet (born in Antwerp) instead.
• The scene of Borgman crouching naked over the sleeping mother to feed her nightmares lines up with the 'alp,' a nightmare demon of German and Central European folklore. The alp's signature move, Alpdruck, is sitting on a sleeper's chest and growing heavier until the crushing weight wakes them — an old explanation for sleep paralysis. The film never names the connection out loud.
• The film opens on a biblical-style title card ('And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks') and a hunting party — a priest who trades his vestments for a shotgun, a bald man with a dog, and a man with a lance — who roust Borgman and his companions out of holes dug under the forest floor, where they sleep in beds beneath the earth.
• It was shot in Bloemendaal in Noord-Holland, the kind of clipped, affluent Dutch suburb the film spends its runtime quietly dismantling.
• Borgman won the Golden Calf for Best Film at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht in October 2013 — the Netherlands' top national film honor — alongside Golden Calves for Best Actress (Hadewych Minis) and Best Screenplay.

Borgman is the Devil, or an alp demon, and the household is a soul being taken. The opening title card, the priest-led hunt, the men who sleep in graves under the earth, and the first name Camiel (the angel said to have driven Adam and Eve from Eden) all stack toward a religious reading where the gardener is a fallen thing reversing the expulsion, putting the family into the ground instead.

Read it as pure class horror with no supernatural content at all. The wealthy couple's life is so insulated and morally hollow that Borgman barely has to push, he just walks in, exploits guilt and boredom, and the family's own emptiness does the rest. The 'mind control' is just privilege with nothing underneath it to resist.

Director Alex van Warmerdam has flatly said many events carry no intended meaning, which makes the film a deliberate trap for interpretation. The graves, the dog, the concrete-and-water drownings, the children leaving willingly, all dangle symbolism the movie refuses to confirm, daring the viewer to assign the morality it withholds.

A priest leads an armed party to dig a vagrant out of the ground like vermin. The vagrant is Camiel Borgman, and he doesn't run far. He talks his way into the manicured life of a wealthy Dutch couple, first as a beggar, then as their gardener, then as something the family can't name and can't expel. His associates arrive. The lawn gets reshaped. The wife starts dreaming of being crushed in her sleep, and the rot spreads inward with a politeness that never breaks. Nothing supernatural is confirmed. Everything feels damned anyway.