It's gutter tourism for famed author Dries in Koen Mortier's adaptation of the cult novel by Herman Brusselmans. Transgressive, vulgar, violent, and sexually sexually explicit, Mortier's debut also showcases a supremely raw sense of style while preserving and oddly tragic and poetic heart. Trainspotting comparisons are inevitable - and apt enough, as far as that goes - but Mortier's film functions on an entirely different level than Boyle's. Yes, boys and girls, we have just been introduced to a fierce and uncompromising new talent.
Famous novelist Dries is, as so many are, very bored. Smugly convinced of his own superiority he leads a largely idle life until one day three strange men arrive on his doorstep with an unusual proposition. Join our band, they tell him. We need a drummer. It's for one show only. Dries agrees, not because of any great love of music but because the trio are such a walking freak show that he believes it will supply him with a diversion, a temporary amusement. He will be able to experience their messy lives from a distance, secure in the knowledge that he can return to his own whenever he should so desire.
Branded The Feminists by Dries himself in their first rehearsal the bandmates are joined by the fact that there are all somehow disabled. The singer has a strong speech impediment. The guitar player is borderline deaf. The bassist cannot bend his right arm. Pressed on whether he also has a disability Dries offers weakly that he can't play the drums - a blatant lie considering the trio approached him specifically after reading an interview with him that mentioned that he plays and plays well - but, wanting the notoriety of a famous member, the lie is swallowed without question. And so the tour of depravity begins.
Koen, the lead singer, is a violent misogynist, prone to following, beating and raping women. He also, for reasons never addressed in any way whatsoever, lives his entire life at home upside down, walking comfortably on his ceiling, though he is the right way up everywhere else. Jan, the bass player, is gay, with major mother issues and a lunatic father kept in restraints around the clock for fear of violence. Ivan, the guitar player, lives in a perpetual drug haze, his wife and baby daughter living in utter filth and squalor. And Dries just drifts through this world, observing it, scorning it, but never once bothering to do anything about it.
Mortier has an extensive resume in commercial and music video work and he employs every trick of his trade here. He plays with exposures, film speeds - and directions - lighting,multiple exposure and rapid fire editing. But while lesser lights use these techniques to mask weaknesses, Mortier uses them to bolster and support the work. This isn't style over substance, this is style as a vital component of the structure of the piece, style as substance. Ex Drummer is the sort of film with so many extreme elements - not least among them graphic, unsimulated sex - that it would be easy to be distracted by them but Mortier is smart enough to root every bit of the film deep into his characters, rather than reveling in the extremes Mortier treats them as symptomatic of some spiritual malaise, the signs of people and a society drifting aimlessly. While many will undoubtedly find elements of the film offensive it is those same elements that lay central to Mortier's point, that people have simply lost their way and Dries most of all.