San Francisco Independent Film Festival 2012

Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts of The Pack) is a hulking cattle farmer who has grown up able to relate to his animals more than the people around him. That’s not to say he’s an animal lover; he routinely pumps his stock full of illegal hormones that he gets through the extensive black market his family has been involved with since the generation before, in an effort to fatten them up quicker and make the big bucks faster. An intimidating figure surrounded by sleazy gangsters and unconscientious meat-men, Jacky is not living the quiet life usually associated with stockmen: his is a fast-paced world full of shady deals and clandestine activities not limited to the meat-trade – there’s also a stolen car racket, an adolescent smut mag racket and even a human hormone underground – the latter being the one Jacky benefits from most personally.

But when the murder of a policeman who has been closing in on the hormone mafia brings all these threads together with Jacky at the center, he finds himself face to face with painful memories from his past that are more devastating than anything a police raid will bring down on him. With an overload of artificial testosterone regularly running through his system, Jacky is a walking time-bomb far removed from the wide-eyed, scrawny kid he once was. But to characterize Bullhead as a crime film would be misleading. The power of this film sneaks up on you; as little bits of information are revealed concerning the characters’ relationships with one another, a horrifying picture of lifelong trauma emerges. Suddenly everything makes sense.

The first feature from writer/director Michaël Roskam – Belgium’s Oscar contender for this year - is both a genre-bender and a gender-bender; what starts off as a depiction of alienating machismo becomes an empathic portrait of a man fighting against psychological wounds that no amount of injected testosterone can fix.